Untying the hunting
"....By contrast with the topographic, such imagery is not about
place in itself so much as about the experience of place...."
In this text, I will try to explain why I will put together the themes of the Ley Lines (or "Lay Lines") and the Genius Loci.
In my search for a creative reinterpretation of the Ley Lines theme linked to psychogeography, I reflected on the consequences of untying the Ley Lynes' "hunting" (as stated by Watkins) from the link with the past.
Watkins sought hidden signs of the past in the environment of his present. The connection of these signs, such as the dots for a line ("The Old Straight Track"), would have led to the identification of the Ley Lines.
According to Watkins, signs can be seen in the meadows and along the roadsides. They are tangible, real.
Thought and imagination create an interpolation of these signs, hence a story. Watkins photographed and told these stories.
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(Watkins, Alfred. The Ley Hunter's Manual: A Guide to Early Tracks . Heritage Hunter. Kindle Edition)
I intend to adopt a creative process that makes me observe my current and not look for the past, but rather what, according to the method of psycho-geographic wandering, comes to me as a perception of the current environment.
".....Discussion of landscape and memory inevitably implicates an inter-relation of space and time as memory deals both in place and in histories. There has been a tendency to separate spatiality and temporality one from the other....."
It is a search for the intangible and its multiple manifestations through the tangible present.
It is a search for the spirit of the place, the Genius Loci.
This is why I thought of combining Genius Loci and Ley Lines so that one feeds the other: for this reason the Ley Lines that I have drawn on the map of the Giudecca island do not follow any interpolation of signs, as much as the localization of spirits. different in different places.