Myriam Lefkowitz — Walk, Hands, Eyes (Aubervilliers) — Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers — Performance — Slash Paris

Past: May 29 → June 1, 2014

Myriam Lefkowitz is beginning an artist’s residence that will allow her to focus on and review a travelling project started five years ago, an examination of types of perception and the transformations they undergo: Walk, Hands, Eyes (a city). The project is an experience for a participant and a guide who, over the course of an hour’s silent walk through a city, form a particular relationship through walking, seeing and touching. Out of the many walks taken in several cities throughout the world (New York, Vilnius, Paris and Venice), a form of knowledge has emerged in the accounts that the artist has collected. They tell with every experience how changes in our sensorial attentiveness alter our relationship to a space. Through these accounts, a novel form of experiencing a city emerges that goes beyond its habitual functionality and regimented uses. For Walk, Hands, Eyes (Aubervilliers), Myriam Lefkowitz will propose a series of these guided walks in Aubervilliers in the spring of 2014 and will also experiment with a new tool at les Laboratoires; the stories come from many voices that will feed into a book to question the interactions at work in the topographic reality of the urban terrain experienced and will attempt to describe the geography reflected in these perceptive experiences.

Openings, spring 2014: Myriam Lefkowitz proposes regular openings to the public organised around several tools for exploring the city and one’s imagination. In parallel to that, she will expose the working process of drafting the book through readings and public conversations, inviting different people who have had a hand in creating the book (both guides and guided) as well as others who can help formulate and theorise the raw material of the accounts.

Publication: The artist will publish a book that will include all the conversations with those who experienced the guided walks and the guides responsible for it. This requires a transcription of the conversations held during the five years of the travelling project. The book will constitute not only an archive but also an observation space for analysing the types of knowledge that come out of this project, questioning the nature and the type of reality that perceptive experience is constantly creating