Close Encounters - a socially engaged project exploring alternative realities and re-navigations of urban public space.

Key aims: discovering; doing; drifting a different Dumfries; de-familiarising the familiar; immersive; collective working experience; participatory; fun; transforming space and sites and our relationship to them.

Context: “The city is itself ‘oeuvre’ ... They do not only contain monuments and institutional headquarters, but also spaces appropriated for entertainments, parades, promenades, festivities” (Lefebvre, 2006: 73).

“The city must be a place of waste, for one wastes space and time; everything mustn’t be foreseen and functional, for spending is a feast” (Lefebvre in Burgel , Burgel , and Dezes, 1987: 36.)

The street “[…] serves as a meeting place (topos), for without it no other designated encounters are possible […] The street is a place to play and learn. The street is disorder …. This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises.” (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]: 18).

“To put art at the service of the urban does not mean to prettify urban space with works of art. This parody of the possible is a caricature. Rather, this means that time-spaces become works of art and that former art reconsiders itself as source and model of appropriate topics’: of temporal qualities inscribed in spaces” (Lefebvre, 1996: 173).

The right to the city’ “[…] stipulates the right to meetings and gatherings […] the need for social life and a centre, the need and the function of play, the symbolic functions of space” (Lefebvre, 1996: 195).

What

The aim of this project is to try and encourage creative and imaginative ways of using and thinking about what the town centre could offer by staging a series of semi structured walks through familiar streets and closes but to create new experiences within them.

Why

The town centre of Dumfries is familiar and suffers from low expectations as well as offerings in respect of experiences. It has a lack of leisure and recreational activities and is increasingly subject to lack of investment and economic malaise as evidenced by the empty shops and the lack of variety in what is there. Close encounters seeks to bridge that gap albeit temporarily in real time , longer in terms of the experience and ideas this propels into that space the participants will potentially take a away.

How

This will be activate whereby the participants will not see the space as such with their eyes but, wearing adapted hard hats with either wing mirrors attached (seeing behind themselves as a result), periscopes (seeing above themselves) or blocked sightline (peripheral vision) will give the participants the sense of a parallel place that may subsequently /in accumulation supersede the one that may exist in reality.

Either me or Andy will be not be wearing the hard hats etc. so as to ensure the smooth running of the moving ‘mass’ aka the participants throughout the event
Using a ‘situationist’ perspective and approach to create an experience of the town centre through semi-structured walks and activities that will encourage and inspire new ways of thinking, feeling and imagining what the town centre is, can or should be. The material space of the town can be reimagined through, novel and fun experiences that will challenge the familiar and inspire new ways of thinking about what the town centre is and can be used for.

To conceive, perceive and practice in use space allows the possibility of being engaged in creatively making or remaking space through imagination and creativity. An inclusive process engaging and giving power to those who inhabit space by encouraging reflexive and participatory methods of being in a familiar space in different ways.

The aim is to provide the possibility of an immersive and sensually simulative walking experience – a tour with a difference – that will engage all the senses and remake, reimagine, recreate and reprioritise the potential that the town centre could have as a fun, interesting, place to be.

Small groups will be ‘tethered’ by large elastic bands and taken on a ‘route’, which they have to collectively negotiate and using a range of props and equipment will be exploited to engage with familiar places and spaces in new and imaginative ways
Using a range of staged events/scenarios (situations) in particular places participants will respond and reflect on familiar places and practices in new ways that may inspire new ways of thinking what the town centre has to offer and what it could offer. To defamiliarise the expected and banal blasé understanding of the familiar by playful, creative and fun activities making it seem, appear and be different, exciting, unfamiliar and thus malleable and subject to new visions, expectations and material uses.

The walks will be semi-structured and limited in time (45-60 mins) and have a clear starting and finishing point starting at the stove and returning to the stove
Interventions with the help of blueprint 100/ will see the closes’ transformed into immersive and sensory experiences-be it sound, touch, scent