#distant drift

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Arches in Amsterdam

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.

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Prompts (5/12/21)

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Circles and Spring (21/3/21):

I only went on my walk this Sunday because it has become habit. Term is ending and essays are starting to pile up. I am still trying to come up with a question or an argument to make about these online communal walks, while I definitely enjoy them I’m not quite sure what exactly makes me interested in them. 

Anyway, this walk was somewhat overwhelming. While the weather was lovely, what struck me was the overabundance of wheels and circles in the urban environment. Every street is lined cars and bikes, offering some variation in wheels but nothing particularly spectacular. As for circles, they seem to be on every sign, let alone the ones carved out of bricks or made in shadows on the ground.

While I found it hard to pick out which images I wanted to share with others online there were a few interesting sites on my walk. I attempted to make a circular walk but really I went in two straight lines one to a town and centre and then returning a slightly extended route through backstreets. In the town centre I encountered an abandoned shopping arcade and experimented with curved images taking a panorama. And near the end of my walk I found some new anarchist graffiti.

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Prompts (21/3/21):

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Women Walking (14/3/21):

On a week that started on International Women’s day and ended on Mother’s day with the kidnap and murder of a women walking home in between, walking this Sunday seemed to me to be more obviously a political statement.

That’s why this week I will be comparing two walks. One that I did in the morning, the usual distant drift, and one in the afternoon, a protest. 

My morning walk proceeded like it often does, in search of flowers I headed to the fancier of the two parks near me. This park has a dedicated botanical gardens so I thought it had a better guarantee of providing me with interesting flowers to photograph.

However the first two images I recorded were not flowers but pictures of women walking. While not the main prompt of the walk this was obviously a topic of reflection on twitter with some people sharing their experiences. Now at 10 am on a sunny Sunday morning I don’t feel particularity worried about where I am walking but I had walked this same path later at night and I did feel more anxious heading down alleys in the dark.

Just as I was approaching the park gates I spotted a red lantern drifting along the road. I don’t know where it had come form but in my head it had flown from the vigil the night before to land in my path; a paper poppy on the pavement.

Within the park there were a variety of flowers to see and even signs to spot and name them. After circling the paths several times I headed back guided by one more image of a woman walking.

The other walk I went on this Sunday was a protest against the police and the knew policing bill that is currently going through parliament that allows very annoying protesters to be sent to prison for ten years. What very annoying means is not specified. While I normally walk alone on the distant drifts the protest consisted of a crowd and even within that crowd I was part of a group. Starting at Charing Cross seven of us proceeded around the edge of Trafalgar square and down Whitehall. Turning towards the river along a side street we rushed to catch up with the protest we had heard had started to move. We could see the ends of the crowd as it moved away from the road outside New Scotland Yard and around the corner to Parliament square where we finally caught up. 

To walk with a crowd or simply to be in a public space surrounded by others feels as if it makes a bigger political impact than when you are standing alone. I have started doing interviews with others who take part in these digital derives and while they know the political history of this method and walking in general there is a feeling that the walks they do are not political. While these walks are social in a digital sense to outsiders they are still seen as a solitary figure; wandering alone. Maybe what they are missing is the ability of a crowd to take up space, to be visible and to create emotions that can be transferred beyond those already involved.

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Prompts (14/3/21):

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Reflections of London (28/2/2021)

This Sundays walk required equipment: a mirror of some sort with which to literally reflect on space. Its interesting how much difference such a simple tool can make to the way you see your surroundings. A mirror can project images into unfamiliar places. It provides a different perspective, complicating simple dichotomies of up and down; left and right; forward and back.

The route of my walk was short and simple, on a sunnier day I may have wandered further but as the weather was bitterly cold I couldn’t bare to continue removing my hands out of my warm pockets after an hour. 

I headed towards the park as I thought I might find some mirrors in the metal structures of the play areas but I found that there are a lot more mirrors around us than I had thought. From cars to driveways but more expansively partial reflections in windows, I go out so rarely now that I have forgotten that to be in the world is for me often to be looking at myself.

One area I walked in was covered in neighbourhood watch signs. I’ll be honest and say I don’t really know what that means. I’m white and female presenting so unlikely to be questioned when walking though suburbia even with spiky hair. In fact the only interaction I had was with a women complementing my hair and asking me when Tesco's opened.

The timing of my walk means that when I first set off the streets and park are often very quiet but by the time of my return, when I’m heading to do my shopping myself, there are a lot more people on the streets.