Lençois.art.br

Lençóis.art.br is an artistic project of mapping and urban experimentation in Lençóis, Bahia, Brazil.

This small town is located in the countryside of Bahia. And, different from a big city, it does not have a precise map of its streets available to the public. Researching in map websites as GoogleMaps, MapQuest and Yahoo!Local, we did not find a detailed map of the town, only the region where it is located.

The performance part of the project it was done during the event Sumidialogia#3 (http://submidialogia.descentro.org). The slogan of the festival is
“the art of re:volving knowledge logos by practices and disorienting the practices by the immersion in sub-knowledge”

During 3 days (December 8-10) festival participants and habitants of the city were invited to go around the city experimenting and making notes of their paths. Those were analogical notes (drawing on the map) and digital (making photos, audio, video to the website).

Low and high tec
The project is a mixture of low and high tec. The low corresponds to the use of precarious maps photocopied in A3 paper where the “wanderer” draws the path with colored pen…
The high tec corresponds to the use of mobile phones that can record audio, video, photos and automatically publish them on the website by mms.

Kids
The surprising point is that many children showed up to collaborate with the project and the majority of them have never used a mobile before. Some after few minutes of explanation felt comfortable with the media, others had difficulty with things as the direction round button of the mobile. We could say that the project became a town mapping with the kids point of view.

Artistic motivation
The idea of creating this project is based on the Situationists practices of Détournement. It is about going around town wandering, experimenting, deconstructing, interpreting… and taking notes…

The motivation came from the interest in mixing these Situationists practices with technologies as the mobile phone and Internet in a place with very low infrastructure as Lençóis. This small town is the terrain for the project, blending the experiences of outside visitors (from large urban centers) and local people.

Lencois.art.br
Project creation and coordination: Karla Brunet

Development of the experience in Lençóis:
Karla Brunet
Maruzia Dutra
Interactive map programming:
Otacílo Neto

Collaborators:
See the people who mapped the town in this link .

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