I have of late been supporting the work of a Russian photographer, Ekaterina Vasilyeva, whose latest work, Black Stripe, is an interesting piece of psychogeography. Although I have tagged it as a “book” it is not really a book in the traditional sense, or at least it is an unorthodox one (as can be seen on her website): photographs taken on the Russian Baltic island of Kotlin, with Google maps on the reverse illustrating walks made by Ekaterina around the island photographing objects and places encountered on those walks.
What I find most interesting is the slightly unsettling, disorienting effect the physical artefact has and how it stands in for mental unsettling that I would no doubt experience if I was to go to the island itself. The physical structure of the work is partly responsible for this: the maps/photographs are hinged together with tape in a less than predictable way so that on any run through the work the sequences shift and change, and nothing seems to fold back the way it was to start with! The maps themselves add to the effect. Rather than clearly illustrating the parts of the island around which Ekaterina walked they do little more than offer some sense of movement. In common with most maps, in the absence of some sense of scale, and an underlying understanding of the physical environment, they can be less than informative. I have no real sense from these maps of the scale of the place, what it looks like, how its parts relate to each other. This is added to by the fact the text is in Cyrillic script (which I can just about decipher) and I do not speak Russian. The information contained in the maps is therefore effectively denied me. If I was there I would in essence be clueless even with the maps, just as I am now as a mere mental visitor. With the aid of the maps and the photographs I can wander around in the manner of a Baudelairean flâneur but as Debord proposed I am in fact doing little more than drifting about, aimlessly and lost. An interesting effect to get from a book!
I am not sure why it did not occur to me before but I suppose my own journey book, coming out of Assignment 2, is also a psychogeographic work, with its combination of map and photographs, but this time rather less opaque or confusing!
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 