subtle sackville

In advance of a workshop with artist Eleanor King on the creation of audio walks, on the evening of Tuesday January 29 students walked through Sackville, using ideas developed in the tradition of "psychogeography." We all make our way through the spaces around us everyday, but theorists from Walter Benjamin in the early 1900s to Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1960s, and Michel de Certeau in the 1980s emphasized that walking through urban spaces could also be a tactic allowing us to see and understand our surroundings in new ways. The Situationists described this practice as psychogeography, a big word that essentially simply was a way to get past habit and official descriptions to consider the meanings and more informal uses associated with surroundings. They would sometimes layer a map of one geography on another, creating new encounters with familiar spaces.

Focusing on areas of downtown Sackville, each group was asked to observe elements of public space as they made their way - the distinctive impressions of various areas and of the thresholds between them, what spaces may allow or disallow, and to consider how they know what they know along the way.

sight + sound impressions





















front stage/back alleys






monuments and messages




public description and public memory: campus


signs and symbols