Rationale
Every story is a travel story-a spatial practice. 5
In his book Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau brings up a point that in modern Athens the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To travel to work or to home, one takes a "metaphor"-a bus or a train. 6 De Certeau connotes that stories have metaphoric quality in that every day they traverse and organize places. Narrative structures have, through spatial syntax, ordered ways of regulating changes in space made by stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series. Thus, stories, whether everyday or literary can serve as a means of mass transportation, as metaphorai. 7
De Certeau goes on to say that "every story is a travel story—a spatial practice". Spatial practices, as he alludes, concern our everyday methods of indicating spaces as we walk through the city with enunciations such "It's to the right", "Take a left". The rest of it, he says, is written in footsteps. I liked this idea of de Certeau's that narrated adventures simultaneously produce geographies of actions in pedestrian travel. They "organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it." 8 I was taken with this notion of walking, that footsteps tell stories, and pathways define spaces.
Early on in my Yale seminar I experienced a coincidence of walked 'spatial practices' that impressed these notions upon me. The first was our seminar fellows' walk in New Haven on the first day of our fellowship forum. Our seminar leader, Joe Roach, gave us all a city map of New Haven. Together we unfolded our maps and as we were oriented to them we considered some of the thinking behind the original planning of the visible city. We gathered outside to embark on a walk together for the purpose of gaining experiential understandings of the built realities of some of the city's pathways, nodes, landmarks and boundaries. Our curiosity was peaked on the imminent mystery, to find the invisible city within New Haven, the Jewish community known as the eruv. After walking several blocks we were surprised as our seminar leader pointed out the subtle demarcations that identify the boundaries of the eruv. It was during this walk that I began to make a connection to my students' and our school's culture. It was striking to me that, like the eruv, there are invisible cities within our school in the form of psychological and social borders within which students feel a sense of order or protection. I recalled the memory of my habitual school day experience of walking to my building in the pre-dawn darkness of the morning as the campus presents its milieu of adolescents. Outdoors along its pathways students position themselves as if characters in a daily performance of a long running play. At each node I encounter a collage of faces while a medley of languages contribute to a chorus of voices rising and falling amid a cacophony of conversations. In Erving Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life he writes that when one's activity occurs in the presence of others there are aspects that are expressly accentuated and others that are suppressed. Actions to be noticed or highlighted occur in what he defines as the 'front regions' while those actions to be subjugated occur in 'back regions'. 9 In the obscurity of the morning students wait in domain specific 'back regions' where from the drama of their day will begin.
Here costumes and other parts of personal front may be adjusted and scrutinized for flaws. Here the team can run through its performance, checking for offending expressions when no audience is present to be affronted by them; here poor members of the team, who are expressively inept, can be schooled or dropped from the performance. Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character. 10This brings me back to the notion raised by Michel de Certeau that daily practices, such as those performed by students, serve to articulate what he refers to as travel stories. Oral narrations of places, the home, the streets, function to organize movements back and forth between 'seeing and 'going' on the totalizing stage of the 'map' of everyday experience. 11 According to de Certeau, the word place indicates stability. Space, however, is composed of intersections of mobile elements. In relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken. "Space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers." 12 As we enjoyed our walk, we stopped to take a look at site-specific public art. We paused to consider civic values and how artistic contributions to a community can have lasting significance. This brings me to recount my second inspiration for this unit experienced while walking that occurred two weeks later when I visited the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. As I strode the spacious galleries of the contemporary art wing I came upon an artwork called The Fire Next Time, 1989 by Chilean born artist Alfredo Jaar. 13 This art form consists of twenty-two metal light boxes with black and white transparencies. Many of the boxes are six feet in length. The images on the boxes are enlarged and fractured newspaper photographs of 1960's civil rights demonstrations in America. The boxes are stacked chaotically across the floor space of a large gallery. In several of these images are close-ups of crowds of feet bearing shoes from all walks of life walking quickly and closely in protest marches. Another image shows a crowd of feet running from the police. Alfedo Jaar was shocked on his arrival in New York in 1981 at the pervasiveness of racial inequality in the United States. I marveled at this visual narrative by a Hispanic artist on African American culture in the US. I was captivated by the images of the feet walking, the story was being told in footsteps.
This curriculum unit elaborates on Michel de Certeau's references to the daily practices that articulate "place" and "space". Stories, he says, carry out a labor that continually transforms places into spaces. I have found an interesting metaphor in his use of the terms "maps", "tours" and "paths" as he alludes to the operations of oral narration. In the structure of the travel story journeys and actions are marked out by the "citation" of the places that result from them or authorize them. I am inspired by his references to drawings on maps of the medieval era that outlined not the route but the log of the journey on foot. 14 He describes the map as "a totalizing stage, on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a state of geographic knowledge." Maps constitute proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge. 15 In this curriculum unit students will look at the work of artists who utilize maps in their work. Class activities addressing the Visual Art Essential Standards for Visual Response will have as their objective students' creative interpretations of their own travel stories in map-like visualizations of the invisible cities of their psychogeography. Psychogeography is a relatively new term used to describe artists' mapping of systems and relationships rather than imagery. The use of maps and cartographic motifs by artists has grown in popularity since the 1960's. In artistic terms the language of maps has evolved beyond the utilitarian plotting of routes and destinations to serving as a backdrop for statements about politically or psychologically imposed boundaries. 16 Contempary artists working as urban storytellers and urban geographers are referenced throughout this unit.
The Great Khan owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all the cities: those whose walls rest on solid foundations, those which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, those that will exist one day and in whose place now only hares' holes gape. 17
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