Walking is essential to understand the city because stories begin from ground up. Through walking, you can align your mind and body within the world around you.
The project comes out of trying to navigate London and my frustration with how maps fail to represent the ever-changing world around us. Relying on maps alone gets us nowhere but further alienates us from our environment. I chose to focus on Temple Church, due to its location, hidden behind layers of other buildings. The road to the church is a set of codes that need to be deciphered by observing the world, not through maps on smartphones. My response to this site was to create a different kind of map using paper-folding techniques and psychogeography as my primary methodologies. As we unwrap each layer, we reveal not only directions to the church but also its history. This folded map describes the condition around us, encouraging its user/reader to look up and observe the world. By slowly revealing its location, this project emphasises the importance of the journey to the church, not just its position as final destination.
Individual maps are scattered at locations across London: at Holborn Station, Farringdon Station, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Tate Modern, Southbank Centre, and Convent Garden Market. Locarions were selected by drawing straights line from the Temple Church’s fourteen pillars outwards. Introduced as an ‘initiation act’ to unravel a secret location, each map was hidden from plain sight. Whoever comes across a map, becomes the ‘chosen one’, who can embark on a mysterious quest to find Temple Church.
Elita Nuraeny is a graduate of the MA Architectural History of Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL,. Her first encounter with site-writing was in 2017, when she took the ‘Theorising Practices/Practicing Theory: Art, Architecture and Urbanism’ module led by Professor Jane Rendell. Currently, Elita works as a junior lecturer in Interior Architecture Programme at the Universitas Indonesia. Her current position has involved her in various research and community engagement projects in Indonesia. Her research interests focus on architectural history and theories of interiority to further explore the urban fabric of everyday life.
What to tell of the site and how to narrate this are the biggest challenges in site-writing. Each step, word, and even process in this project must be related to the site, a delicate and careful approach that binds the whole idea of site-writing. For me, site-writing provides an opportunity for grasping spatial experience: producing an artwork that can embody the true meaning of interiority.
Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Streets and Other Writings. London: Verso, 1992.
Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1998.
Stilgoe, John R. Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. New York: Walker Publishing Company Inc., 1998.
