- Joined
- Thursday March 30, 2017
Welcome - good luck.
The pre amble - psycho geography - is a style of literature that normally - but not exclusively - takes the built environment and uses it as a springboard to redefining what you see and what you could see when wandering about - with no particular purpose - with the right sort of eyes. Discarding the A-Z, the tourist map or Google on your phone and creating your own guide book. That which is not obvious - but actually is, when you readjust the way you are looking at things. The genre has been most recently associated with writers such as Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. We blindly rush about cities paying very little attention. If you take your time - time is a key concept here - it isn't linear - more, malleable - you get overlaps in particular spots - backwash from that which came before. Other worlds - ways of thinking- that leave their marks on the shore - in the sand. Ideas that have occupied humans far longer than our modern age - our rationality. The following pictures and words are me playing with the idea of psycho geography in Madrid - a city I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours wandering about. All the images were shot deliberately for this project over two afternoons in February this year - almost exclusively in very unfashionable barrios of the city. As I said before - good luck - I hope you enjoy.
'Los de Abajos' - the underworld.
Los de abajos - literally translated - those that live underneath. Madrid has an underworld - as does everywhere else in the world. It stands to reason - we live up here - they live down there - I have no idea who they are incidentally. Nature seeks equilibrium - all organic life is symmetrical - bi-lateral in the case of animals - so if there is an above, there must be a below. Balance. The Egyptian - but culturally Greek - geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus knew this in the second century ce. In his 'Geographia' of 140 ce - which would remain the definitive work of cartography for one and a half thousand years - postulated the idea of the anti-podes - a great southern continent - hence antipodean -Australia - otherwise the globe would spin off its axis into space. It would take some 1600 years before Cook proved him right. I'm pretty sure that the Dutch knew this before but the British didn't ruin their economy in the interim trading on tulip bulbs - history is indeed written by the victors. Equally St Augustine in his 'City of God' - early 5th ce - imagined that there must be a perfect celestial city - above - to mirror the sacked ruins of his beloved Rome - below. What he doesn't actually point out in the 22 books of it - is that the Visigoths that did the deed were in fact Christians themselves - just the wrong sort of Christians. Arian not Catholic. He also fails to mention that Alaric and his troops that set about Rome in 410 ce did so because they were hired mercenaries in Roman employ that hadn't been paid for quite some time. They didn't touch a single church when they ransacked the city. So - two examples of an above needing to have a below. Back to Madrid. There must be gateways between the realms? Time to go look for them - after a bit of wandering in this frame of mind - I started to apply significance to apparently random things in the street -
The gesture on the left poster seemed to be pointing me in a certain direction. I turned my gaze and saw this -
A map - strangely drawn - both apparently directions to the same place. One for the above - one for the below. I followed it - and found this -
The first portal - gateway- I discovered between los de abajos and the surface. My eyes tuned - I would find many more, traces of subterranean Mithraic bull cults and alchemy.
End of part the first - if anybody is interested in reading more of this rubbish - I'd be happy to oblige. Alternatively I can show the rest of the pictures from this project on their own.
Thank you for getting this far - yours - I.
@Barry Giddens @Blademonkey @Wayne Pritchard @Helveticum
The pre amble - psycho geography - is a style of literature that normally - but not exclusively - takes the built environment and uses it as a springboard to redefining what you see and what you could see when wandering about - with no particular purpose - with the right sort of eyes. Discarding the A-Z, the tourist map or Google on your phone and creating your own guide book. That which is not obvious - but actually is, when you readjust the way you are looking at things. The genre has been most recently associated with writers such as Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. We blindly rush about cities paying very little attention. If you take your time - time is a key concept here - it isn't linear - more, malleable - you get overlaps in particular spots - backwash from that which came before. Other worlds - ways of thinking- that leave their marks on the shore - in the sand. Ideas that have occupied humans far longer than our modern age - our rationality. The following pictures and words are me playing with the idea of psycho geography in Madrid - a city I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours wandering about. All the images were shot deliberately for this project over two afternoons in February this year - almost exclusively in very unfashionable barrios of the city. As I said before - good luck - I hope you enjoy.
'Los de Abajos' - the underworld.
Los de abajos - literally translated - those that live underneath. Madrid has an underworld - as does everywhere else in the world. It stands to reason - we live up here - they live down there - I have no idea who they are incidentally. Nature seeks equilibrium - all organic life is symmetrical - bi-lateral in the case of animals - so if there is an above, there must be a below. Balance. The Egyptian - but culturally Greek - geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus knew this in the second century ce. In his 'Geographia' of 140 ce - which would remain the definitive work of cartography for one and a half thousand years - postulated the idea of the anti-podes - a great southern continent - hence antipodean -Australia - otherwise the globe would spin off its axis into space. It would take some 1600 years before Cook proved him right. I'm pretty sure that the Dutch knew this before but the British didn't ruin their economy in the interim trading on tulip bulbs - history is indeed written by the victors. Equally St Augustine in his 'City of God' - early 5th ce - imagined that there must be a perfect celestial city - above - to mirror the sacked ruins of his beloved Rome - below. What he doesn't actually point out in the 22 books of it - is that the Visigoths that did the deed were in fact Christians themselves - just the wrong sort of Christians. Arian not Catholic. He also fails to mention that Alaric and his troops that set about Rome in 410 ce did so because they were hired mercenaries in Roman employ that hadn't been paid for quite some time. They didn't touch a single church when they ransacked the city. So - two examples of an above needing to have a below. Back to Madrid. There must be gateways between the realms? Time to go look for them - after a bit of wandering in this frame of mind - I started to apply significance to apparently random things in the street -
The gesture on the left poster seemed to be pointing me in a certain direction. I turned my gaze and saw this -
A map - strangely drawn - both apparently directions to the same place. One for the above - one for the below. I followed it - and found this -
The first portal - gateway- I discovered between los de abajos and the surface. My eyes tuned - I would find many more, traces of subterranean Mithraic bull cults and alchemy.
End of part the first - if anybody is interested in reading more of this rubbish - I'd be happy to oblige. Alternatively I can show the rest of the pictures from this project on their own.
Thank you for getting this far - yours - I.
@Barry Giddens @Blademonkey @Wayne Pritchard @Helveticum