References
Smith, P. (2015). Mythogeography for Anyone. Mythogeography. https://www.mythogeography.com/mythogeography-for-anyone.html
the war of the many unnoticed against the few with the power of exposure.
Mythogeography has one weapon – you. It is the stepping and steeping of people in the flows and tugs of all the images around us.
Its central tactic is old-fashioned – walking and journeying.
By setting ourselves in motion through a world of images we make ourselves human movie cameras or camera phones – both interpreters and producers. By the particular focuses and the angles of trajectory we choose, we make an interpretation of our world, and from our impressions we begin to re-make its meanings.
The productions that follow from these experiences – a conversation in a bar, a procession, a conspiracy, a plan, a map, an organisation, a gesture – are what mythogeography is.
it is the struggle of the differences against the big sameness (dressed in oh so many colours, of course). And those means may be entrepreneurial, may be trespass, may be poetic, may be effete, may be abject, may be disarming, may be perilous, may be made at a cost, may be invisible, may be best unspoken of for the time being, may be both naïve in hope and canny in practice.
Or it may be something quite unthought of yet, which only you can make it.
Smith, P. (2015). The Context of Mythogeography. Mythogeography. https://www.mythogeography.com/the-context-of-mythogeography.html
It is not simply a book of now, but of the particular present that has been under construction since the fading of the late 20th century Psychogeographical Associations and Societies. It is also a part-product of the longer rhythms of production by artists, activists and theorists that peaked, as they peak again now, in the late 50s, late 60s, early 70s, and then in the middling conjunction of the mid 90s: Lettristes, Long and the Land Artists, Fluxus and, then, the Psychogeographical Associations.
The book has been written to celebrate a very loose weave of artists, teachers, activists and walkers. These efficaciously variegated groups and their practices have, in the last decade, both expanded and moved a little closer to each other. Fortuitously, important developments in a range of disciplines and activisms have been sufficiently tentative, frayed and incomplete to allow outsiders to cross their thresholds
The Psychogeographical Societies and Associations of the 1990s oriented themselves to an occult version of situationist theory. They protested against the vagaries of urban redevelopment, exposed the geomancies of a ritualised ruling class - drifted, argued around the standard texts of dérive and spectacle, levitated landmarks (or attempted to) and produced small journals, echoes of an earlier Potlach. Often on the defensive, conservative (of the textures of industrial cities), pessimistic and steely – they had to be all these things as the ideas for their activity, the raison for their d’etre, was appropriated by literary genii loci and (more unexpectedly) by the officer corps of the Israeli military.
Some (like Manchester’s) were of a reasonable size, while others may not have stretched much beyond an individual and a website. But in their playful actions and centred theory they have kept something important warm during a wintry political season.
Ancient practices – the elegances of Fluxus, the compartmentalism of Happenings, the ranging rods of Land Artists, live artists moving out of studios and the dematerialisation of the art object – have revived and been matched by equivalences in parallel disciplines: nomadological and mobilties orientations in geography, the adoption of performance theory in tourism studies, the re-emergence of the procession, the cult of neo-pilgrimage among young performers and a return to a more confident site-specificity (more specific, and more confident in the beyond-specificity of those specifics).
But the unspoken argument of Mythogeography is that where there have been communications, meetings, joint wanders, crossed-lines, mutual recommendations, meetings at conferences, emails, shared inebriations, tips, sales and exchanges of maps and books and dvds… that all these connections and businesses and plans – the “and and and” - have benefited each and helped to swell, without limiting, all.
to lure you into an exhibition of wild ideas and actions. In the hope that such a display may tempt you to produce some (more) of such unalike things of your own. But more importantly, if you do, that it will also encourage you to investigate suspiciously all the conditions of your makings, all the conspiracies against yours and others joys, and to share generously – even, my god, to organise - your findings with the mostly anonymous, but often excessively hospitable matrix that is that mythogeography which can never know itself, and must never let anyone tell it that it can.
Smith, P. (2015). Starter Kit. Mythogeography. https://www.mythogeography.com/starter-kit.html
/1. Knowing why.
‘Drifts’ are for opening up the world, clearing eyes and peeling away the layers of spectacle, deception and that strange “hiddeness in plain sight” that coats the everyday.
/2. Knowing where.
start somewhere you know well, next to somewhere you don’t. Start in the familiar and straightway head off into the unknown. Remember, you don’t have to get anywhere, there isn’t a set destination. It’s all about the journey. Generally, keep out of shops, museums, art galleries. Go to places you wouldn’t normally visit
/3. Knowing me, knowing you
start with a least one other. Above six or seven you’ll probably split into smaller groups. Even if you organised the meeting place and the time and maybe a starting idea, you don’t need to be in charge. Let the group develop its own instincts and make its own discoveries. Drifts do NOT have guides or leaders. Remember, your focus is on the place you’re passing through, let it shift from self and others for a while – that leaves a space for ‘our (dis)placed selves’. ‘Drift’ with friends, with friends of friends. The ‘drifting group’ should be a web of friendship and acquaintance. You do not need to be a history buff or an architectural boffin to make mythogeography. In fact, experts may have to be tamed (distracted, really) and prevented from turning drifts into guided tours. Any group of people will have different skills, stories and sensitivities that can be shared in teasing out the mythogeography of the journey.
/4. knowing how
You need to free yourselves from your usual walking habits. Maybe start at a time that is odd for you – 4.30am, 9.15pm, noon… Make sure you have at least half a day – the drift is not a stroll. Find a way to get you off your beaten tracks. Jump on any bus at random and get off at the 7th stop. Order a cab, close your eyes and ask the driver to drop you “somewhere anonymous”. Start with some kind of theme – look for traces of rebellion or snuffed-out difference, for wormholes, for powerful symbols, for voids, for where things are interwoven. If the drift diverts you onto another theme, that’s fine. The drift may begin to tell a story and you can look out for things that will develop the narrative. You might set out to collect things or take things to leave as memorials or surprises or plan to seek particular types of place: the tops and bottoms of buildings, rooms without windows.
/5. knowing what
Sensible shoes, maybe – needs vary. Maybe, something to leave behind. Small torch. Some chalk. Notebook and pen. Camera. Water. Food to pass round. Something a little luxurious or unusual – a treat. Not maps usually. You’ll notice what you miss the first time, so take it on the second.
Après dérive: make some memento of your drift to share with your fellow drifters or show to others. They may become your next companions.
Smith, P. (2015). Not psychogeography. Mythogeography. https://www.mythogeography.com/not-psychogeography.html
Psychogeography arises as one of a set of ideas and practices developed by the International Lettristes (who later gave birth to the situationists), a study of how places affect the psychological states of those who pass through them. With a reciprocal meaning: that the places might be changed in order to change the experiences and mental states of their residents and visitors. This was part of a theory of radical activism for the transformation of cities.
In the UK the concept of psychogeography was detached from activist meaning and reconfigured as a literary practice in the work of writers like Iain Sinclair and also gathered some occult trappings during this time from Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and others.
Mythogeography describes a way of thinking about and visiting places where multiple meanings have been squeezed into a single and restricted meaning
Mythogeography is influenced by, and draws on, psychogeography – seeking to reconnect with some of its original political edge as well as with its more recent additions. While engaging seriously with academic discourses in areas like geography, tourism studies and spatial theory, mythogeography also draws upon what Charles Fort might have described as ‘the procession of damned data’. So, occulted and anomalous narratives are among those available to mythogeography, not as ends in themselves, but as means and metaphors to explain, engage and disrupt.