:: tour/ detour ::

exploration citywide :: ongoing

documentation CUBE2 :: 5.27 - 6.4

website n/a

tour/detour will consist of a series of six walking/exploration trails through different parts of Providence. Based on the model of park and forest hiking trails, these urban trails will encourage participants to move through unfamiliar and neglected parts of the city, and explore more familiar parts of the city in a new, more mindful way. It will be slightly more structed version of a derive, a psychogeographical wandering.

Each trail will begin and end at a specific location and will be marked with "blazes" (trail markers) designed for an urban environment. Participants will be given a map key they can pick up at both of the Provflux hubs. The key will describe each trail by its start and destination, estimated time of completion, and level of difficulty. But most importantly, the key will not disclose the specific path of any of the routes. Participants will have to pay close attention and follow the blazes to get from start to finish.

We believe the spaces and neighborhoods left over from the industrial era have been baptized with neglect. Artists and others who are more willing to exist in the margins have claimed them, after owners have written them off as "unprofitable." We know those spaces as playground and home, and revel in the ruins. We love the old crumbling parts, the spaces now endangered by gentrification thinly veiled as "new urbanism." Five years from now, what will be left of the city we know? Ten?

Ours is a different way of reclaiming space. We know that the city belongs to its inhabitants, and that as much as we make the city, the city makes us.

We know that decay is also fertilizer.

about the artists

Ruination is a Providence, RI-based collective of political artists dedicated to making work for/or/by and about cities, and the complex ways cities are changing. Its members are amateur radical geographers, sound + visual artists, urban theory heads, and general n'er do wells.