Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography. This time he takes us on a wander around Chacarita.

Rat going through a maze. (Photo: Melissa Baldwin)

One of the fathers of 20th century psychology, Edward Tolman, claimed that psychology boils down to what makes a rat turn left or right in a maze.

But what about the human turning left or right in the city? What does this infer about how we interact with cities, how we find our way, consciously or unconsciously through these labyrinthian structures?

Wayfinding is something that has captivated me since moving to Buenos Aires. Despite the fairly consistent grid system, I have lost my bearing on numerous occasions and my partner has frequent bouts of spatial disorientation.

According to current navigational theories, some of us rely on a compass bearing and navigate accordingly, relying on, for instance, ‘east and west’ to find our way around. However, others rely on cues that cannot be geographically categorized – typically, landmarks, thus finding their way by linking together identifiable objects, ‘right at the Baroque church, follow till abandoned building, and left at the red apartment.

Arguably, Buenos Aires is not a great city for navigation-by-landmarks. Straight proportional streets, discrete churches, and scant public squares add up to a fairly cue-less landscape, making it quite plausible to walk the same street several times without knowing it.

Google Map of Buenos Aires showing one orientation.

And if you’re the type who navigates through compass bearings, Buenos Aires can also prove confusing. Why are there so many maps of the city rendered according to different axes? After a simple Google image search of Buenos Aires Map I located at least 5 maps aligned to different axes (north/ west/ north by northwest etc…). I suppose this is why it’s common to avoid using bearings to discuss navigation in Buenos Aires. It’s so much easier to just say ‘down Santa Fe towards Retiro’ than to have to figure out if your mental map has a north-south axis or some mutated variation.

But this is all digression. The purpose of this walk is not to wayfind or navigate but the opposite. I am seeking to get lost, allowing my spatial senses to blur and fade out, in order to better take-in my surroundings and allow them to guide my ‘lefts and rights’.

Abe, a friend visiting from Canada, and I decided to get lost in Chacarita, a part of the city I had had no experience of. We wanted to test out the purest form of psychogeography’s derive (drift) - the completely aimless stroll. Up till now my pedestrian experiments have used constructed drifts to explore the city, such as walking Linea D of the metro, walking home from the airport and walking in the shape of a crucifix between places of worship in Palermo. This drift was intended to enable us to lose ourselves within the city.

39 bus in Chacarita (Photo: Francis Mariani)

At random we exited bus number 39, unaware of our location and began to walk. It was within a minute that we realized the challenge at hand; we stood at an intersection and couldn’t decide which way to go. Should he decide, should I decide, should we vote, how do we proceed? What does it mean to be aimless when there is another person? If we both don’t have aims how do we decide where to go?

We stumbled through this process, bit by bit. As we grew less conscious of decisions and eventually found a rhythm with both our walking and with each other, our decision-making became increasingly fluid.

The truly aimless walk was first pioneered by the French Surrealists in the early 20^th century. They took the practice of automatism, which, like automatic writing, they applied to walking and thus set locomotion free from consciousness. Through dispassionate strolling, they sought to discover places that have no reason to exist but simply are; through this process they stumbled upon odd juxtapositionings, coincidences and embarked on unplanned diversions.

As Abe and I ambled onwards, I began to spot the developing patterns in our choices of direction. At crossroads, there was a clear trend of choosing to venture into areas that were partially covered or obscured, whether by foliage, a turn in the road, or an obstructing building. Curiosity and intrigue were throttle and steering wheel. Green areas such as small parks, abandoned lots and informal parks led us onwards. Graffiti and abandoned buildings stopped us in our tracks; we investigated closer, pried through fences and pondered over building’s fates and the messages conveyed in spray paint.

The aimlessness evolved into wonder. The places we passed through were full of narratives, nearly all of which were out of our reach. At one point we came across a large concrete foundation with nothing more than a single dilapidated wall left standing. Upon closer inspection, we found a tiny laminated note on the wall, which simply stated that at a previous time this was a helado factory. Abe and I were transfixed with this idea, we tried to visualise what it would have looked like, how the neighbours interacted with it (free ice-cream being snuck out from the backdoor?) and the impact of its closure.

Some of the seemingly insignificant sections of neighbourhood that we passed, such as the abandoned lot or rusty bus shelter, may in fact retain a lot more emotional value to the block’s inhabitants than the majestic town hall down the road. But this is not recognised, accepted, or valued. We are surrounded by countless informal public monuments; each one has an impact on our lives and yet they commonly remain unrecognised and under-appreciated.

Guy Debord, one of the founders of psychogeography, believed that through the aimless stroll it was possible to identify emotional zones in the city. Psychogeography, as he saw it, was a pure science enabling identification and distillation of urban ambiances.

From our perspective, it would take a lot more walking to achieve something like this in Chacarita. In many ways, the identification and distillation that was achieved was an internal one. It required an effortful switching off of the intentional button, turning down the pragmatic dial, and listening to the dialectic between the surrounding space and ourselves.

The surrealists saw the derive as playful aquiescensce to the subconscious and the Situationists mixed submitting to the unconscious with radical politics. Abe and I mixed exploration, wonder, and hunger. It’s hard to deny the extent to which both our conscious and unconscious was guiding us towards streets where it would be possible to find a hearty lunch. It’s hard to be aimless when hungry.

Abe felt that by taking away the objective behind the endeavor, his senses were heightened and he was able to extract the extraordinary from the banal. Indeed, drifting brought us face-to-face with places and situations, which were curious, out of our control and novel. Being lost helped with establishing a sense of wonder and purposelessness.

Over a period of six hours and covering 13km, we nearly completed a full circle.

What makes a human turn left or right in the city? 99% of the time it’s to achieve an objective, go to work, meet friends, buy food etc… The other 1%, from Abe and my experience, tends to be propelled by the city itself subconsciously guiding us left and right by its spaces of imagination, curiousity, and wonder.

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography, this time deciding to use his feet, rather than a cab, to get from the city airport home.

When was the last time you walked home from the airport?

The British author Will Self walked from his home in central London to Heathrow Airport and then upon touching down in New York, walked from JFK airport to his hotel in Manhattan. Why would he do this? It was an attempt to curb a sense of spatial dislocation.

With this in mind, I decided to test the walkability of Buenos Aires’ Jorge Newbery airport, what has to be one of the more centrally located airports in the world, a mere 5 km from residential Palermo. I hardly think Ezeiza is an option, some 40km south-west of the centre.

Walking to and from airports is about a lot more than fitness or fascination, it’s about grounding oneself after the strong effects of flying.

My first arrival to BsAs from Paris CDG prompted near Olympic-level mental gymnastics. My brain was running in high gear to process the new surroundings and sensations that my body was experiencing. My sense of direction was hopelessly lost, staring at the setting sun unable to accept its westward-ness. It took weeks to regain, and in a sense, relearn, my bearings.

This time, I decided to linger in the airport a little longer than usual, taking in the hustle and bustle before exiting the dark tinted sliding doors leading to the world beyond.

Spatial dislocation consists in the feeling that you are in a place other than the one where you actually physically are. It happens when the brain and the body have incongruent sensations and are fed distinct and seemingly contradictory stimuli.

Walking out of the JN airport, I can imagine anyone might experience some sense of spatial dislocation simply as a result of the sweat filled upper body crevices of the topless fisherman and of course the charcoal-infused smell of choripan mixing with car fumes. A blistering affront to the visual-olfactory, mixing the good, the bad, the wondrous and unsettling.

In general, a number of factors can contribute to spatial dislocation or disorientation when flying; this includes more than just distance covered but includes the mode of transport, as well as design and architecture.

Airports: Departure

It is hard for most travellers to describe the architectural, or for that matter, any differences between airports, with the exception, perhaps, of better amenities, cleaner toilets, or the rarity of benches without the annoying armrests. Originally extrapolated from train stations, airports have become increasingly sterilized conduits of movement. To use Rem Koolhaas’ term, they are ‘nowhere architecture’.

The airport’s nowhere-ness disengages our sense from whence we depart. Therefore, by the time I boarded my plane in CDG on my way to Buenos Aires, I felt as if I was no longer departing from Paris, but from a uniform portal that could be anywhere in the world, be it Tokyo or Cape Town.

Flying:

In the air we naturally suffer other forms of alienation. We hover deceptively motionless, oblivious to the wonder of air travel, the beautiful landscapes below, and the mundanity in which it is served up and packaged for us. I am perplexed by the lack of travellers’ curiosity with the views outside the windows, whether it’s the expansive lingering sunsets or patchwork topography. One of my favourite views is of Greenland when flying LHR to YVR, I cannot understand why there are not collective gasps and fanfare from amongst the passengers at the immense glaciers and dark craggy mountain peaks.

Arrival:

And then arrival, a mirrored experience of departure, the same transnational architecture, a mirror image of what we had just departed 12 hours earlier—almost as if we haven’t moved at all. Nevertheless, when we exit we are confronted with a new reality—the local; and in the case of JN, greased up men with fishing poles.

As I thought about these stages of spatial dislocation, I finally exited the doors of the air-conditioned airport and strolled over to the riverside and made my way southwards towards the rounded jetty. I found it unusual to see so much life so near to the airport; there were picnics, young and old men fishing, cyclists and even some travellers playing dice-games while sitting on their suitcases-probably waiting between connections.

I continued southwards along the Costanera Norte towards the giant pier and mock-Tudor clubhouse. My curiosity growing, I began to spot the odd person on the pier. From a distance it looked abandoned. I detoured from my walk to investigate further and came across the dignified world of the Club de Pescadores, founded in 1903. Here, some thousand members can fish uninterrupted. Claiming to be a journalist, I was given ‘special permission’ to walk the pier which is strictly for members only; it is an exaggeratedly long structure considering its limited use.

I continued south by southwest, walking alongside the fence that cordons off the well-kept airport lawn. It was empty of pedestrians but I did come across a statue remembering a 1949 air disaster, where a group of humanitarians who travelled to Ecuador to assist in relief work suffered an internal fire that brought down the plane into a farmer’s field, killing five passengers. The statue is captivating, an airplane in flames and out of the flames rise two nude women—likely to be the nurses who perished.

The solitude and constant motion of walking lends itself to introspection. Travel itself, particularly long distance, has profound impacts on the brain. The neuroscientist/ journalist Jonah Lehren’s work on travel and the mind puts forward some compelling arguments for travel, even if only to brighten ones’ thinking or ability to problem-solve.

In particular, air travel provides an unusually conducive environment for existential cogitation. Ironically, for many of us the airplane is a place of personal stasis, despite travelling at 900km per hour, time seems to slow down, often inducing self-reflection.

Having walked the length of the airport and turned westwards towards the Planetarium the sidewalk abruptly ended. The only thing that separated me from the green parklands of the Palermo Bosque was a large underpass with no shoulder to walk on and fast moving traffic.

After some scouting I noticed a well-worn dirt footpath in the dry grass. I followed it for a time, letting it lead me beside empty patches of dis-used tarmac, piles of rubbish, and finally to a barbed wire fence barring me from crossing a set of train tracks.

I searched the area for possible options amidst a cacophony of dog barks and the noise of trains screaming by. Finally, I found a hole in the fence that had been pried open, I crawled through, praying none of the dogs would follow. Luckily, a similar opening had been forced on the adjacent fence. Once through, the rest was a smooth walk into the city.

Later, upon discussing my journey to a friend, I was informed that there is, indeed, a walkway that sits elevated from the traffic but below this same underpass. Intrigued, I decided to reverse the direction of my previous walk and sure enough, and plainly to see from the other side, is a well constructed walking option. In the end, there was no need for any crawling through fences or evading rabid dogs.

The Jorge Newbery airport is an example of how airports can be walked-to. For good or bad it is part of the urban space around it, linked not only by road but also by foot and bicycle.

For many cities, walking to and from the airport means walking outside of the urban-planned parameters, which is an act of subversion. In this case, it is less so.

Next time you fly to Jorge Newberry or are meeting someone at the arrivals, you may wish to consider walking there.