Find a spot in your surroundings, a gap in your timeline, a place in your life, an instant to choose to be present,
try to keep this moment as long as possible. I suggest a day, or an afternoon, hopefully nothing shorter.
The choosing of a place and a time is really important. It has to be a place where you may be able to lose your
senses and/or learn new ones. The place can be defined by a building, a park, a field, trees, a waterfront or any
other kind of structured place.
Allow yourself to meander, only guided by your curiosity and your questioning. Dérive. Acknowledge the wind, the
mud, the rain, the snow or any phenomenon that comes on your way. The weather and the temperature will not
be a problem standing between you and your experience because you will embrace it. The weather will certainly
alter and influence your experience, especially in a place like Finland.
The intention of meeting your environment is deliberate. I personally choose my sight as I would choose my
upcoming dinner. Fiercely.
Once you arrive, how do you see the situation around you? Turn around to acquire the senses that are being
present and surround you.
Observe
Smell
What do you see?
Do you feel the vibrations, the tempo and the rhythm of the elements around you? Make sure that all your senses
are prepared. There are so many future temporalities of you in your surroundings. Here, the snow will melt, there,
the tree will fall. Next to you, the building will be destroyed one day. The past marked the land with different
agencies all along the days, months, centuries. How many worms swarmed under your feet? Was there grass all
along here? The terrain topography created pathways with rain that dripped through the soil. That building was
here before?
Check in through macro and micro lens, the tiny detail, the ready-to-bloom flower, the frog that stands still next to
you, trying to not be seen. But what if you change your lens? I notice the woodpecker pecking and vibrating the
bark of this dead tree 10 meters above me. Is that a crow flying and jumping from branch to branch? I inspect the
path: who came before me? I imagine who will come after, will they think the same thing as me? Would they be
stressed, relaxed?
Widen your perspective even more: can you see the sky? What's in it? Are there planes? Where are they going?
Do they understand that 10000m below them you’re looking at them, what's their life? Are there clouds? What's
their shape? Are they dark and grey clouds? Or fluffy and unctuous like whipped cream.
Adapt to the change of scale, the different speeds of your steps.
Pause and observe.
Lure
Drift
Accept the soil and co-exist. Change the surface you ́re walking on. Be sensitive to the hardness or the softness
of the ground. Imagine the beasts, the animals living under it. Remember your school books about myths and
legends of your childhood. I invite you to keep them vivid during this experience.
Detect the shadows. Sense the light and its moving elements around you. How does the shadows draw you to
new perceptions of things? How does it feel to see your silhouette mapped on the floor? Is that a reproduction of
you?
Can you feel that you ́re part of this world?
Just this one, the one you ́re in now.
Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but now.
In this singular moment.
Imagine the shape
Feel the sun,
Watch the clouds.
Or the blue sky,
that shift from blue to red
and to darkness.
All this in a loop, again and again with always that tiny sparkle that makes it everyday another shift, another
shape. All the metamorphosis that happens at once around you.
How many temporalities are you living? Where is this bird going, what has this rock lived through. There is a
meaning, a sense to objects as much as we give sense to our surroundings and our life.
During your walk, your environment will change, passing from light to dark, urban to forest, sea to sand, crowdy
to desertic. Acknowledge it. Appreciate it, whatever it is, by focusing on details. Inspect and pay attention to
people around you.
They are here with you. What are they thinking about? How do they feel?
Speak out loud or whisper. Scream, shout or stay silent. Sing with the birds or listen to them. By attempting to
change your physical and psychological scale, you will be able to process time other than your own.
Express what comes to your mind, what does it mean? What is the meaning of the words that you think of?
What ́s your language and its meaning? How does another language understand the landscape differently?
English, French, Spanish, Finnish, Wolof, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic... All these languages will have different views
on the perception that you ́re having. A different approach. The steps will be diverse. Connect with them, make
words to your perception and vice versa.
Repeat the experience with another person. Share your culture, your thoughts and your comprehension of your
environment. What does it say? Look up and down, are you looking in the same direction together? Your
connection will create a new path of understanding and you won't be the same. Sharing will develop a new path,
a new logic that will affect you and others.
All the experiences on multiple territories have an effect and an affect, they are irremediably floating, in constant
movement and drawing patterns inside of you. Everything is in movement. Everywhere, all at once.
All are shaped structures according to one another. By moving in a landscape and by giving an emotion to where
you are, you create other paths, buds that will bloom or give roots. Roots that will connect to other roots will
expand to other territories.
Making seeds.
Nothing is central but multiple connections with different growth rhythms change in times. Our identities are
affected. Transformed.
Shift once again.
Once your experience is found and your process started, find a contemplation point.
This place may define you at this moment. It may become your emotional madeleine de Proust.
Because our human time is constantly moving forward.
You ́ll find this contemplation point and it may draw you to a memory, an anchor point in your life, drawing you to
a safe space.
Be Home. Because home is where your memory is. It is where you ́ve been living. It is the one that you will
remember. The one that you ́ve been shaping with your experience in a defined moment.
Accept the melancholy that will exacerbate at that moment. It will enhance your feelings. Refuse the alienation of
your surroundings at that instant.
“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad” - Victor Hugo.
Accept the seasons, their beauty, their resilience and their deception or joy. Acknowledge the time being, the
weather being, the people being or any being around you. It will change, just like you. By accepting this
uncontrollable feeling of ever changing forms of lives you can acknowledge your rhizomatic thoughts of
experiences. These multiples roots that you will create physically or figuratively here and there.
Process, accept, feel, live and replay
—-----
“Un jour, on construira des villes pour dériver. On peut utiliser, avec des retouches relativement légères, certaines
zones qui existent déjà. On peut utiliser certaines personnes qui existent déjà.”
Les Lèvres nues n° 9, décembre 1956 et Internationale Situationniste n° 2, décembre 1958
“One day, we will build cities to derive. We can use, with relatively slight adjustment, already existing
zones. We can use already existing people.”
By practising the dérive, we can draw a sociology of the territory we ́ve been exploring. It allows us to understand
the structures, the movement, the fluctuations of people, the dynamics that are in effect in certain environments:
which area drags the most attention, which areas are abandoned, misplaced or unused and why.
By creating a mapping of movements and derives, we can create alternative ways and hijack the contemporary
hubs of neoliberalism. Its way of influencing the economy by placing a logic of profit creates a profitable
landscape - one that draws power dynamics through development and pivotal structures according to the logic of
shareholders.
You can shift your perspective by allowing your spirit to insert new drifts and new logics emerged from your
derive.
Clément Beraud
Background design by
Jana Stumpe
&
Jane Markevich