Publication : Walk/Talk - Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng

8/9/2019 Publication : Walk/Talk - Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng

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PRINTED IN HEAD GENEVA_ JUNE 2010 _ edition of 17

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Chapter VII. Walking in the City

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th loor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the

skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and inally undulates off into the distance

beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in

which extremes coincideextremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterdays buildings, already trans-formed into

trash cans, and todays urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents

itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.

The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural igures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures

and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the

world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.

Voyeurs or walkers

To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of

seeing the whole, of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the citys grasp. Ones body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an

anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York trafic. When one goes up there,

he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus lying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Dae-

dalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was

possessed into a text that lies before ones eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the iction of

knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.

Must one inally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below?

An Icarian fall. On the 110th loor, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: Its hard to be

down when youre up.

The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This

iction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an all-seeing power?3 Thetotalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achieve-ments. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today

the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the iction that creates readers, makes the

complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.

Is the immense texturology spread out before ones eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a

projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. The panorama-city is a theoretical (that is, visual) simulacrum, in

short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The voyeur-god created by this iction, who, like Schrebers God, knows only

cadavers,4 must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them.

The ordinary practitioners of the city live down below, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walkan elementary form of this experience of the city; they

are walkers, Wandersmnner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces

that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each others arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which

each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks

of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in

relation to representations, it remains daily and indeinitely other.

Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining it-

self against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the geometrical or geographical space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical

constructions. These practices of space refer to a speciic form of operations (ways of operating), to another spatialityi6 (an anthropological,! poetic and mythic expe-

rience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and

readable city.

1. From the concept of the city to urban practices

The World Trade Center is only the most monumental igure of Western urban development. The atopia-utopia of optical knowledge has long had the ambition of surmoun-

ting and articulating the contradictions arising from urban agglomeration. It is a question of managing a growth of human agglomeration or accumulation. The city is a huge

monastery, said Erasmus. Perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold projection of an opaque past and an uncertain future onto a surface that can be

dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particu-

lar igure of history, it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic ratio. Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but

it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to

articulate it and be able to do it.

An operational concept?

The city founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is deined by the possibility of a threefold operation:

1. The production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it;

2. the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientiic strategies, made possible

by the lattening out of a ll the data in a plane projection, must replace the tactics of users who take advantage of opportunities and who, through these trap-events, these

lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere;

3. inally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it , as to its political model, Hobbes State, all

the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjectsgroups, associations, or individuals. The city, like a proper name,

thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a inite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.

Administration is combined with a process of elimination in this place organized by speculative and classiicatory operations. On the one hand, there is a differentiation

and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations, etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is

not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the waste products of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.). To be sure,

progress allows an increasing number of these waste products to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even deiciencies (in health, security, etc.) into

ways of making the networks of order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims: the proit system generates a loss which, in the

multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into expenditure. More-over, the rationalization of the

city leads to its mythiication in strategic discourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the necessity of its destruction in order to arrive at a inal decision.Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e., time), causes the condition of its own possibilityspace itselfto be forgotten; space thus becomes the

blind spot in a scientiic and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various

kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.


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Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for

socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself

urbanizing, but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. The city becomes the

dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a ield of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combi-

nations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to adminis-

ter.

The return of practices

The Concept-city is decaying. Does that mean that the illness aflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals aflicts the urban populations as well? Perhaps

cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organized them. But we must be careful here. The ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole uni-

verse was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune. Whenthey transform their bewilderment into catastrophes, when they seek to enclose the people in the panic of their discourses, are they once more necessarily right?

Rather than remaining within the ield of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try ano-

ther path: one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but

which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have rein-

forced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable

tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observatio-

nal organization.

This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but a lso as the reciprocal, of Foucaults analysis of the structures of power. He moved it in the direction of mechanisms

and technical procedures, minor instrumentalities capable, merely by their organization of details, of transforming a human multiplicity into a disciplinary society

and of managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances concerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the army, or work.10 These often miniscule ruses

of discipline, these minor but lawless mechanisms, draw their eficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space that they redistribute in order to make an

operator out of it. But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? In the present

conjuncture, which is marked by a contradiction between the collective mode of administration and an individual mode of reappropriation, this question is no less important,

if one admits that spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistance, tricky and

stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being out-side the ield in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space,

of the disquieting familiarity of the city. (...)

2. The chorus of idle footsteps

The goddess can be recognized by her stepVirgil, Aeneid, I, 405

Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a

style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to

spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city. They are not loca-

lized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more inserted within a container than those Chinese characters speakers sketch out on their hands with their ingertips.

It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories

(going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of pas-

sing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or window shopping, that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on

the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible.

These ixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has

of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.

Pedestrian speech acts

A comparison with the speech act will allow us to go further and not limit ourselves to the critique of graphic representations alone, looking from the shores of legibility

toward an inaccessible beyond. The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.13 At the most elementary level, it

has a triple enunciative function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on

the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that

is, among pragmatic contracts in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an allocution, posits another opposite the speaker and puts con-tracts between

interlocutors into action).14 It thus seems possible to give a preliminary deinition of walking as a space of enunciation.

We could moreover extend this problematic to the relations between the act of writing and the written text, and even transpose it to the relationships between the hand

(the touch and the tale of the paint-brush [le et la geste du pinceau]) and the inished painting (forms, colors, etc.). At irst isolated in the area of verbal communication, the

speech act turns out to ind only one of its applications there, and its linguistic modality is merely the irst determination of a much more general distinction between the

forms used in a system and the ways of using this system (i.e., rules), that is, between two different worlds, since the same things are considered from two opposite for-

mal viewpoints.

Considered from this angle, the pedestrian speech act has three characteristics which distinguish it at the outset from the spatial system: the present, the discrete, the pha-tic.

First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from

going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others,

since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, trans-form or abandon spatial elements. Thus Charlie Chaplin multiplies the possibilities of his cane:

he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization. In the same way, the walker transforms each

spatial signiier into something else. And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities ixed by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on

the other he increases the number of possibilities (for example, by creating shortcuts and detours) and prohibitions (for ex-ample, he forbids himself to take paths generally

considered accessible or even obligatory). He thus makes a selection. The user of a city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret.

He thus creates a discreteness, whether by making choices among the signiiers of the spatial language or by displacing them through the use he makes of them. He

condemns certain places to inertia or disappearance and composes with others spatial turns of phrase that are rare, accidental or illegitimate. But that already leads

into a rhetoric of walking.

pages 102-108 _ Certeau, Michel de - The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley 1984)


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Good evening. Our project is entitled walk and talk. According to Michel de Certeau the act of walking is connected to the urban system in terms of enuncia-tion: The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. Thus for this project we decided to stride alongthe city of Bucharest during 5 days inviting every day a new person to join us in a walk/talk. This walks, that all last for 6 hours and cover about 20 kilometresper day, are documented in various ways. The walk/talk project aims at producing new forms when the conventional tools turn out to be inadequate to captureeverydayness. The simple method we have designed, but wed rather call it rule, is a sort of catalysis: we wanted to see what could happen when one follows andobeys a rule like this, we wanted to see what kind of unexpected could arise when confronted with a method.

The talk/performance that will follow is in no way a work of art. The actual work has been of course the walks and talks themselves, a form we thought to be themost relevant concerning our situation: how to make an art work within seven days, respecting the framework of the Biennale, the city and the people who leavewithin? This lecture is in no way a conclusion. Flaubert said that stupidity consists in the will of wanting to conclude. We believe that itd be stupid to conclude.These walks and talks continue outside, steady, and probably unconcerned with this lecture... and thats our best reward.

One more thing before starting the lecture: It is of course a compilation of fragments. One could never transcribe everything that has been said during these 24hours of walks and talks. Actually many things cannot be said outside of their context. Exhaustivity, if such a thing exists is not to be found here, its there outside,in the real.

We would like to thank, Ana Dabija, Dragos Badita, Maria Muscalu, Iulian Mosu, Adrianna Mihailescu for having walked and talked with us so kindly and so bra-vely under the burning sun, Felix Vogel for having invited us, and Katharina Hohman and Laurent Schmid for having supported us in this project.[Now we can present ourselves.Well, my name is Ceel Mogami de Haas, I come from the Netherlands but I am currently studying ine arts in Switzerland, Geneva. As part of my studies I conducta research on knowledge technologies and especially encyclopaedism. As an art ist I realize mainly installations.

My name is Florent Meng. I come from France and I study in the same school as Ceel. I mainly practice photography, mixing documentary inluence with installa-tion form, asking in my work: How to speak about History?]

We landed Sunday the 23rd at half past three. We took a taxi to the hostel; I was a bit ashamed to say its name to the taxi driver: it bears the absurd one of FunkyChicken. As soon as we arrived we tried to look for a map. Maps are not easy to ind on a Sunday. We stumbled from big hotel to big hotel, none of them had anentire map of Bucharest, just city centres maps and sex shop maps. We need one with the suburbs for our project.Luckily its not that warm, we had expected worse. The people are very friendly with us, we are looking forward to start walking and talking to them; but we haveto face it: there are no maps and we feel already tired after this afternoon seeking for them. We came back to the Funky Chicken without a map.

On Monday the 24th, we woke up at nine oclock. I have a hangover, Florent hasnt. Strange, I dont remember having drunk that much. After breakfast we went tolook for a map again. A lot of shops are still closed. What kind of Monday is this? They say to us its holy. We say its crap. We need a map. In the hall of a closed sex

shop, an old man sells books. He has a map. Nice. It costs 13 Lei. Thats basically the only money we need for our project. We already knew that we wouldnt needthe map to ind the destinations of our walk, but rather to ind our way back after the 6 hours walking. We had in mind not to use the map to orientate ourselves.We would let the streets guide us. How can inanimate streets become our active partners? How could they guide us? Through a simple operation of anthropomor-phism. Just believe they can get a conscience of their own, and believe me, you will think that the path you carved in the city is not only due to your own decisionmaking, your own sensibility. Just think about this. Every street, every crossroad, every square has its own personality for they all have their own physiognomy,their own characteristic. Anyway we will come back to the role of the map in our project later in this lecture.Later that afternoon we went to visit La Bomba. Irina, one of the artists of the collective, welcomed us. Shes very nervous, thats the least we could say, but I likedher. They showed us around Rahova, the neighbourhood they are mainly working in. There is a huge piece of waste ground betweenRomania Academia and the Palace of the Parliament. As we entered the waste ground, we heard about 10 dogs barking at us. We immediately stepped back whenIrina said they could be dangerous. She says that the kids could help us get rid of them, but they are busy playing football. Maria, another girl of La Bomba showedus a very high pile of concrete blocks. She said something about Formula one racing that confused me. We couldnt hear very well what she was saying as we heardthe dogs barking again.In the evening we came home. I started to think about our next days walks and talks. I think I was thinking so hard about it that suddenly my computer died. Atirst I cursed everything and everyone around me. Then I calmed down and said to myself it was a nice sign. It was a proof of experience predominance. Like thepaper that falls on the ground, our world of paper like Luigi Pirandello would say, my computer died. (I turn on my computer...).On Tuesday the 25th we started walking at 9. We met Ana Dabija halfway General Berthelot Strada. We live in that street and so is she. It seemed to be a good com-promise to meet halfway. Halfway. What does it mean to meet someone halfway?First we walked, but soon we started to talk. About everything.

The problematic of narrative is often tackled in the everydayness that is at the hart of contemporary literature and art. Especially when it comes to contestconventional narrat ive discourse. In his novel entitled Impatience, the narrator invented by Franois Bon shouts: No more novels. Nevermore!. He then pro-posed to get the ingredients for the novels in that very everydayness; even when it resists.Ana showed us at irst the city, the hard city. At one point she brought us to her old high school. We passed through the street she always took as a kid to get there.Suddenly she stops, slightly pale. A house had disappeared. In its place, a hole, big and empty. She looked at it and shouted it was sad and unfair. We enteredthe soft-city.To be attained, to be said, the city truth would need, ones and for good, a franc assault on conventional narrative forms that seek to give an order to the real -inthe same way the city plan seeks to give an order to reality. There it is, not here: not a novel, not a narrative, but the dispositive of voices that do name the cityand try to grab it. There is a link between everyday and narratives. That is why we decided to walk and talk. But what we do not want is to take part of walkersthat use the everyday in the city in order to create an artiicial frame for semi-interesting social-economical or psychological processes. We would like to channelthe minimal -so to leave aside a totalization that is we believe so absurd. There is this unstable zone in everydayness and in the city. A dimension that only has aperformative dimension. We believe the everydayness is not a region or a spectacle one could represent: without an objective status, it can only exist through thediverse practices that make it exists and that actually invents it.On Wednesday the 26th we started to walk at half past nine. Dragosh came with us. He is an art student in Cluj. We met him yesterday night. I dont know how wemanaged to convince him to walk and talk with us. Maybe we started to produce possibilities.Is there a difference between actions and stories? Thats the irst question Felix Vogel asks in his text for the Biennial. Our irst answer and proposal was a quotetaken from the famous book by Michel de Certeau, The Practice Of Everyday Life: The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to languageor to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple enunciative function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on

the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acousticacting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic contracts in the form of movements (just as verbal en-unciation is an allocution, posits another opposite the speaker and puts con-tracts between interlocutors into action). It thus seems possible to give a prelimi-nary deinition of walking as a space of enunciation. Later on he establishes a parallel between the act of speech and the act of walking (practice of the street); heinduces a contrast between the conceptual city of the urbanist (the hard and ideal city) and the city of the performers the walkers for example. The walkers donot have that global overview, they create something that does re-surface: their movements create a urban text, an invisible text, without author, without readeror spectator. A second city is created, within the irst one, a kind of metaphorical city.As we approached the lake of Mori, Dragosh who at one point was walking slightly behind ran to me and showed me a picture he just made of us. He told me itreminded him of the Movie Gerry by Gus Van Sant. We can see Florent and myself walking, Florent ahead, and me weighed down with pain in my feet and heat,stumbling behind. Its a good picture I told him, somehow a good rsum of the situation at that point. Gerry is the story of two boys that get lost in the desert,there is no way for them to ind their way back... I am wondering if this could have happened to us in Bucharest if we didnt ind a map to ind our way back.

Thursday the 27th. We met Maria and Christina in front of the fountain of the Universitate Plata. We started to walk at 9.30. The sun was already burning.

A democratic journey on the streets seems to be a rather dificult exercise for the inhabitants of the city. It is confronted with what French philosopher Guy Debord

calls a psychogeography of the city, since a city quarter is not only determined by geographical and economical factors but also by the self-representation of their

inhabitants. The experience we are practicing reminds us constantly to our foreigner status, but it makes us more legitimate when it comes to practice our demo-

cratic walks.

Our guests, for those living in Bucharest, sometimes hesitate to bring us to certain places, advise us against some neighbourhoods, warn us about images, prevent usfrom dogs; but often join very excited in our continuous drift, our verbal and spatial drift. In Bucharest, to cross a road outside the pedestrian is a sport, a true duel,

but that is the price to pay for a sense of liberty. We walk across the gardens, we climb over walls and fences, but we didnt dare to swim across the river. The French

poet Jacque Rda asked the same when suddenly confronted to the Seine. Also, our democratic walk obliges us to pay attention to how the city itself rebels. The co-

lumns of certain authoritarian buildings are collapsing. The ground is cracking, the road signs stripes are peeling of. These same stripes that forbid us to walk where

we want to walk it settles.


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A space where drifting is a lie. Its this kind of nothing-identity that is contrasting with that empty space in f ront of us: a swarming urban desert, a playgroundfull of possibilities.We stay 10 minutes under the overpowering sun, observing the poverty of that space. We begin to feel tired. We do not care about hearing or waiting for anything.We are not in Bucharest, we are in the city.

Friday the 28th. We are waiting in front of Tineretului Metro Station. Adriana arrives ir st, then comes Iuilian with sunglasses and a hangover.For three days now we do not decide of a speciic trajectory, guided by historical considerations, an attitude peculiar to tourists. We only decide with our guestsabout a direction, that we will loose invariably all along our walk/talk. We do not take pleasure in boredom, we proit from the diverse knowledge of our guestsand from the conversations we had with them.Its their voice that sometimes directs our path: I know a nice architecture close to here, lets go there. It is this way that we liberate ourselves from the absur-dity of a straight path on a boulevard, that we escape the authority axes, that we get under the skin of the city.Thankfully we are not as rigid as these axes and we often escape our own rules. We often walk more than 6 hours, sometimes a little less. Very often we watchedour watch after only 3 hours of walking.Iuilian is incredible. He is still with us, under the burning sun, with his hangover. Its quite amazing he made it all along with us. We realized pretty son how difi-cult it is to stick to our rules.We pass by a newly painted house. The colour is really nasty; its yellow, but almost luorescent. The house has been restored. Someone has applied a layer ofconcrete on the house, masking the mouldings and the stones. Only the authentic window frames are still visible, but they have been painted in a bright green.Besides the same building goes on. That part is in ruins but it permits to analyze a transition, to have access to the original aspect. We might be in front of a do-cument. The sun burns. We talk less. But are we are certainly observing more accurately. Its this silent observation that stays a fundament of our project. WalterBenjamin quotes Charles Baudelaire in these terms: the observer is a prince that enjoys everywhere anonymity.

Saturday the 30th. No one will walk with us today. We left at 9 oclock without any direction. Today we stroll and we concentrate on the lecture we will givetonight at the biennale. We are nervous. What we believe is capital in our walk and talk experience is the feeling to participate in a kind of whole that is irstconstantly moving and secondly that contains us. Represented by the city, this whole is associated with anonymity, with a dissolution of the self, with a sense offreedom linked to an experience of the possible, with (I quote the French poet Jacques Rda) a spreading feeling of freedom in ininity.It seemed at some point that part of our intention was to disappear in order to become part of that space that we were travelling up and down tirelessly. As partof our method, which is we believe a non-method, we decided not to use the map and to let the streets guide us. The inner logic to our project was to ind what wewere not looking for. Here the everyday city becomes a ield of possibilities, the streets our active collaborators. Now we come back to that idea of anthropomor-phism we were introducing before and to the question of how inanimate streets can get a sort of conscious state. That was our role, the role of the walker/talker.Through our practice we tried to deine an ar ticulation between facts (architecture, city planning), randomness, circumstances and mindsets. I mean walkingimplies much more than just kinetics, it implies reorientations, changes of direction, adaptations and dis-adaptations that goes together with the kind of fre-quency of the city, at this place, at that time. And walking within the streets, wandering through them is to feel suddenly at a bodily level the ramps and dips, thevariations of proportions, the materiel and the vibrations a street, a city is constituted of.

Lecture at BB4 Pavillon , Bucarest, May 29, 2010. Florent Meng and Ceel Mogami de Haas.


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Pictures and Text, Credit

Page 2 _Strada Mehadia, Bucarest , photography, may 2010.Page 3 _View from Sun Plaza, south east Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 4 _View from Sun Plaza, south east Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 5 _ Calin Dan Trip 2006,video still

Page 6 _ no credit recolected

Page 7 _ E.Adget_Ch iffonnier. N Atget : 32...1899. BNF

Page 8 _ E.Adget _Vendeur dherbes. N Atget : 3207. 1899. BNF

Page 9 _ E.Adget_ lorist. N Atget : 3085. 1898-1899. BNF

Page 10_ lorist, Uranus District,Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 11_ Street detail, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 12_ Turturelelor street, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 13_ Turturelelor street, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.


Page 15_ Turturelelor street, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 16_ Parcul National, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 17_ Street view, center of Bucarest , photography, may 2010.

Page 18_ Advertising, metro of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 19_ Street detail, Piata victoriei, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 20_ Detail, Stintii Voievozi street, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.Page 21_ Advertising, detail, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 22_ Bibliography Still Life , may 2010,photography.

Page 23_ William Eggleston, the democratic forest cover , Doubleday 1989.

Page 24_ William Eggleston, image from the democratic forest, Doubleday 1989.

Page 25_ Ceels broken computer, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.


Page 27_ Florent crossing, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 28_ Still Life , South of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.



Page 31_ Walk , Second day , Bucarest, photography by Dragos Badita, may 2010.

Page 32_ Screenshot from Gerry, Gus Van Sant, 2002.

Page 33_ Street view, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.



Page 36_ Classic Column Orders, Table of architecture, Cyclopaedia, 1728.

Page 37_ Street view, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.Page 38_ Street view, center of Bucarest, photography, may 2010.


Page 40_ Sophie Ristelhueber, WB # 7, Cprint on aluminium, 2005.

Page 41_ Screenshot from Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982.


Page 43_ Parcul Tineretului, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 44_ Parcul Cismigiu, Bucarest, photography, may 2010.

Page 45-50_ Michel de Certeau, Linvention du quotidien, tome 1 : Arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990.

Page 51-52_ Certeau, Michel de - The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley 1984)

Page 53-54_ Lecture at BB4 Pavillon , Bucarest, May 29, 2010. Florent Meng and Ceel Mogami de Haas.

24-29 MAY 2010 _ BUCAREST BIENNALE 4

Ceel Mogami de Haas (NL), born in Selebi Phikwe, Botswana, 1982, lives and work in Amsterdam and Geneva

Florent Meng (FR), born in Paris, France , 1982 , lives and work in Paris and Geneva

Documents

Publication : Walk/Talk - Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng