The project Routes + Routines takes place in residential areas in Brussels. Through interventions, actions and presentations in public space, the project creates dialogs with the day-to-day reality of the
street corner, roundabout or zebra-crossing. R + R looks at the relation between technology, geography, urban representation and visual imagination and investigates the city from inside out.
The recent re-validation of Situationism has staged the city again as a
platform for spectacles, unexpected situations and aesthetic
coincidences, the city as a layered locus with unique live and logic, a
chaotic post-industrial organism where functionalism and planning team
up with historic remains and social marginality.
In an informationalist Utopian world vision everything can be
interpreted as programmable and the city is no exception. Routes +
Routines proposes a comparison between on the one hand romantic notions
of urbanity in which the individual experience is the starting point
for a subjective interpretation of locations and on the other: the
structure of binary language where all information can be reduced to opposites; to
zero's and ones.
If cities, social groups and identities can simply be regarded as
programmable entities, can we than approach cities as hardware on which
social, economic, political programme's play; directing and determining
behavior, movement, norms, interactions and relations between citizens?
Can we question how this programmability is employed and re-think and
re-model urban power structures, dominance of capital, racial
injustice, property, normality? How can urban programs that are seemingly fixed be
diverted, changed and appropriated?
Routes + Routines investigate low-tech means of communication and is
curious about the potential of no tech-media such as gossip, backchat,
word to mouth in a world dominated by (communication) strategies. How
can looking, observing and reporting be recaptured from the paradigm of
control and surveillance and how can they be employed to stimulate the
imagination of citizens? How can we map multi -plicity, -culturality,
-layering and changeability starting from the details and individual
observation rather then the bird perspective?