Wish You Were Here
Intervention, Cosio d’Arroscia & Genoa (IT) & online
Inspired by the Situationist concept of psychogeography, Wish You Were Here is an invitation to reimagine the city by exploring, mapping and sharing how places make us feel.
Launched in Cosio d’Arroscia, as a site-specific work for the Trasformatorio art lab, the project invites people to give presence to places of personal meaning through a website that turns your answers into word-based postcards and pins these emotional landmarks on the map.
The power of words
In a world saturated with images, where we have too often seen every sight before we have been there, Wish You Were Here eschews all pictures in favour of the power of words. The considered construction of the card titles brings a grandiose presence to personal moments and less publically celebrated place, inspiring us to revisualise, reimagine and reinterpret the urban and rural landscape around us.
In keeping with the lexical thematic, Wish You Were Here maps each place of meaning using What3Words – a word-based geolocator that gives every 3mx3n square in the world a unique three-word address
Interventions in Cosio
During the Trasformatorio residency, Cosio’s locals were able to create and print postcards marking their places of personal memory – with the mapped locations providing a new way for visitors to discover the borgo.
Two metal signs were also put up in the village, giving permanence to the Drift collaboration between the artists and the villagers, and monumentalising the archway under which the lab’s Conference of Birds live streams were broadcast. The sites and stories of all the artworks, performances and interventions created by the Trasformatorio artists were also added to the map
Postcard Lab in Genoa
For the Trasformatorio open day at Al’Ortiche, a special postcard shop was set up for locals to create and print their own Genoa edition postcards commemorating their place of memory - designed with a nautically inspired font on a marble background.