10 Scores for a Wild City:
Crab & Bee have provided 10 “scores”. These are actions for participants to try out during the course of this festival; an invitation to join in fully embodied engagement with cities, built environments, green spaces and unhuman wildlife. The scores are preliminary actions for a rewilding of a human self as the first steps towards a rewilding of the city.
Crab & Bee have also provided 5 short films to accompany five of the “scores” to demonstrate their own responses.
The online workshop will be an opportunity to explore these ideas a little further, using playful activity, discussion, and ecosensual engagement as a way to access and work with the specifics of site and personalities of place
Score for collaboration with Crab & Bee, Unfix 2021:
Part 1:
Choose one of these personae, then explore your town or city, seeing
through their eyes, sensing through their feelings:
A fox
A ghost
A detective in a city where a terrible crime has been committed and everyone is a suspect
The last human survivor of a zombie apocalypse
or
A diver in a world underwater
Part 2:
Create a response to this exercise; this may be a piece of writing, a drawing, a map or diagram, a poem, or something else: it is up to you.Send us your response by 21st June:
Email: mytho.smith@btopenworld.com
Post: 4, Dundonald St, Stoke, Plymouth, PL21EJIn response to your responses, Crab & Bee will make a ritual on 21st June. This will be documented and put up on the Crab & Bee page on the UNFIX website during the final week of the festival.
Walk out into the city and find a place…
1/ Experience the full force of the wind channeled through the city on a blowy day. Find those places in the city where the wind blows hardest – this may be on the tops of hills, or at the ends of alleys that funnel the wind, or wind tunnels and dust devils that form around large buildings. Stand and face the gusting air, open your mouth as wide as you can, let it rush into your body, let something else breathe in you…
2/ Explore the tipping point between feeling relaxed and feeling discomfort in the city. Make a list of the places that make you feel uncomfortable. It may be because everything’s loud there, or the smoke is choking, or there’s a physical threat, or the security staff are overbearing, or because it’s isolated and creepy…. Go to the edge of one of these zones. Put one foot across the line. Stay there a little to examine your feeling…
3/ Find the moon’s best reflections. On clear nights go out to find the moon in rivers, in the big display windows of shops, in the eyes of a friend…
4/ Find buried rivers. Look for points around estates and city centres where rivers or streams enter a pipe or drain and disappear underground. Make a list or a map. Then search for where they emerge. When you think you have found the entrance and exit of a river, take as much water as you can carry and leave a water trail on the surface above where you think the watercourse is below. There may be clues like drain covers, put your ear to them and listen out for the waters’ flow…
5/ Make a shrine for sacred bodies. Whose bodies are sacred to you? Whose bodies are ignored or traduced, when they could be reverenced? What objects or images will you need? How does a shrine work? Find an existing space in the appropriate area – a hole left by a missing brick in a wall, an empty telephone box, a niche that never had a statue – and place the pieces of your shrine there…
6/ Take a pee outside. Find a place in the city, outdoors, where the ground is unpaved; somewhere you can safely have a pee, out of the view of others. Pay attention to the colours, textures and aromas of the soil around you. If you are squatting down, how does that change what you see? What kind of plants are around you? What happens when your pee mixes with the fluids in the ground? Are new aromas produced? What chemical processes might you have started? What structures in the city offer you privacy? What connects your body here to what is below the ground…
7/ Gather a menagerie of simulacra. Sticks that look like snakes, stones that look like penises, roots that look like giant squids, plastic cartons that look like dinosaurs. Put them in a box, invite your friends to view your menagerie…
8/ Walk your city on nights when the sky is clear. Look out for processions of satellites. Elon Musk’s Starlink project alone will eventually have 12,000 satellites in orbit. Once you have seen one of these, make your counter-train. Look for trash in the gutter that looks like a rocket, flying saucer, Sputnik, an alien or a cosmonaut’s spacesuit. On a clear night, lay out your satellite-train (Groundlink) somewhere prominent for people to find in the morning…
9/ Recently we decided to walk around a suburb. We drove and parked the car at random there, crossed a nondescript road, turned down a cul de sac of semis and onto a patch of grass that led into a valley where we disturbed a large doe, who led us to another doe and three stags. We stood silently and watched them for a while. It was three minutes from parking the car to being with the deer. Make a habit of carrying with you small threads of red wool (real wool, not synthetic) and tie these to a branch or fence or post whenever you meet one of the larger wild animals we share the city with: foxes, badgers, alligators, goats, parakeets and so on. Pay attention to them. Do your best to protect the remaining spaces in your city where they can be…
10/ Carry an ice cube in your hand; walk through the city allowing the melted water to drip onto the ground. When it snows, roll huge snowballs and store them in the shadows. When the temperature rises and the snow disappears, roll your huge snowballs through the city leaving trails of water as you go. Make or adapt a hat so you can put some ice cubes on it; wear it in the city when the sun shines, walk through town wearing your melting ice cap…