Its been a while since I've written anything about walking, since I last posted I've moved to a new city in a new country but I am still taking classes that require me to think critically about landscape.
Its also been a while since I last did a distant drift, as things began to open up over the summer when covid seemed on the decrease I had other things to do. It seems that for the same has been true for others as this was the least social distant drift I have ever been on.
A feeling of disconnection, of inability to connect to my landscape was a theme of my walk. Whether this was a personal or general feeling of place was one thing I tried to identify on my walk. Following the situationists I tried to identify what feelings were produced in me by place, but I found that feeling is not so simple. What I feel in my body is not just affected by my landscape but also by who I am with and who I am. This is of course also the feminist critique. Gender is one characteristic that effects how you feel within a place.
Returning to my walk, I started off by heading under the railway bridge, prompted by the idea of arches. A bridge produces an interesting soundscape, as each noise is echoed and elongated. Sound travels further but is also more likely to be overlapped to the point of becoming unintelligible.
This initial prompt led me to follow the lines of the railway in a curving walk, that I have followed before on the other side. This meant that occasionally I would see familiar places from a new angle or would be surprised by something I knew, a place, in the middle of a space I didn't.
It also led me back again and again to underpasses. Places I would expect to smell of piss but which here in Amsterdam seem to smell of nothing much at all. I wonder if this is because they are cleaned more regularly or if there are just more public toilets.
It might have been the time of day, or year but I felt like the streets were empty. It was cold. My fingers tingling with it each time I checked my phone but eleven on a Sunday morning is not that early if you aren't a student. Maybe it was me: my presence as a foreigner; the fact I can't speak dutch; my unfamiliarity with the people I might see. How do you understand a place you don't know?
As I was trying to understand and analyse while walking I also gained a greater sympathy towards Henri Lefebvre's methodology of rythmanalysis. It is impossible to see and record everything you experience in a place. Even with the use of technology, to records sights and sounds, how can we collect smells, tastes, feelings both physical and mental. But perhaps by walking the same walk, or visiting the same location again and again we can start to build up this data.
While acknowledging my lack of data, I have still attempted to understand what exactly caused me to feel excluded from the place I was walking. I believe that it is a characteristic of residential areas in which you do not live. This is a feeling I have felt before when walking streets designed for houses. These buildings are not designed to be open for perception from the street. Attempts at connection come up against bricks and concretes. This is less so in the houses with front gardens than in flats, but even so many gardens are enclosed by walls. This design may be purposeful after all many of the streets I was walking will not often be used for those other than the people that live there unless as shortcuts to other destinations. The most glaring example of this offsetting of housing from interaction by strangers was actually at the end of my walk when I realised the buildings closest to my own are actually surrounded by moats.
