WALK
The act of walking across a city is not a neutral gesture, nor is it one that goes unobserved. The pavement traced, the corner cut, the square circled, the line crossed, the wrong turn mis-taken, the blind alley turned a blind eye to, the dead-end dreaded causing quick and uneasy return. It is all too easy to stop attending to the nature of these daily decisions: to choices weighed up, instructions obeyed and strayed from, to routines that somehow build and are played out each day after day after day. Before long our irresponsible steps are taken care of by others. Unseen shepherds herd us sheep-like through the spaces of the city as though we were daydreaming or in partial sleep. We are perhaps too willing to place trust in our uninvited guides, to forfeit our intuition and forget how we ever made our way without their help. Gradually we might abandon our capacity for aimless wandering, lose our individual sense of direction in favour of authorised routes and assisted navigation. We are forgetting to look in lieu of being told. Like good children we stick to the map and follow the arrows. The city is closing its secrets to us. We must now try to remember its spells. ‘Open city! Open Sesame!’
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 40. Revised extract of a text entitled ‘Pay Attention to the Footnotes’ previously published as part of a series of publicly sited postcards and artists’ pamphlet produced in collaboration with the project Open City (2007–2010).