Some workshops urgently need participants. Our’s doesn’t. Fortunately.

For some reasons, the Urban Emptiness Festival is lacking an audience. This left us with a total number of 0 participants for our second workshop. Those who had signed up did not show up, and after an hour of waiting we decided to continue the workshop just on our own. As the workshop’s intention is less about teaching others a certain thing, but more about co-creating a walk together, we were fine also on our own.

After having created several routes in the previous section, we combined two of those routes into one. Our plan was now to walk along this route and record our observations and thoughts along the way. Nothing extremly complicated, just personal recordings of a subjective experience. Those ad-hoc audiowalks would then serve as the material for the 3rd workshop in which others than the recording person would imagine a new city — based on the recording of someone else.

Even though (or maybe: Because) the instruction and the method is so simpel, it took us longer to walk the given path than expected. The excercise is a lot of fun, and you keep losing yourself in small details that suddenly become highly fascinating. A dog in a pullover, graffiti on a squared window, half a poster, a red lamp. Given only small hints by your environment, you start building crazy stories around them, making assumptions, and even though you might know that half of it is either unreasonable or completely impossible to exist, you find joy in your own creativity. However, falling in love with your own fictions, also highlightens the trap why we may so easily be tricked into something that is obviously not true.

Both our recordings are available here: