Psychogeographical Reflections on I Learned how to be a Crow and a Pigeon
University of Huddersfield
DR Alex Bridger

Psychogeography is usually associated with the situationist practice of radical walking without a destination in mind though arguably it can be much more than that. Psychogeography can be considered as a way of thinking and critiquing the world, which can include not only physical practices such as walking, but also ways of thinking, writing and any form of movement through places and spaces. At its core, psychogeography can be a political way to understand our relations to environments with a view to considering what the world could look like beyond consumer capitalism.

Reading Liadin Cooke’s tapestry from a psychogeographical approach, it may remind you of Debord and Jorn’s Naked City map (1957), though it is quite different and offers something very new, contextualised and important in terms of documenting peoples’ walking routes during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Kirklees region. Huddersfield has a long and rich history in textiles and the choice of presenting such walks in this medium is both pertinent and inventive in bringing together different histories of place – from peoples’ route maps during the Covid-19 pandemic to how textiles are embedded in the region.

In this tapestry, each of the walking route maps can be considered not only as land masses but also as different parts of the human body. So one can interpret the images in the work as looking like feet, legs, arms, a torso, a heart and so on. Each of the walking maps in the tapestry can be considered like Rorschach tests to be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways. Place and body then become one, with the walkers situating themselves in place and treading routes through these locales, and then we, as viewers of these maps, re-walk these routes observing them through the woven imagery, codifying the distinct parts to understand the tapestry as an organised whole, a Gestalt of sorts. The great reveal of what the world could look like beyond consumer capitalism is then left to its viewers to consider.