Situation Venice: towards a performative ‘ex-planation’ of a city

Abstract

The article's main concern is to analyse theoretical and artistic factors influencing the attempt by a group of undergraduate students (at the University of Warwick, UK) to produce a ‘performative mapping’ of the city of Venice. In other words, it asks what kind of performance-based strategies might usefully be applied in the process of encountering and documenting – or creatively researching – an ‘unknown’ but highly determined urban situation. Far less an evaluative assessment of pedagogy and outcomes, the overall aim of the article is to delineate possible points of reference in the development of an applied creative practice within the emerging discipline of urban intervention as performance research.

Keywords:

• relational tourism
• embodied mappings
• practice/performance as research
• urban intervention
• psychogeography
• situationism
• urban encounters
• play
• performative cartography

Notes

1. See also Sadler (1998, 78–9 and 181, nn. 31–2) for details of these events. ‘The Leaning Tower of Venice’ was originally published in abridged form in 1958 in ARK: The Journal of the Royal College of Art 24: vi–ix.

2. The ‘Performing Venice’ installation took place over the course of a day (9 December 2009) in two adjoining studio spaces in the Theatre and Performance Studies department's Millburn House facilities.

3. See Rogoff (2009).