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Get off the subway or bus in an unfamiliar area and go for a walk, without a map and navigator, intuitively, drifting through the streets like a ship driven by the wind. This type of travel (from the French dérive – “drift”) was invented in the 1950s by French postmodernists – artists and philosophers who were passionate about psychogeography, the study of the mutual influence of man and the urban environment.
Get lost consciously
Perhaps everyone has had a chance to go where their eyes look in their own or someone else’s city. But drifters, whose communities exist in many countries, do so with a purpose. Literally “knocking” themselves off the trodden paths, disorienting in space, they walk and catch impressions, trying to emotionally live everything that happens during the walk, note how the terrain changes, who they meet along the way. And then they analyze their feelings. Such an experience can be useful not only for psychogeographers.
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- The trip will take place in any weather
Enter into a dialogue
The city imposes on us a certain way of interaction – movement along strict trajectories, maximum alienation and functionality. “For the duration of the drift, the space-time thread that is familiar to us is broken,” writes the traveler under the nickname NoNaName on the Psychogeography website (see “Learn more”). – A person stops moving from point to point, he seems to be lost in the urban space. And enters into a dialogue with the city, as if talking to a friend. Here the specifics of movement disappear. And the specifics of sensations appear.
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- Get back on the bike
Understand your desires
Spontaneously wandering the streets, imperceptibly you find yourself in an altered state of consciousness, similar to sleep or meditation. “A stream of fantasies arises, in which some forgotten images from childhood and archetypal plots suddenly emerge, whole stories are built from them,” says psychoanalyst Svetlana Fedorova. – When traveling with a guide or guide, we follow someone else’s settings, the information binds us to reality and drowns out our own feelings and associations. And when we find ourselves in an unknown environment, we are not bound by stereotypes and can listen to ourselves: why does this house suddenly respond to us, and not another, why do we want to linger in this yard? Drifting helps you better understand your needs and anxieties.”
Take root in the world
“Exploring new spaces, we build new connections with them, and these relationships become a support for us in different situations,” notes existential psychologist Yevgeny Osin. “It is especially important to meet with the city in which we live, in which we gained experience and made important deeds for ourselves – live emotional contact with this city gives us a feeling of connection with the world, rooted in it.”
* The principles of dérive were described by the French philosopher Guy Debord in his article “Theory of dérive”. Also read about it: academia.edu/414027.
Learn more
Sites. You can borrow ideas for “drift” on the website of The Village online publication under the tag “psychogeography” and on psychogeo.spb.ru, the website of St. Petersburg travelers “Psychogeography. How does the city affect us? How do we influence the city?