These were both brand new terms to me. I had not come across the Situationist movement before and found it so inspiring and motivating. It encouraged me to take stock of the work I produce and realise how I need to take advantage of the world I live in right now and use this for inspiration. It’s all about taking what you see and where you are and turning it on it’s head. Looking beneath the picture perfect surface, rubbing away that beautiful image to find what’s really there.
We now have Google Maps right there on our phones – it’s no longer acceptable to get lost if you have a phone. Sometimes there’s just a real beauty in turning off your phone, getting lost and exploring a whole new area with no definitive destination.
This idea of drifting around a city, with nowhere to aim for, crosscontaminated with the Siutationist movement made me realise perhaps the maps we look at every day or use to find our way around a new area need to be modernised.
There’s a current crisis over the whole of the UK that our high streets are declining, more now than ever. York is a struggling city, 43 empty shops within the city centre, declining footfall and an increasing homeless population.
BUT, tourists don’t see this – the council focus so much on what tourists see when they come to the city, the main hotspots have money pumped into them, driving the tourists down certain routes in the city. The main shopping street has colourful facades over sad empty shops. It’s become so easy to paper over these enormous cracks so that visitors aren’t aware of the current state of the city. There has been an increase in the homeless using the empty shop doorways, and the police are unable to keep up with this. We are at a breaking point.
I decided to travel round York initially wanting to focus on the beautiful sights I take for granted on a day to day basis.
I then decided to take an alternative tour of York – a Tour of the Empty Stores. This turned into a much more eyeopening, shocking experience for me – Every single day I walk past these places and don’t look at them or acknowledge them. There’s some beauty in this but it’s still shocking.
During my research i came across Lay Lines – a conspiracy theory of sorts, where people have realised certain historical places or monuments are set in straight lines across cities or the world. These are actually quite mindblowing and there is an obvious Lay Line within York:
These Lay Lines are amazing and I love that in a historical city such as York, something so powerful and unknown is just right in front of us! I’m still researching into this somewhat and definitely want to play around with using these silent Lay Lines and the ignored empty shops…
Hannah Elizabeth Design 