What is a metropollination? It could describe a place I once visited in San Fransisco called the Albany Bulb: an old garbage dump ensconced in a raw concrete shell, appropriated as a hippie commune, and finally overgrown with plants and flowers hosting only the frantic violence of a hummingbird colony. Or maybe metropollination occurs when one territory fertilizes the other, in a poetic conceptualization of that regrettable process by which large cities have all begun to resemble each other. Perhaps each city is metropollinated as people come to live there and leave tiny marks of themselves, somewhere in the stone.
another
city
for
another
life
Or it might just be a blog on psychogeography.
If you’ve never heard of that: you could say that psychogeography is the exploration of the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual effects of the built environment on the people who traverse it. In its exploration of those subtle zones of ambiance, psychogeography can take on forms ranging from site-specific theatre to occult local history, from environmental psychology to radical urbanism, from political activism to mobile art projects, and sometimes all of these things at once. You would be right to call it diffuse. But what all these approaches tend to have in common is the practice of walking and thinking about the city in creative, philosophically and artistically inspired ways.
Metropollination’s blog serves to showcase some of the writing, performance, art, and cinema that animates the walkers of the world these days. I will also document here my own projects and drifts. To request walks or written work, please refer to my contact information for more information.
See you in the streets,
Witold