I’m recording this in an in-between of two places. On a train. Being on a train always held a special feeling for me. It’s one of the few places where I can just be - without following an activity - for hours. Although I just sit and look outside the window I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time, because I move- or rather - I’m being moved - I make a transition between two places. The train generates a transitive space - similar than the space I generate by walking. This transitive space unfolds between two places that I call home - two places that are very familiar to me - Graz and Frankfurt/Gießen. Both places feel close and real when I’m there - and surreal and imaginative when I’m not. …. I always know that both of them exist but still they feel like parallel universes that just come into being when I physically inhabit them - when - in de Certaus words - I transform them into a space by my practice - in that case by my physical presence. It’s the „real space {-that -} cannot be experienced except in real time“ - how Robert Morris describes. The first time when this paradox was temporarily dissolved was when my friends from Gießen visited me at my family home in Rinnegg just next to Graz. First it felt like in dream where two situations come together and still in the dream you realize that something’s wrong or doesn’t make sense. Then after some time of getting used to it - these two separate parallel realities started to overlap and for the first time I could feel how both of them where real and existed in the same world and time. So I’m thinking about - how words can be inscribed in a place by practicing them together - also people inscribe in spaces - by memories that are generated in a common practice of places. By practicing this other, parallel place together, both places were realized - in a way - at the same time and by that they overlapped and lost their parallel existence. Guy Debord defined the notion of psychogeography - an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting" - the derive. A graphical engagement with the practice of the derive was the collaging of maps, where they cut them into pieces and connected them in a way that did not represent the actual geography but the psychogeography - where places were connected not by location but by - as they called it - psychological energies. Like that they visualized the relationship between real and imaginative spaces. The energies realized by drifting connected the here’s and there’s. As my mind drifts between memories and imaginations and my body drifts between spaces and places I form my own psychogeography. A psychogeography that - in a subversive act - cracks open the homogenity of our capitalist, industrialized environment and forms an new map that is created through affinity rather than geography - through care rather than economy… The Topo(ideo)logy Video-Essay-Series is are an ongoing project started in 2020, that reflect my current artistic research around the topic of walking as an aesthetic and subversive practice, concerning the creation of space, with a special interest in public urban environments.

The Topo(ideo)logy Video-Essay-Series is are an ongoing project started in 2020, that reflect my current artistic research around the topic of walking as an aesthetic and subversive practice, concerning the creation of space, with a special interest in public urban environments.

Film von Alica Müller

Film von Barbara Luci Carvalhol

Film von Yinfu Gao

Film von Jean-Noël Lenhard