Concrete City / Human Heart

Concrete City / Human Heart is a performance dérive for a group of strangers. This project asks how we move through and are moved by our cities, returning a sense of emotion to the motion of people and place. A happening between the roof of a car park, hidden alleyways and fallen Scottish department store Watt Brothers, this work is a playful attempt at transcending the rules of moving through cities. In turn, the inter-generational audience-performers gain a heightened understanding of space, and see something new in familiar places.

 An accompanying essay is available on request. Read abstract here:

The contemporary city is a complicated mesh of human movement and activity, an agglomeration of urban rhythms. But under late-stage capitalism, the city is increasingly ‘controlled and shaped by dominant power relations’ (Stavrides, 2016:13), relegating its citizenry replaceable and forgettable, as consumers and commuters. Reflecting on a practice-as-research performance walk I curated for a small group of strangers in Glasgow, I will argue that a social practice informed by Jane Bennett’s ideas around vibrant matter and Guy Debord’s dérive practices can temporarily alter our perceptions of the metropolis. In this way, I will use the materiality of concrete as a means to explore how all bodies are ‘affective’ (Bennett, 2010:xii), the ways worlds are built, and how performance, play and dance can facilitate greater interconectedness among people in their cities.