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.

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography, by walking the entire length of Subte line D.

“We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost,” wrote Ivan Chtcheglov, one of the fathers of psychogeography, in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’. He claims that we have lost a sense of imagining the city, no longer does it contain the phantasmagoric.

Congreso de Tucumán on line D (Photo: Diego Herrera)

How would you describe your routine movements in Buenos Aires? Do they fill you with surprise, awe, and inspiration—or quite the opposite?

Street corners, gutters, pavement, bends, movement, art, hidden nooks, and exposed cracks—what do we notice, what catches our eye and captures our interest? Is it true, that amidst so much distraction we have lost our sense of discovery within the city?

A regular part of my urban existence is the subte, I ride it frequently yet often have no idea of the neighbourhoods that I travel under. I feel dislocated when I arrive at my destination. Whole parts of the city remain glaringly blank in my mental map, void of exploration.

With this in mind I set off on a voyage of discovery, to walk the city’s longest metro line, Línea D (the Green line that was, strangely enough, formerly the red line pre-90s). I did this both to discover what sits and fits between and to try my hand at discovering the city anew.

In the heat of the middle of the day, I rode the metro to Congreso de Tucumán subte station from where I began the long walk to Catedral station. Unfortunately I had no suitable walking shoes and my satchel had recently disintegrated, which meant having to walk in my flip-flops and with my girlfriend’s embroidered shoulder-bag (not ideal).

The crowd walks along the subte hallways (photo: Galio)

The metro/subway/subte or however you want to call the underground rapid transit system is an ingenious method of transport. No traffic, simple to navigate, reliable, and in the winter doesn’t require waiting in the cold.

However, these systems severely alter the way in which cities are understood and lived, making it possible to experience certain parts of the city without needing to cogently connect them together, giving the illusion that neighbourhoods float independently from one another. For instance, it’s possible to live in Belgrano and work in Microcentro without having to ever see what lies in between. It’s a way of folding up space; our brains create new maps that match our experience of these two places - separate yet connected.

Buenos Aires’ subte, opened in 1913, was the first in South America or south of the equator, for that matter. It boasts six lines that carry 1.7 million passengers a day, a number that looks staggeringly high but falls behind daily ridership numbers of considerably smaller cities like Prague and Vienna and ranked globally at only 28th.

The 77 subte stations are nothing out of the ordinary. They don’t offer elaborate showcases of Soviet pomp like Moscow’s or modernist masterpieces like Montreal’s. But, there is a certain charm to Buenos Aires’ subte, particularly some of the bizarre tile murals (is that a topless mermaid or a fish with breasts at Angel Gallardo?) and Línea A’s rolling stock classical carriages and the whole system’s Anglo-legacy with the direction that the carriages travel, which follow the British logic of driving on the left hand side.

Similar to air travel, the metro can induce forms of spatial dislocation. As I emerged from Congreso de Tucumán, I found myself gaping at the street names and seeking familiar landmarks to orient myself.

The "murales" on line D (photo: Thomas Hobbs)

The initial walk from Tucumán station was ordinary. Av. Cabildo to Av. Santa Fe was sun-baked, crowded and monotonous. I collected a total of nine flyers, was dripped on twice by an unknown liquid (hopefully water), and had a woman accidently try to hold my hand, mistaking me for her husband. I wasn’t able to reflect on my surroundings or delve into the unnoticed world around me; sidewalk inertia was pushing me forward. I was surprised at how quickly I passed subte station after subte station.

I surveyed the jagged disparate rooflines, they looked like aborted games of Tetris - clumsy blocks thrown together without much logic and left to find their own congruence. Or, like awkward family members posing for a photo.

I passed as travellers entered and exited the stations. Most of those exiting seemed to know where they were going, yet others clearly did not, dawdling on the sidewalk, obstructing passers-by, until they got their bearings.

Crowds increased as I passed the Palermo subte next to the Pacifico train bridge - named after the company that planned, and failed, to build a track from there to Chile. Walking towards Scalabrini Ortiz became tedious, stop-go walking, avoiding crowds, and at several points required perilously walking on the road itself in order to keep a decent pace.

Nonetheless, connecting the subte stations felt rather liberating. The big green signs are like navigational beacons. I was putting together the pieces of an urban puzzle.

It struck me how we live in a giant metropolis heaving with life and yet often fail to appreciate the individuality of its components. Its immensity, throbbing energy and in-built expectations make it onerous to slow down and reflect, to seek out new passages, and re-examine our connection with the city.

After Subte Puerreydón (and yes, it’s ridiculous that there are two stations named this, which sit 1.2km apart) the linear route began to zig-zag towards Facultad de Medicina as I tried to stay as true to the diagonal route of the subte below.

I found my way but I did not find intrigue, just a sense of emptiness. The streets here seemed void of human relations outside of commercial transactions. It was mid-day and brutally hot.

Penultimate station on line D (photo: Kara Brugman)

My interest veered to the sound of birds, I watched as they played on ledges, infinitely more free than the cheerless people with whom I was sharing a sidewalk - sweating in their suits, rushing. I hated the heat, I needed to find a shaded refuge. I finally slumped down against a shaded wall in an unnamed alley, where I waited and watched.

Finally coming across another metro line, Línea C, after the 9 de Julio station was a magnificent moment. I am sure something quite akin to discovering the confluence of the Nile. And shortly after this excitement, my ambulation ended as I made my way down the steps of Catedral station, hot and tired.

While I walked I wondered whether it was to be a fruitless endeavor. I wasn’t convinced that I was gaining a familiarity with Línea D, connecting some of the gaps in my mental map of the city nor discovering parts of the city anew. It was only afterwards, when riding on the subte from Catedral, that I realised this new knowledge invoked a completely different metro ride experience; I felt intimately aware of what was passing above me and how the stations were connected, what lay between, and the feeling derived from walking that space.

Robert Park, an urban sociologist from the late 19th century claimed that the city is built in man’s image - in his desires and wants. The city I witnessed, the city that lies above Línea D struck me as utilitarian; movement from point-of-habitation to point-of-work to point-of-consumption and repeat - a city that’s lost its imagination as observed by Ivan Chtcheglov. In this regard, I would look to Marx and side with the situationists and argue that the city that lies above Linea D is built in the image of the bourgeoisie - their desires and wants.

But did I miss something, is there something more, something playful, dangerous, and exciting at the prospect of the city. Do I have to look deeper, explore more widely or just avoid walking in the mid-day heat?

Street movement toward the iconic Obelisco (Photo: Jose Tellez)

In August 2011 I was sitting on a beach near Rome surrounded by a disproportionate amount of tanned men in white speedos. My girlfriend looked up from her book and asked with a rather puzzled look on her face, “Do you know what psychogeography is?”

I didn’t.

But with a name like that, I was definitely intrigued.

Psycho + geography, whatever could that mean?

That night I did some internet research on the subject and came across a reference of a game of poker that was played across several cities in the UK using cards that one found on the street. I couldn’t get my head around how it worked; elusively, further information wasn’t to be found.

Next I came across a story of someone using a map of London to navigate through Paris. Again, totally dumbfounded.

And this is how it began, what has become an eight-month journey, plagued by confusion, distracted by a dozen ulterior theories each with an equal amount of rabbit holes, punctuated at times by inspiration, and resulting in a lot of gasps, groans, wringing of hands, and confused mutterings. One thing is certain; I will never see cities in the same light again.

Having moved to Buenos Aires, and with a bit of extra time on my hands, I decided to at least try-out the methods of psychogeography. And so I began to walk, differently.

Walking is a practical part of our day, most of us don’t don spandex and walk around the city for a spot of people watching or urban absorption—we walk because we need to get somewhere. Much was the same in Paris a hundred years ago, around the time when social and cultural movements began to arise from, or included, the locomotion of walking—or what I prefer to call the ambulatory arts.

Mapping and drifting (Photo: David Boardman)

Walking all of a sudden became part of the cultural landscape; for example, the advent of Flanerie, an analytical tool-cum-lifestyle, requiring one part aimlessness and one part passionate observer. Baudelaire epitomised the flaneur; he felt that private life is dull and void of the orgiastic, whereas one’s true dwelling is “within the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.” The flaneur was driven in the search for freedom, sociality, and meaning.

This act involved walking and watching, he referred to himself as a ‘sidewalk botanist’ delighting in the city’s immense picture gallery.

Surely, Baudelaire would be quite enthralled by Buenos Aires; streets are full of people, movement, and life. In addition, many streets have become genuine picture galleries of spraypaint on concrete, merging the literal and metaphorical. However, I won’t delve into the literal botany of sidewalks here - it’s purely scatological.

In the years that followed, radical groups of students and intellectuals sought ways to experience the city anew. Dadaists organized random expeditions throughout the city and surrealists found the use of drugs as a helpful tool to reach unrealised and untapped dimensions of the subconscious within urban spaces.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that many of the disparate ideas of walking began to form categories, organised into societies, and then atomised into yet further groups, resulting in a frustratingly wide variety of philosophical units squabbling over ideological differences—the two biggest and most influential to emerge were the Lettrists and its off-shoot, the Situationist International (SI). Psychogeography was born out of the former but heavily influenced by the latter.

Psychogeography focused on the effects of geography (consciously organized or not) on human emotions and behavior. It’s a bric-a-brac collection of ideas and philosophies of the city, combining surrealist, Dadaist, and Lettrist desires to bring art into everyday life with the unintentionality and ambulatory locomotion of the flaneur.

Warning: many of the doctrinal corridors of ambulatory ideology are labyrinthian, intentionally obscure and wildly interpretive. I cannot claim to be an authority on this, despite my research and studies, I would likely be one of the first to make the excommunication lists for ideological heresy, as was so frequently customary with these groups. (If any readers are well steeped in this discourse, please contact me and I will swap drinks for insight)

Street art in San Telmo (Photo: Christine Candice)

A key principle of psychogeography is its rejection of the functional Euclidian values in architecture (adherence to strict geometric formulas) and the rejection of distinctions between art and its surroundings. What does this really mean? It implies that it’s impossible to know where art ends and function begins, therefore rendering the city a giant playground for artistic and self discovery, a fundamental place for the ludic (playful) education where everything is worth delving into and exploring. Think bouncy castle-meets-Louvre-meets-Almagro.

Now comes the fun part: the derive (drift). The derive is a type of movement, most commonly, but not exclusively, walking, that is premised on dropping one’s usual motives for movement and action, one’s relations, work and leisure activities letting oneself be drawn by the surroundings and the encounters found therein. It’s a contradiction of letting-go of ones intentionality with an active participation within physical spaces.

The derive helps one move beyond the everyday recognition of space, which has become anaesthetized, literally meaning without the aesthetic - the appreciation of beauty, art, and taste.

Through some blasphemous over-simplification and blatant conflation, the derives can be broken down into two forms:

1) the natural drift, which entails surrendering to the dictates of the unconscious mind or irrational forces within the city, in other words an utterly aimless and directionless stroll.

2) the constructed drift, which seeks to impose an artificial means of dictating an experience to acquire new discoveries, whether that’s using walkie-talkies to discuss with someone walking in another city of everything you’re seeing and experiencing or just flipping a coin to determine your direction at crossroads.

Both approaches seek to access a more authentic experience of everyday life and to reconnect with the city.

It’s important to point out that psychogeography wasn’t about a pleasant stroll; it was imbued with revolutionary tendencies. These groups saw themselves as the radical avant-garde and rooted much of their theory in forms of Marxism.

It’s taking all of my will power to restrain myself from writing about the madness and genius of their exploits, whether it’s their public pranks, eccentric personalities, or role in the Paris ‘68 student rebellions. However, I will be sure to include some of this eclectic vibrancy in coming articles.

Photo: Ramiro Moyano

Psychogeography encapsulates a broad movement in history, with various radical and obscure influences. It has been called many things, from punk-walking to magical Marxism. No one seems to be quite sure how serious to take this movement, especially as its made something of a resurgence in recent years through British authors like Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Inherent in the movement is a sense of playfulness, overcoming boredom and banality, and various elements of subversion (sometimes subverting itself). It is, however, clear on one accord, that it unites theory and practice; psychogeography cannot be studied, it can only be done.

Is it an absurdist political critique, does it fight the abstraction within the abstract, or is it creative recreation for the self-hating bourgeois? I still don’t know.

Over the coming months I will be experimenting with the theories and practices of psychogeography by taking fortnightly walks in the spirit of the derive—both the natural and the constructed.

Catch a glimpse of Buenos Aires through the lens of psychogeography, as I embark on exploring this peculiar tradition of walking.

Everyday you can enjoy two hours of smiley Gastón Cernadas’s company for nothing. The 27-year-old porteño will take you for a stroll around the centre of Buenos Aires loading you with interesting facts, historical trivia, and amusing anecdotes.

Gastón travelled in Europe for several months earlier this year. He came back inspired by the concept of free tours and decided to offer the same service in Buenos Aires. “I did the free tours in Madrid, Paris and Berlin - I thought it was a great idea and so brought it back to BA with me!”

As a tourist trap city Buenos Aires is renowned for charging special foreigner prices to tourists. However, Gastón, and his business partner and sister, Sol, are clearly not running a dollar grabbing venture. But how do they pay the bills? Gastón explains: “We operate on a tips-only basis. This hopefully means the quality of the tours remains high. We want you to enjoy the tour as much as possible and tip generously!”

The tour aims to be very objective regarding historical events and sheds light on many porteño myths. I learnt 9 de Julio is actually not the world’s widest avenue nor Rivadavia the longest. I was also pleased to hear that torre de los ingleses is in fact not a very bad replica of Big Ben, but just a present from the British.

Apart from shattering a few porteño illusions, the tour provides historical information about Argentine exiled heroes and idolised tyrants, iconic buildings and monuments, and insight into modern society.

The city tour runs daily at 11am and focuses on the areas around Congreso and Plaza de Mayo.

The aristocratic tour, daily at 5pm, takes you around the districts of Retiro and Recoleta and gives a picture of the lives of 19th century wealthy residents of Buenos Aires. It’s packed full of anecdotes about aristocratic figures who modelled their Buenos Aires’ palaces on fine Parisian mansions as well as those who wanted the real thing so uped a left to Paris leaving their fine Buenos Aires dwellings abandoned.

Why is the Casa Rosada pink? Why does the Argentine flag, inaugurated the year of independence, use the Bourbon colours? Why is the monument Pirámide positioned 1 metre to the left of centre in Plaza de Mayo? Why are all the buildings in Avenida del Presidente Roca exactly 33 metres tall?

You know where you can find the answers to all these burning questions!

More information at www.bafreetour.com