Urban Fiction

Locative Artwork and Installation, 2006-7

Urban Fiction imagines the multi-layered urban fabric to be constantly rewoven, torn apart and stitched together again. Mutual relations between the ‘lived’ and the 'mapped' are made visible and tangible in the form of a performative cartography.

The work uses mobile phones as 'lenses' through which to look at the city and to trace the participants' movements. Seen through this lens, the city turns into an elastic filigree of imaginary spaces spun by our everyday lives—spaces that our traditional maps are blind to. Back inside the gallery, the imaginary spaces are projected onto translucent silicone sheets, swept across the gallery space like sheets of skin. Upon closer inspection, they reveal that the fabrics are continuously in the making, and tiny movements produce threads, whorls and stitches, similar to the embroidering pulses of a heart rate monitor.