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Mobile Culture Studies The Journal
>mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020
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178 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page of their dog, each flatmate wanders off to create (voluntary or involuntary) psychogeogra- phies of their new home. By getting to know the territory, each walker encounters Hebden Bridge individually, considering the aesthetic, technical, and/or geological characteristics of the places visited. The scenes sketched within the zine seem at first glance rather mundane and unaesthetic, places which may easily be overlooked, yet each exhibits one unusual characteristic that seems to reveal itself only to frequent dog walkers and other attentive psychogeographers, highlighted in a bright pink colour. These highlighted areas or spots have become known through their impact on Charleston and her flatmates, with some revealing topographical con- ditions (‘The Footpath that might actually just be someone’s garden’, ‘Where we all fell over’, ‘The bit that is Too Wet’), and others characterized by an abandoned, uncanny or supernatural scenery (‘The bit that is definitely haunted’, ‘The house with the mysterious writing’, ‘Fairy- holes’ (original emphasis)). Crucially, each landmark is remembered for how it was specifically perceived by the walkers, and how it impacted the emotional or behavioural state of the indi- vidual, as a result of the individual’s unique characteristics. These descriptions and depictions exhibit how individuals’ actions and stories can influence space and vice versa, attesting to the fundamental cognitive effect of psychogeographical walking. The narrativization of these experiences into a collective language, which is at the heart of the aforementioned meaning-making processes, is depicted within the zine through the use of word and image. Rather than presenting psychogeography as a solitary affair, Personal Geogra- phy depicts the social and communal mechanisms involved in people’s developing relationship to spaces. Confronted with unknown surroundings, the flatmates first individually explore Hebden Bridge before negotiating and re-negotiating the spatial oddities of the town in an effort to gain a better understanding of themselves, their group, and their relation to the new home. These exchanges, during which a part of meaning is created socially, take place within the walkers’ house, who are thus removed from the very spaces they are talking about. Instead of actually showing these localities to one another, they use language to gradually approximate and finally agree upon a set of verbal codes representative of the visual appearances encountered during their rambles. Charleston acknowledges that these codes make sense only within her particular group, explaining that they turned out to ‘be utterly unfathomable to anyone else we would mention them to’ (Charleston 2019: 1). It is only when word and image come together, as within the zine, that the influence of the specific places can be decoded by an outsider. The relationship between word and image is established through their arrangement on the pages of the zine, creating an intermedial phenomenon that ‘takes place between media’ (Rajewsky 2005: 46). However, this is not merely to reiterate Saussure’s principle of semiotic arbitrariness between signifier and signified, but rather to illustrate the absence of any generalizing, objective experience — even if more than one person is involved in the creation of meaning. The visual-verbal signs within the zine thus make evident that personal geographies are always knowledges produced through individual and collective experiences and imaginings of spaces. Charleston concedes that her guide is ‘an attempted document’, signalling the limited validity of the signs within this spatial dictionary (Charleston 2019: 1). This ambivalence corre- sponds with the overarching aim of zines as a medium, which by their nature blur boundaries between the objective and the subjective, ‘the specific and the generalizable […] the local and the global, the personal and the political’ (Piepmeier 2009: 10). The landmarks presented in
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>mcs_lab> Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020
The Journal
Title
>mcs_lab>
Subtitle
Mobile Culture Studies
Volume
2/2020
Editor
Karl Franzens University Graz
Location
Graz
Date
2020
Language
German, English
License
CC BY 4.0
Size
21.0 x 29.7 cm
Pages
270
Categories
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