collectivewandering

On a windy day in the town of Bierum, the Collective Wandering took place. A walk in the fields, over the dike, along the sea and through the village where visitors encountered 11 performances along the way.

The Collective Wandering aimed to perform a re-enchantment of the Groningen landscape through the use of a form of psychogeographical technique. Psychogeography looks at breaking through the existing landscape concepts (which largely determine how we interact with this landscape) and reforming them. By wandering and not exactly knowing what to look for and where to go, your way of seeing, moving and listening changes.
The performances offered new perspectives, experiences and memories of places. This breaks through the way people usually view the surrounding landscape and invited the visitors to make different associations and feelings. It breaks the banality of our everyday environment and feeds it with a form of magical thinking that re-creates meaning and value. The landscape is no longer a background for the performative life, but an essential part and must therefore be approached in that way.

At the end of the wandering you were invited at the Bierumer School to join the conversation with Katja to reflect on it.
Take this newspaper as a guide to wander around in your own environment. Listen, look and move carefully; pay attention and imagine that everything around you could be a peformance. What changes? How do you perceive the things that are happening? What do they mean to you? Create new perspectives, stories, memories and explore your own place again.

The Collective Wandering is part of Vrijplaats Voor Verbeelding, a project taking place at the Bierumer School which is researching how we relate to our environment, how we experience it and how our imagination can be used to create new perspectives, memories and ideas of our direct environment we are in every day.