Output details

Mythogeography

Mythogeography is a playful and reflexive ‘toolkit’ of praxes, written under Smith’s nom de plume, The Crab Man. It aims to offer a general reader the critical ideas and practical options to support democratic activism and a re-orientation of post-Lettriste tradition of psychogeography away from professional literary production. The term ‘mythogeography’, used both tactically and as self-parody, first emerged from Smith’s work as a founding member of Wrights & Sites. It describes a process whereby through walking and journeying – that is, by choosing oblique angles of trajectory – one is able to create complex impressions of the world and re-make its meanings. Smith first outlined the main principles in his essay, “Crab Walking and Mythogeography”, which accompanied his texts for two performances, The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside (ed. Mock, 2009). These represented one type of performance, all related to or derived from ambulatory practices (including ‘dérives’; secular pilgrimage; exploratory, therapeutic and extreme walking; and walking as art), that generated the ideas and material that would eventually appear in Mythogeography. This included a walk Smith made over 17 days, following the journey of a Manchester engineer 100 years earlier, searching for oak tree survivals of the acorns he had planted. The book uses practice-led research such as this to exemplify the heightening and re-focusing of attention during interventions, juxtaposing and re-assembling objects, stories, subjectivities and experiences, and the narratives and dramaturgies not only of individual interventions but also of the overall research project. Over-explaining events and perceiving organised patterns are means to accumulating multiple meanings for a place, through a heightened sensitivity to textures, signs, details and symbols, in order to counter a dominant ideological tendency towards under-explanation and fragmentation. A creative video aligns, and was distributed, with this book and its research intentions.