An Exeter Mis-Guide

Persighetti, Simon, Hodge, Stephen, Smith, Phil and Turner, Cathy (2003) An Exeter Mis-Guide. Wrights & Sites, Exeter, UK. ISBN 0-954613007

Abstract / Summary

An Exeter Mis-Guide, a pocket-size guide-book designed collaboratively with visual artist Tony Weaver, suggests a series of walks and points of observation/contemplation within the city of Exeter. Unlike conventional guide-books, it is informed by ‘mytho-geography’: a Wrights & Sites concept and practice which seeks to value the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal as much as the 'factual' within municipal histories. In this sense, it seeks to disrupt institutionalised city tour guides and conventional practices of tourism. The book proposes other models of engagement with urban space through invitations to explore (routes, roles, realities). Here, author and walker become partners in ascribing significance to place. Many of the walks were developed in conjunction with Exeter citizens, generating a variety of perspectives on the ways we negotiate ‘our’ city. The goal was to help local people discover unknown or overlooked aspects of their city, and to celebrate and proliferate individual senses of place.

Here Wrights & Sites proposes a critical remove from performance-as-spectacle, a disposition that emerges from our investigation of the 'drift' ('dérive') as means of uncovering fresh approaches to interaction with the city. Rather than inviting audiences to a specific site to see performances, we invite people to investigate with us by walking with us, finding places along the way, following desire paths and short cuts. Our ideal is for the city as a whole to be animated as creative space and adventure playground inscribed with ephemeral monuments, footprints, spaces of refuge. We endeavour to hand over agency for infinite possible trajectories and perceptions to anyone who wishes to participate in their own creative explorations.

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