Routes + Routines is a series of city walks; surprise visits to unexpected corners of Brussels. The project tests out various methods for diverting and changing routines, and as a result your experience of daily habits could possibly shift. Through treading on unknown territory, these performative explorations investigate rhythms, patterns, movements, circumstances and situations which make up our so called “normal” world.
The project Routes + Routines takes place in residential areas in Brussels. Through interventions, actions and presentations in public space, the project creates dialogs with the day-to-day reality of the street corner, roundabout or zebra-crossing. R + R looks at the relation between technology, geography, urban representation and visual imagination and investigates the city from inside out.
The recent re-validation of Situationism has staged the city again as a platform for spectacles, unexpected situations and aesthetic coincidences, the city as a layered locus with unique live and logic, a chaotic post-industrial organism where functionalism and planning team up with historic remains and social marginality.
In an informationalist Utopian world vision everything can be interpreted as programmable and the city is no exception. Routes + Routines proposes a comparison between on the one hand romantic notions of urbanity in which the individual experience is the starting point for a subjective interpretation of locations and on the other: the structure of binary language where all information can be reduced to opposites; to zero’s and ones.
If cities, social groups and identities can simply be regarded as programmable entities, can we than approach cities as hardware on which social, economic, political programme’s play; directing and determining behavior, movement, norms, interactions and relations between citizens? Can we question how this programmability is employed and re-think and re-model urban power structures, dominance of capital, racial injustice, property, normality? How can urban programs that are seemingly fixed be diverted, changed and appropriated?
Routes + Routines investigate low-tech means of communication and is curious about the potential of no tech-media such as gossip, backchat, word to mouth in a world dominated by (communication) strategies. How can looking, observing and reporting be recaptured from the paradigm of control and surveillance and how can they be employed to stimulate the imagination of citizens? How can we map multi -plicity, -culturality, -layering and changeability starting from the details and individual observation rather then the bird perspective?
Constant member Peter Westenberg participates in the debate ’Aventures en architecture’, organised by IBAI, the Brussels Architecture Institute The debate investigates city tours as an artistic (...)
Balearic Routes and Routines are two walks which try to interfere with the experience you have moving about in your familiar environment. With low tech shoes and other devices we will explore (...)
Les Mouvements "Radieuse": urban gymnastics for the inhabitants of the Maison Radieuse. A series of ’Routes + Routines’ workshops on the relation between architecture, prescription, routine and the (...)
The last of the Routes + Routines walks in Hasselt will stumble across protocols of exchange, (il)legal procedures of accessing the web, personal trust and temporary alliances.
Registration: (...)
Passeer Pas Par Là proposed a walk through the neighbourhood Scheut in Anderlecht. We looked at local re-appropriation of disfunctional spaces, self chosen trajectories and gardens throughout the (...)
Regulating Impulses was an experimental site-specific walk along the General Police Regulations of the Brussels’ neighborhood Ixelles. In this walk we mirrored movements and actions from the (...)
Swap Script consisted of an experimental visit to a square in the Brussels’ neighborhood Schaerbeek in the shape of a site-specific workshop on rythm, motion, behaviour and navigation in an urban (...)
