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urbanflows: immersed in worlds

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'urbanflows: immersed in worlds' is a site-specific project led by Carolyn Deby, artist & director of the London based immersive performance company sirenscrossing.

Carolyn Deby has been commissioned to provide a draft proposal to lead a site-specific project entitled ‘urbanflows: immersed in worlds’. Sirenscrossing will undertake a series of immersive bodily experiences in various sites in the city of Coventry. These will be devised partly in consultation with local residents who will be invited to share with the company their own everyday embodied understanding of place.

The nature of these inner/outer experiences will be mind-mapped using reflective writing, photography and drawing, and through the physicality of the investigators.

The research will consider the body as process, as immersed in situations where acts of becoming, reflection, memory and habit move between the material and immaterial, the human and non-human, the incidental and the significant.

Several theoretical approaches are relevant to this practical research, including affect theory, phenomenology and psychogeography, as are the notions of urban metabolism and the city as reconstituted nature. ‘urbanflows: immersed in worlds’ will seek to capture, articulate, and document the complex networked experience of individuals navigating, via their lived experience, in relation to time and site. The m-p will seek to define the complexity of the collective production of urban space, recognizing, in Borden’s words, that ‘[s]ocial relations in the city are dynamic ones, and although we argue for the importance of space, time is increasingly entering into discussions of the social production of spaces –personal and irregular times: bodily rhythms, unconscious memories, the flux of complexity and chaos’ (The Unknown City, 2001: 8).