Friction Atlas
Redefining public space as the visible surface of a playing field
— Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame, designers and researchers, Italy
The scripts of law are drafted into our public bodies. They imprint upon flesh a quiet definition of movements and gestures, unconscious reactions, behaviours and anticipations. Law is often out of sight, although always implicitly present, throughout our urban experience. Regulations make use of symbols, conventions, abstractions, and have the power of persuading human beings to act. They are sets of instructions that incorporate power—an invisible structural force that plays through into everyday life. In the city, the laws regulating the uses of space emerge through a synchronised routine of elaborate moves on public surfaces: a choreography.
It is not uncommon in the media, for example, to spot demonstrators keeping their march to one line, standing on the sidewalk, in Washington, D.C. Any reading or picnic gathering over twenty persons in one of New York City’s parks requires a special event permit. In Sweden, you might need to apply for a permit to dance in public. In Cairo, one is allowed to spontaneously discuss public matters only if there are fewer than ten people. Some regulations surely sound sensible, some bizarre; many are contested and strongly conflictual.
What happens when the laws become a game? What happens when we redefine the rules as the visible surface of a playing field, blurring the distinction between unthinking movement and a conscious submission as participants?
We logged into a Friction Atlas some of the rules and constraints that regulate the circulation of citizens within urban space; we translated them into full-scale diagrams, drawn onto the pavements of Ljubljana, Athens and Melbourne; we then organised and followed a series of crossings of the city, we invited the public to perform staged choreographies, enacting and embodying selected rules on the uses of public spaces, while discussing issues of public space, law and legibility.
Friction Atlas focused on the disciplinary aspects of the control of movement, giving visible shape to its traces and paths. It addresses openness (and lack thereof) of public space in relation to the legal codification of its uses, in particular for public assembly. Turning public space into a visible playing field, it represents openness by subverting the often opaque legal code and bringing its bare rules into the foreground, open for scrutiny and debate.
The project plays on a double entendre of the notion of “legibility”. On one hand, it shows how the public and the publics, the behaviours of citizens—users, customers, consumers—are represented and made legible by any government through simplified relations, which in turn inform what people can do. On the other hand, it reshapes laws into fully visible agents through graphical devices and performative practices, providing possible models for opening up to new forms of civic and aesthetic engagement with hidden or abstract layers of the city. Arranged situations and experiences within the urban environment activate an awareness that can be operationalized, to enable reprogramming, hacking, and deconstructing.
The video (embedded above) documents some of those who tried to cross the urban space of Melbourne, giving shape to a number of performative choreographies, ready-made, found objects in the legal codes of our cities.
Friction Atlas is a project by Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame (La Jetée) initiated at BIO 50, the 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana (2014) and further developed for Adhocracy Athens (2015) and Performing Mobilities in Melbourne (2015).
About the authors
Paolo Patelli is a designer and researcher. He earned a PhD in Architectural and Urban Design from the Politecnico di Milano. His current interests include practices of design in relation to “legibility” in promoting assemblages and networked publics across the geography and the media of the contemporary city.
Giuditta Vendrame is a designer and researcher currently based in the Netherlands. She graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven, where she explored the relationships between individuals, citizenship and territory, and their related (in)visible borders.
References
Patelli, Paolo and Giuditta Vendrame. “Choreographies of Everyday Friction.” Continent. Issue 4.3/2015: 46–51. Available at: http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/207
Debatty, Régine. Curatorial Selection: A Decade that Goes from Locative Media to Resistance to the Privatization of the Public Realm. A Fragmentary and Subjective Walk into the Crossover Between Play, Technology and Urban Space. Arte y Políticas de Identidad Vol. 12 (2015) La ciudad como interfaz: arte, juego y tecnología digital en el espacio público.
