Wrights & Sites is a group of four artist-researchers committed to producing experimental, site-specific work across a range of media. Formalised in 1997 and based in Exeter (UK), the four core members are Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith & Cathy Turner.

Collectively, we aim to explore and celebrate space and place through site-specific performance, Mis-Guided Tours & published Mis-Guides, 'drifts', mythogeographic mapping and public presentations & articles.

The city of Exeter (UK) has acted as a laboratory for Wrights & Sites since the company's formation, but in the last few years we have begun to explore the ways in which our work can be transferred to other environments, from larger cities to rural islands.

 

Site-Specific Mis-Guides

2003 saw the release of An Exeter Mis-Guide. Since then we have been asked to give workshops and to create, or help create other Mis-Guides (such as A Courtauld Mis-Guide, made for The East Wing Collection, Courtauld Institute of Art, London). One walk from An Exeter Mis-Guide was included in the Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel.

 

Site-Generic Mis-Guide

We noticed that many people who don't actually live in Exeter seemed to find things in An Exeter Mis-Guide which they can transfer to other places. After receiving responses from people in Toronto, Sydney, New York, Washington DC, Bangalore and beyond, we began to wonder whether we might make a 'Mis-Guide' that deliberately set out to provide transferable ideas. We started by calling it a 'generic' guide - unusually for us, since we have always been interested in specific localities, rather than 'types' of place. We would not usually consider a work to be 'site-specific' if it could be transferred from its original location. But in this case, the work is completed by the walker and becomes specific to its location only in the walking (we intend 'walk' to be interpreted as journey, hop, skip, jump, negotiate on wheels etc. as appropriate to circumstances and mood).

We realised that the same set of instructions or stimuli become radically different as they are transferred between places and we became very interested in that difference and how we perceive it. We called this project A Mis-Guide to Anywhere and we were pushing the idea of 'anywhere': can we be mis-guided 'anywhere' and on any scale?

After two years of research and walking experiments in Manchester, the Channel Islands, Copenhagen, Zürich, Paris, New York, Shanghai, rural Zambia, etc, A Mis-Guide to Anywhere was launched at the ICA, London, in April 2006, accompanied by 4 Mis-Guided Tours.

Once again, we worked with our artist colleague, Tony Weaver, on the design of the book. The project was financially supported by Arts Council England (Lottery Funded) and the Centre for Creative Enterprise & Participation.

 

Possible Cities

Possible Cities is a series of provocations, aimed at rethinking/replanning the 21st Century City through performance-related walking practices, papers and presentations. Elements include:

  • a day-long, pre-conference workshop for international walking artists, a plenary paper and a mis-guided performance-walk for Everyday Walking Culture (the sixth international conference on walking in the 21st century, Zürich, September 2005)
  • A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: dealing with the city in Performance Research (Issue 11.2, 'Indexes', June 2006)
  • Exeter Everyday - a week of day-long festivals exploring the ways in which people use the city, travel across it, mark it, mend it, walk over it, write on it, work on and in and under it - funded by Exeter Arts Council (Exeter, July 2006)
  • Simultaneous Drift (4 walks, 4 routes, 4 screens) - a co-authored, performance-lecture, accompanied by split-screen video documentation of a simultaneous drift, commissioned by Situations (Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, October 2006)
  • three performed, guided walks exploring filmic representations of Soho for Living Streets, the Pedestrians Association (London, November 2006)
  • Stadtverführungen in Wien - working in partnership with Tanzquartier Wien and the Vienna Festival, Wrights & Sites act as concept creators, curators and artistic coaches for a three-week season of work based on the company's principals of mis-guidance and mythogeography - based in the heart of the Museums Quarter of the city (October 2006-June 2007)

 

Possible Forests

Possible Forests is a body of practice-as-research aimed at transferring Wrights & Sites' practices of urban exploration, surrealistic derambulation, mis-guidance and spatial planning from the city to the trees.

Working in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World in Haldon Forest Park (which the Forestry Commission are in the process of replanning), the project comprised a number of interlinked elements.

Click here for more details.

  

© Wrights & Sites, 2008