Urban anomalies / Highway 101, the journal #4
Introduction
Rudi Laermans & Myriam Van Imschoot

1. Postmodern urbanism obeys the logic of the spectacle society. Its representatives - its ideologists - primarily perceive the urban environment as a visual landscape, as a sequence of images that alternately connote pastness (the historical centre) and futureness (new estates). The prototypically postmodern city is not so much a place to live in or to die as a site for wanderers and consumers. Basic life is banished to the wings, the scene is dominated by trendy lifestylers who seem unsusceptible to biological time. This booklet is titled Urban Anomalies. According to Peter Westenberg, the Rotterdam publisher who issued Highway 101, the journal, this title should priorly be understood as a statement - for it has made a secret pact with the modernistic idea, that public urban space is still a locus of frictions and surprises, a place of mostly visual collisions (sometimes physical too) and ever-toppling impressions. It is only in a 'temporary urban zone' that the unusual becomes momentarily acceptable, the anomalous obvious. Even in its postmodern form the city as such continues to refer to a 'state of physical emergency': the city is the projection screen par excellence of the human longing for excessive experiences, as described by Laurens Ten Kate. The metropole aspires to be sheer image, and precisely these ephemeral forms of existence provide an exquisite locale for the nihilistic enactments of late modern man and woman.
2. Now the highway remains perhaps the utmost symbol of modernity: indefinite (nothing as flat and fringeless as a highway), solely aimed for movement and transport, in passing. Every ordinary highway is a twilight-zone, a lingering promise - not to live anywhere and to arrive somewhere sometime. Who, around 3 a.m. on the freeway, never met with the feeling of having fused with a very fast moving car has never been a modern human. The real Highway 101 is in America, once a fantasy continent but now a supremacy in search of an identity, an inspirational image. The project Highway 101 creates an imaginary, artistic highway between five European cities: Brussels, Vienna, Paris, Rotterdam and Zurich. Five cities for Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods, five intervals that may generate relationships; five stops where on site these booklets have been conceived as well.
3. Just like the entire project, Highway 101, the journal regards the urban stops as places where one can come home free from oppressive feelings and to find relatives that are no members of the family (and never will be). Flexible ties, temporary coalitions, instable social constellations, shifting networks...: the Highway project is dominated by the quest for an unidentifiable community - which indisputably has an urban nature. How do the journal and performance relate to each other? Here the text, there the performance - 'the art'? Here the thinkers, there the performers? Actually no, that which separates the people, joins them too. In Highway 101 all participants - so the audience as well - are patient passers-by, waiting for the never provided explication of the knowing looks that brought them together. Therefore, Highway 101, the journal is considered a not manipulatable chance to cross-fertilise artistic 'genres' and 'concepts', texts and an artistic trajectory that - under the transient conditions of a local embedment, for instance in Rotterdam - strives at more than just provisionality. The opportunity was offered, the result remains - as a trace of a series of contacts, as a memory of a sequence of symbolic exchanges.