Routes + Routines

Routes + Routines was a series of city walks and surprise visits to unexpected corners of Brussels. The project tested out various methods for diverting and changing routines, and as a result your experience of daily habits could possibly shift. Through treading on unknown territory, these performative explorations investigated rhythms, patterns, movements, circumstances and situations which make up our so called "normal" world.

The project Routes + Routines took place in residential areas in Brussels. Through interventions, actions and presentations in public space, the project created dialogs with the day-to-day reality of the street corner, roundabout or zebra-crossing. R + R looked at the relation between technology, geography, urban representation and visual imagination and investigated the city from inside out.

The recent re-validation of Situationism has staged the city again as a platform for spectacles, unexpected situations and aesthetic coincidences, the city as a layered locus with unique live and logic, a chaotic post-industrial organism where functionalism and planning team up with historic remains and social marginality.

In an informationalist Utopian world vision everything can be interpreted as programmable and the city is no exception. Routes + Routines proposed a comparison between on the one hand romantic notions of urbanity in which the individual experience is the starting point for a subjective interpretation of locations and on the other: the structure of binary language where all information can be reduced to opposites; to zero’s and ones.

If cities, social groups and identities can simply be regarded as programmable entities, can we than approach cities as hardware on which social, economic, political programme’s play; directing and determining behavior, movement, norms, interactions and relations between citizens? Can we question how this programmability is employed and re-think and re-model urban power structures, dominance of capital, racial injustice, property, normality? How can urban programs that are seemingly fixed be diverted, changed and appropriated?

Routes + Routines investigated low-tech means of communication and was curious about the potential of no tech-media such as gossip, backchat, word to mouth in a world dominated by (communication) strategies. How can looking, observing and reporting be recaptured from the paradigm of control and surveillance and how can they be employed to stimulate the imagination of citizens? How can we map multi -plicity, -culturality, -layering and changeability starting from the details and individual observation rather then the bird perspective?

documentation


Related events

Summercamp Electrified

2009
Cet atelier est une dérive à travers la ville de Gand, guidée par des données environementales. A l’aide d’une antenne bricolée, les promeneurs explorent les champs électro-magnétiques de Gand. (...)

Summercamp Electrified

2009
Constant vzw stelt een collectieve audio-derive voor over de Gentse electro-magnetische velden. De wandelaars gebruiken antenne’s die ze zelf bouwen tijdens een workshop die aan de wandeling (...)

Summercamp Electrified

2009
This workshop is a detour through the city of Ghent guided by environmental data. Fit up with a self-made antenna, city walkers are dwelling through the electro magnetic fields of Ghent. Part (...)

Routes + Routines Baléariques

2008
Les Routes + Routines Baléariques sont deux balades qui tentent d’interférer avec l’expérience que vous avez lorsque vous vous déplacez dans votre environnement familier. Avec des chaussures (...)

Balearic Routes + Routines

2008
Balearic Routes and Routines are two walks which try to interfere with the experience you have moving about in your familiar environment. With low tech shoes and other devices we will explore (...)

Routes + Routines - performatieve wandeling

2008
De laatste in de reeks Routes + Routines-wandelingen in Hasselt struikelde over uitwisselingsprotocollen en zocht naar (il)legale procedures om toegang te krijgen tot het web, persoonlijk (...)

Routes + Routines - promenade performative

2008
La dernière des promenades dans le cadre de "Routes + Routines" à Hasselt, trébuchera les protocoles d’échanges, les procédures d’accès (il)légales au web, et rencontrera la confiance privée et (...)

Routes + Routines - performative walk

2008
The last of the Routes + Routines walks in Hasselt will stumble across protocols of exchange, (il)legal procedures of accessing the web, personal trust and temporary alliances. Registration: (...)

Routes + Routines Z33

2008
Dans le cadre de l’exposition Place@Space, Peter Westenberg organise une série de ballades dans le centre d’Hasselt. Equipé/e/s de chaussures audio-visuelles low tech, les marcheur/euse/s (...)

Routes + Routines Z33

2008
In het kader van de tentoonstelling ’Place@Space’ in Z33 organiseerde Constantlid Peter Westenberg low-tech wifi-wandelingen door het centrum van Hasselt. Uitgerust met elektronische (...)