…to start a conversation

Walking around Detroit I became fascinated by the number of signs posted to prevent people ‘loitering’. One in particular outside the supermarket on Third Avenue that I walked past every day, it was written by hand. Hanging around, mooching, loitering was not tolerated….

Loitering – implies hanging around with no purpose,  - not at all in line with capitalist notions of productivity and a protestant work ethic.

 So who are these signs aimed at? Not at the shoppers, or the motorists speeding by, or the people walking hurriedly to work….no, it’s aimed at those of us with time on our hands for one reason or another, to those of us who stop for more than a minute or two…

 Having read Mike Davies’ Los Angeles I knew that cities were trying to find ways to stop the homeless from resting, sitting, lying, loitering in public space.

Ideas began to take shape began with a trip to present work at the Artivistic conference[1] in Montreal, Canada. I made three sandwich boards (I had been reading Susan Buck-Morss,[2] Walter Benjamin[3] and Steven Duncombe,[4] among others.) on which I wrote questions and musings about space, walking and memory, on the boards, which were in French. I walked, reasonably slowly, dressed in these sandwich boards, a couple of times a day from my accommodation to the conference centre. I did not ask for responses or reactions, I merely intended to provoke and/or stimulate thought. Although people looked and appeared to read the boards I have no idea whether this intervention was ‘successful.’

The second intervention was sitting on street corners, with two chairs, in the hope that someone might sit down with me. I did not want to come up with a ploy or ruse to do this but since there was no indication that this was my intention then no one (apart from people I was getting to know through the conference) sat down. Once those people sat down then passers-by would take notice of this gathering and hesitate and look but no one asked what I, or we, were doing. I was only once engaged in conversation by two women, one of whom had lived for a time in the UK. Both were fascinated by the interventions and we had a long discussion about space, place, inhabiting and belonging.

Whilst carrying out these interventions I started to realize that the cross-walks (zebra crossings) showed in a digital display where the stop/go sign the amount of time left to cross before the lights would change. I became fascinated by the concept of trying to gauge how much time the crossing would take depending on the gender/age/ability of the pedestrian and whether this display would encourage more or less risk-taking, as in “5 seconds, oh, I’ll make it across,” or “5 seconds, oh, I’ll never do it.” I started timing the window for crossing which was about 30 seconds. I then began to create performances lasting 29 seconds, enacted on the crossings, leaving 1 second to make it to the safety of the kerb.

 On my return to the UK I bought a roll of rubber carpet underlay and made it into portable zebra crossings. I take these into the city and create new, temporary zebra crossings for pedestrians to cross the road.

Back in my village in West Wales I started wearing a hi-viz vest with the writing Loitering with intent on the back….and hanging out on street corners to see if anyone would like to engage in conversation. As an older, white woman, this presented me with little danger of being moved on or bothered by officials. But it was easier just to go into shops and start conversations around the purchase of a small item.

Wandering up and down the main street of Llandysul on a regular basis, I started to see flashes of colour between the houses, greens and browns, trees, bracken, a stream, hills stretching away into the horizon….I was in the country yet in the town, or was it a village? Inevitably, I got into conversations about this - do we live in a town or a village? Opinions were divided - and it wasn’t a question of size, rather of services and facilities: the local banks were closing and bus services were being cut, yet we had a Town Band and a Town Football Club. The wholefood store had closed a year or two back, but the harp factory was still going strong and Llandysul was the location for a regular international canoeing festival. Plus, perhaps strangest of all, there were Tregroes waffles, sold far and wide and in Harrods, a Dutch-style Welsh waffle created by a Dutch couple who had moved to Tregroes, the hamlet just outside Llandysul.

These conversations, and many others with residents and tradespeople in the town/village, made their way into a video, Free Range Eggs and Chutney and a conference performance/presentation at the Emotional Geographies Conference in Groningen on the ‘Rural Good Life'.

Loitering, hanging around, having conversations on the streets, in shops and pubs are part of belonging, of placing ourselves, being placed in the neighbourhood landscape on our own and with others.

Loiterings lead to conversations, talking, sometimes to sitting and the Sit-U-ationist Sofa

[1] ARTIVISTIC: un.occupied spaces, espaces in.occupés

[2] Susan Buck-Morss, (1986) The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, New German Critique 39

[3] Benjamin, Walter (2002) The Arcades Project, USA: Harvard University Press, and also (1999) Selected Writings vol.2 1927-1934, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, The Return of the Flaneur

[4] Duncombe, Stephen (2002) The Cultural Resistance Reader, New York: Verso