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The Hidden City Symposium:
Mythogeography, Writing, & Site Specific Performance
This event took place on 4 October 2008 at the Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth
The Hidden City Symposium, arranged to complement Part Exchange’s week-long Hidden City Festival in Plymouth (from 29 September – 5 October), was a chance to interrogate the possibilities for writing in site-specific performance practices that address the multiple narratives and trajectories of the city. The symposium was open to all: scholars, artists, students, and anybody who enjoys thinking about the ways we live, perform and create in urban environments.
‘Writing’ was interpreted broadly and the symposium brought together considerations of practices as diverse as political mural making and karaoke.
With Hidden City Festival events as a resource of full-scale commissions and micro-interventions; with keynote speakers including Mike Pearson, Cathy Turner and Baz Kershaw; and with papers from practitioners such as walkwalkwalk, Hilary Ramsden of walksquawk, and Fort Reasoning, the symposium was intended to encourage a strong focus on the practical applications of mythogeography’s variegated approaches.
Mythogeography is the theorisation of an experimental approach to the site of performance as a space of multiple layers; an approach which might include a hybrid of numerous influences and strategies, perhaps including the atmospheres and effects of psychogeography, the Fortean procession of 'damned data', or the deployment (both analogical and direct) of geological, archaeological and historiographical methods and is self-reflexive in the sense that it would regard the performer as a similarly multiplicitous site.
The symposium reflected this unfinished and hybrid approach in its wide range of models, critical approaches and subject areas. Panel sessions included ‘Site Writing’, ‘Glasgow’, ‘Walking’ and ‘Psychogeographies’ and papers range from the analytical to the performative.
At lunchtime, interventionist artist Oreet Ashery was on hand to open her new exhibition at the University’s Sherwell Centre: ‘Bedding the City: Oreet Ashery's Site-Specific Performances’.
The Hidden City Symposium was co-ordinated by Roberta Mock, Chris Hall, and Phil Smith.
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