Phil Smith is one of the world’s leading “Experimental Walkers.” So just what constitutes experimental walking? To find out, let your fingers do the walking over to Phil’s website and book, Mythogeography. As he writes:
“At its simplest, Mythogeography is a way of walking, thinking and visiting a place on many levels at the same time. Anyone can do it. You can do it. Walking becomes a performance, walkers become performers and the route becomes their co-star.
In a city, for example, walkers become aware of their urban home as a site, a forum, a playground and a stage: all there to enjoy, understand and provoke on multiple levels:
- Shops, houses, streets
- Tourist sites, visitor centres, museums, heritage industry
- Visible archaeology and history
- Community/social/collective ambitions, hopes, disappointments, failures
- Personal memories and recollections
- Invisible and forgotten history
- Concealed history (crime, disease, squalor)
- Childhoods, loves, hates
- Myths, legends and rumours
- Private dreams, imaginings and fantasies
The levels of the city are reflected back in the many levels of the walker – the public and the private, fact and dream, admissible and inadmissible, forgotten and remembered, past and future.”
Other good reads from Phil on mythogeography, mis-guided walks, counter-tourism, dérives, psychogeography, and so forth include:
- A Sardine Street Box of Tricks
- Alice’s Dérives in Devonshire
- Counter-Tourism: The Handbook
- On Walking
- Enchanted Things
- Walking’s New Movement
- Ways to Wander
Many follow Phil on his Facebook page, where he regularly posts about his activities. He is also one of four core member of a group of artist-researchers called Wrights and Sites, who have generated a range of mis-guides, performances, possible cities and forests.
Before his consuming fascination with walking Phil was engaged in performance and music theater, and has written more than 100 plays for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Opera North and Perpetual Motion, and he is dramaturg with TNT (Munich)].
Phil is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Performing Arts at the University of Plymouth and a visiting lecturer at the University of Exeter.
Please consult our Calendar for his four major events and 6 1-hour daily walks.