2012

Walking Portraits: Performing Asphalts

“always situated between arrival and departure poles”

artist publication (2013: 420)

“altering Benjaminian metaphor of botanizing on the asphalt - towards an audiovisual portrait”

artist notes (May 2012)

Concept

Walking Portraits forms an audiovisual piece made of a series of walking performances across 5 London station areas for 5 days; documented through video, sound and GPS. It focuses on a geography on foot, one which highlights the mundane and unnoticed details of everyday life. The work constitutes a performance of a metaphor in everyday spaces of transition which blur the concepts of private and public space. The artist walks repetitively from interior to exterior of transit spaces; following found urban patterns: different asphalt cracks, signs and coloured lines. Departing from Benjamin’s metaphor on ‘botanising on the asphalt’, Psarras goes botanising on the various surfaces and material layers of the everyday; an action magnified by camera’s position, which set an ongoing sensory dialogue while little topographies are revealed in the porous surfaces of them. The performance had a series of outputs ranging from audiovisual piece to a series of photographs and visualised GPS data in abstract maps.

Description

Walking performance for camera, sound, GPS data, 5 days / 5 London stations

Technical: HD video, 16:9 colour, single channel, stereo sound

Duration: 3:45’

Year: 2012

Credits

Concept - Performance - Creation: Bill Psarras

Selected Exhibitions

The work was awarded with the 1st Prize of Cinematique UK Student Film Festival (2013). It has been also screened across film festivals: Australian International Experimental Film Festival (Melbourne), Emotional Geographies conference art screenings (Groningen) as well as part of the interview in Peripheral Arteries journal (March 2014: online).