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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
>mcs_lab>
Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020
The Journal
- Titel
- >mcs_lab>
- Untertitel
- Mobile Culture Studies
- Band
- 2/2020
- Herausgeber
- Karl Franzens University Graz
- Ort
- Graz
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- deutsch, englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY 4.0
- Abmessungen
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Seiten
- 270
- Kategorien
- Zeitschriften Mobile Culture Studies The Journal