Drift
Intervention, Amsterdam (NL) and Cosio d’Arroscia (IT)
In Drift, we revived the Situationist dérive — wandering without functional aim — and reimagined it with a ludic sense of parade and participation to explore ideas of presence and absence and rethink notions of time and place. So grab your hat, and join us on a well-dressed wander to nowhere in the particular.
While the traditional dérive is drawn by chance encounters, Drift goes further to purposefully seek engagement and collaboration: inviting all those we encounter on our path to participate, and to replicate. Transforming passers-by from spectators to creators. Experimenting with new ways to see and to be seen. Reimagining and reappropriating public space. Bringing a new presence to the streets.
Through the enactment of Drift, we explore the subjective territory of the city, absent from the map, tracing its emotional pathways and observing how different places affect us. What is there? What is not? What do we find in the places between? What reminders can we leave to inspire playful disruptions for future passers-by?
Drift also questions whether the absence of a purpose or destination engenders a more mindful presence, opening a new awareness of urban spaces that allows us to see and use them differently. Considering how the presence of our procession in spaces typically absent of playful intentions could inspire us to reclaim them as new domains for public life.
The first Drift, performed In Absentia, brought a further dimension. Led by Dierck Roosen and Vanessa Inggs from Amsterdam, connected digitally in real time with the villagers in Cosio and participating artists across 8 cities — and radio streaming to the world.
In gender-fluid dress and spectacular attire, we shared actions and observations to which others responded asynchronously, creating associations and dependencies impossible to trace and causing a progressive loss of the Aristotelian principle of cause and effect.
The ‘before’ and ‘after’ disappeared and everything happened in anti-logic timelines that would have made Marinetti euphoric.
In Presentia, we Drifted again, bringing impromptu ball games, carnivalesque happenings and actions and reflections inspired by guerrilla street signs to the midnight passagios of Cosio.
