Image Credit: Tracing Mobility

We are very pleased to be presenting a talk about our project Walking Smiles as part of the Tracing Mobility Open Platform on Saturday 26th November at the HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT in Berlin.

Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space, is the final event that completes the Tracing Mobility project; a project which spanned two years and four European countries. The overall project included residencies, workshops, exhibitions, symposiums, and other satellite events that took place along the Croatian coast (north of Split); in Nottingham, UK; Warsaw, Poland; and Berlin, Germany. More information at www.tracingmobility.org

The Open Platform events is intended to break down the limits and barriers caused by conventional exhibition formats, and challenge the discursive spaces used for art. Tracing Mobility want to open up the HKW, an established international arts venue, to the fringes of production, exploring movement, communication and aesthetics in culture, becoming that space that Boris Groys claims to be the distinct space of contemporary art, “in which multitudes can view themselves” and which “assists [us] in reflecting upon [our] own condition”. More info on the Open Platform here.

This is an ‘incomplete textual sample’ made in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham, that comes out of Walking (S)miles by Present Attempt. Rachel was commissioned by Hazard Festival and Critical Writing Collective to respond to some of the work in Hazard 2010 (Manchester’s micro-festival of incidental intervention and sited performance). The text emerged from transcripts of audio recordings that Rachel made as she wandered through Manchester on Saturday afternoon and too part in Walking Smiles – an event that builds a unique ‘map’ of a city as people wander through it, collecting smiles from passers by. Below is the text.

Optional Instructions for Self-Assembly

1. Print the document

2. Cut each of the pages down the centre with the exception of the last page

3. Affix the cut pages to the last page

4. (W)read the document

Following an intense period of collecting people’s smiles in London at Hide and Seek and last weekend in Manchester at Hazard Festival, we are in the process of compiling all of our documentation which we will be adding to this site soon. We will also be working on developing this project over the rest of the summer.

We will be up in Manchester on 17th July 2010 running Walking Smiles at Hazard – a biennial festival of intervention and sited performance offering strange occurrences in unexpected places.

Stationed in the Manchester Arndale Centre – we will send out a ‘army’ of smilers who have one hour to go out into the city to see if they can raise the temperature by trying to solicit smiles from strangers. These smiles then get mapped in real time, creating a handmade visualization of the intervention.

Walking Smiles is part of the Larkin’ About programme – a mircofestival within a festival!

We are really excited to be running Walking Smiles as part of the Hide and Seek Weekender and LIFT Festival 2010. This time the event will run for just over 48 hours continuously, from Friday 9th July until Sunday 11th July and takes place in the foyer the National Theatre.

You can play Walking Smiles from wherever you are.

Have a look at the instructions on our post card above and attempt to collect as many smiles as you can from strangers.

Each time you collect a smile text or tweet it in – as you do we will map them on our handmade map which is based at the National Theatre, London.

Hope that you can join us to cheer up the city/countryside!