From Bryony McIntyre:
SHADOWED SPACES
Sean Meehan, Tamio Shiraishi, Ikuro Takahashi, Denis Wood
6th-15th July, FREE
ABERDEEN, DUNDEE, EASTERHOUSE, NEWCASTLE, CUMBERNAULD, EDINBURGH
There are places in the towns and cities where you live that exist not by planned design, but by circumstance. Their elusive ambience attracts those with nowhere else to go, and those who wish to go elsewhere… overlooked bypassed unwatched detached unconsidered shadowed.
In the mid ’70s… Denis Wood (at the time a recently graduated geographer, or more particularly psychogeographer) wrote an impassioned essay, titled ‘Shadowed Spaces’. It was an ardent and poetic defense of our need to feel a sense of privacy in public, and the subsequent need for places where one might take refuge, or engage in transgressions which we may be unwilling to share with a wider public, but which are important to our lives and development, to our needs and desires.
The essay Shadowed Spaces has never been published, but exists in a sort of parallel way to the kinds of spaces it discusses, handed around and sought out by people who maybe need to find it. And it’s served as a loose inspiration to a clutch of artists and musicians who are also drawn to these kinds of spaces, and to a desire to perform there, in a kind of artistic parallel to that need for privacy in public: ‘cause isn’t a musical performance just that, a private thing done publicly?
Our tour brings together 3 incredible experimental musicians from the USA and Japan, as well as Denis Wood, and takes them to some of our favourite, secret spaces, where collectively perhaps we can share in something hidden from the eyes of those keepers of the norm.
More info about the artists and what to expect at www.arika.org.uk