Theories of Drifting

A collaboration between Dagmar Dahle and Don Gill

No one perhaps has ever felt passionate towards a lead pencil, writes Virginia Woolf in Street Haunting, But there are circumstances in which it can become extremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

To haunt, to stroll, to wander aimlessly; the act of walking can be an escape, a ritual, method of transportation, exercise regime, leisure activity, social activity or political act.

Dérive, which translates as ‘drifting’ is a term borrowed from the Situationist International group of the 1950’s who practiced aimless urban wandering as a means of investigating the political and cultural meanings of cities’ architecture and spatial arrangements. The rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious meet in the term ‘dérive’.

Dagmar Dahle and Don Gill engage in walking differently, but for both artists walking is an intellectual practice. Gill is an urban walker whose art practice involves moving through space on visual and conceptual planes simultaneously. Collecting evidence of urban meanderings through photography, video, texts, detritus, maps, conversations, encounters, anecdotes, Gill gathers information to be sorted, analyzed, considered and archived as a record of the act. For Dahle, walking is a meditative practice. In the daily practice of walking, the natural areas of Lethbridge are observed through seasonal changes. Investigating the visual, Dahle ruminates as she wanders.