1. Nick Kaye
Performing the City
Nick Kaye examines the relationship between site specific art and place.
'site': substantive. … local position… The place or position occupied by some
specified thing. Frequently implying original or fixed position.
'site': 1. transitive. To locate, to place. 2. intransitive. To be situated or placed.
(Onions 1973)
Place and Space
In The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984), the philosopher Michel de
Certeau reflects on the relationship between 'place' and 'space'. Adopting the
semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the langue, the complex of
rules and conventions which constitute a language, and the parole, the practice of
speech in which these rules are given expression, de Certeau reads 'place' as an
ordered and ordering system realised in 'spatial practices'. Just as Saussure
understands the langue to be always realised in practices, yet never wholly manifest
in any particular linguistic expression or exchange, de Certeau proposes that space
is a practised place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is
transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space
produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e.: a place constituted
by a system of signs. (de Certeau 1984: 117)
Defined by its internal stability, 'place,' like the langue, is an exclusive and self-
regulating system of rules, 'an instantaneous configuration of positions' (de Certeau
1984: 117), which enunciation or practice at once realises and depends upon. As the
order through which a practice obtains location, it is this 'place' which ensures that
practices make sense. De Certeau states that:
A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accordance with which elements are
distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two
things being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place:
the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its
own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines. (de Certeau 1984: 117)
The order and stability of place, however, is not a property of the practices in which
it is realized. De Certeau notes straightforwardly that spatial practices may give
multiple expressions to the stability and orderliness, to the 'univocity,' of place.
Space, he suggests, 'occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it,
situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual
programmes' (de Certeau 1984: 117). In this sense, de Certeau does not read place
as an order, but as an ordering system, while spatial practices do not reproduce

2. fragments of a given order, but operate as ordering activities, whether that activity
be walking, reading, listening or viewing. Thus, different and even incompatible
spaces may realize the various possibilities of a single place. Returning to the
metaphor of language, de Certeau outlines a more complex situation, suggesting
that:
In relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is
caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent
upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and
modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction
to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper'. (de Certeau
1984: 117)
The Practised Place
Space, as a practised place, admits of unpredictability. Rather than mirror the
orderliness of place, space might be subject not only to transformation, but
ambiguity. If space is like the word when it is spoken, then a single 'place' will be
realized in successive, multiple and even irreconcilable spaces. It follows that,
paradoxically, 'space' cannot manifest the order and stability of its place. Thus, in
comparing 'pedestrian processes to linguistic formations' de Certeau states
categorically that 'to walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being
absent and in search of a proper.' (de Certeau 1984: 103)
Caught in the act of enunciation, perpetually in the practised place, the walker can
never resolve the multiple and conflicting spaces of the city into the place itself. The
walker is thus always in the process of acting out, of performing the contingencies of
a particular spatial practice, which, although subject to the place, can never wholly
realise or be resolved into this underlying order. For de Certeau, the modern city
epitomises this transitory condition, producing an awareness of our perpetual
performance of place but inability to come to rest in the stability of the 'proper'. He
observes that:
The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an
immense social experience of lacking a place … The identity furnished by this place
is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens'
positions and profits, there is only a population of passer-by, a network of
residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among
pretences of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by
dreamed-of places.
(de Certeau 1984: 103)
In the city, de Certeau's walker realises the site in its transitive sense, always in the
act or effort of locating, and never in the settled order, the 'proper place,' of the
location itself. As de Certeau indicates, even the attempt to fix location through the
'symbolic (named)' participates in this movement. Here, where space, like the

3. spoken word, is realised in a practice which can never rest in the order it implies, so
the representation offered by 'the word' moves one on from 'site'. Just as these
spatial practices function in the absence of place, in their inability to realise the
order and stability of the proper, so the 'symbolic (named)' is tied to the experience
of lacking a place precisely because representation, by definition, presents itself in
the absence of its object. It follows that, ironically, the 'symbolic (named)' is
antithetical to the presence of the authentic or real place it would reveal. In his
discussion of 'The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,' Crimp argues that 'the
desire of representation exists only insofar as it can never be fulfilled, insofar as the
original always is deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that
representation can take place.' (Crimp 1993: 119)
To represent the place, is, in this sense, and analogously to its practice, to construct
a removal from it. Like any of the spatial practices de Certeau describes, however,
this very moving on also implies its own place.
In Nights In This City, first presented in Sheffield in 1995 and subsequently
relocated in Rotterdam in 1997, the British company Forced Entertainment
foreground their work's roots in the city. Admitted to a tour bus by a
performer-hostess, an audience of fifty begin a 'strange tour of various
locations in Sheffield' (Etchells 1995). As a soundtrack plays over its speakers,
the bus climbs to Sky Edge, above the Manor Park estate, beyond which the
city centre and its industrial and suburban sprawl reach out into the distance.
Here, once the driver Ray has pointed out the place where he first worked in
the city, his home, and 'the place where he was married fifteen years ago', the
party is joined by Alan, a 'professional' tour guide seemingly worse-the-wear
for drink, played by company member Richard Lowdon. As the bus criss-
crosses various parts of the city, Alan offers a guide to its streets and
landmarks which becomes progressively more distracted:
We're going to be taking you south on Love Street, past the place where
they're thinking of building a new Macdonalds, and past the entrance to Knife
Walk, so called because of all the murders that are commonly done there... All
the streets round here got named after famous football hooligans from history
and the buildings got named after ghosts and cleaning products and convicted
kerb crawlers [...] Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Rome… (Etchells, 1995)
In their self-conscious manipulation of appropriated textual fragments,
Forced Entertainment emphasise the constructed nature of role, identity, and
place. Reflecting their concerns with media and mediation, the group work, in
their theatre performances, to heighten the artificiality of the elements they
play through, allowing one 'fictional' moment to shift onto or be juxtaposed
with another. Tim Etchells, who writes and directs for the company, suggests
that such strategies foreground 'the inability of the performers to fully inhabit
the texts and gestures which they perform' in an articulation of a sense that
'[t]here's no utterance by anybody that isn't somehow a quotation of

4. something else' (Kaye 1996: 244). Translated into an address to a real city,
which, Etchell's suggests, 'is both a map of space and a map of states of mind'
(Etchells 1999: 77), the company engages in a 'writing over the city' which
reflects the notion that:
The space that we really live in is a kind of electronically mediated one. And it
feels like one's landscape - the source of one's images, the things that haunt
you - are likely to be second, third, fourth-hand. (Kaye 1996: 236)
In playing this dream-like journey through Sheffield's backstreets and housing
estates, the company play out the need to construct, build or state connections with
a site or place. Yet through these incongruous representations of the city's
spectacles, this journey evokes an inability to rest in the places toward which the
audience's attention is directed. As a site-specific work, Nights In This City
articulates a curious displacement from a site whose particularities cannot be easily
or appropriately named. It is a displacement reflected in the approach to the re-
siting of Nights In This City in Rotterdam in 1997, when company members elicited
suggestions for a route by posing questions which implied generic narratives
or events linked to dramatic themes: 'If you had killed someone and had to
dump the body where would you take it?', 'If you had to say goodbye to a lover
where in this city would you most like to do it?'. Like the performance itself, this
process acts out a 'writing over' the site, a moving on from the real city inscribed
into the very attempt to know it. In these ways, Nights In This City effects a twin
movement over its site, at once moving its audience through the city, while playing
out the effect of the 'symbolic (named),' in which this 'tour' perpetually moves one
on from its object.
Non-Place
Yet this experience of lacking a place, or of a place characterised by mobility or
movement, can be further articulated in relation to place and space. Extending the
implication of de Certeau's reference to the 'symbolic (named)' in an analysis of the
spaces of supermodernity, the anthropologist Marc Augé reflects on the notion of
'non-place'. Defining non-place in opposition to what he describes as
anthropological place, Augé's analysis reflects distinctions between the transitive
and substantive definitions of site. Thus, he notes that 'when Michel de Certeau
mentions 'non-place', it is to allude to a sort of negative quality of place, an absence
of the place from itself, caused by the name it has been given.' (Augé 1995: 85)
While 'anthropological place,' Augé states, 'is formed by individual identities,
through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living
know-how' (Augé 1995: 101), where one's location or position is known, 'non-place'
is produced in a passing over of place. More specifically, Augé argues, "'non-place'
designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to
certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that

5. individuals have with these spaces.' (Augé 1995: 78) Here, non-place is
characterised by a projection forward, in the individual's relationship with this
moving on, and so in a mobility which suppresses the differences in which
anthropological places are established. Non-place, Augé suggests, is realised in
travelling by or through anthropological place and so in a process of displacement.
In this way, Augé proposes that:
"Space, as frequentation of places rather than a place stems in effect from a double
movement: the traveller's movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the
landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses, a series of 'snapshots' piled
hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them
…Travel… constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape."
(Augé 1995: 86)
Here, too, in this frequentation of places which specifically defines the journey, Augé
argues, the spectator's gaze is subject to a deflection or reversal, where, in this
passing over, by or through places
"The individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the
spectacle. As if the position of spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if
basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle."
(Augé 1995: 86)
Nights In This City, then, can be read as articulating this movement and reversal.
Alan's narrative, the promise of coincidences between the fictions of the text and the
happenstance of the street, as well as the thought that amid this flow of the
everyday there may be incidents constructed for the audience, demands that one
looks for the piece outside. Yet in looking out, through the trace of one's own
reflection in the window, this gaze is returned by passers-by and, on one occasion,
performers, who simply look back as the coach winds its way through areas where
such a journey is explicitly out of place. Here, the tour-bus is realised and reflected
back to the viewer as a place for looking, provoking a self-conscious perception over
which these representations of the city are played. For Augé, this self-regarding gaze
suggests precisely a writing over of place through the anticipated image, a moving
on epitomised by contemporary travel. Augé notes that:
"A lot of tourism leaflets suggest this deflection, this reversal of the gaze, by offering
the would-be traveller advance images of curious or contemplative faces, solitary or
in groups, gazing across infinite oceans, scanning ranges of snow-capped mountains
or wondrous urban skylines: his own image in a word, his anticipated image, which
speaks only about him but carries another name (Tahiti, Alpe d'Huez, New York).
The traveller's space may thus be the archetype of non-place."
(Augé 1995: 86)
Yet non-place, as Augé describes it, is not in any simple way the antithesis or
negation of place. Indeed, non-place is defined, first of all, in relation to place, even

6. as that relationship is one of displacement. Thus Augé points to the implication of
non-place in place and vice versa, stating that:
"Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely
erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the
scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. But non-places
are the real measure of our time."
(Augé 1995: 79)
Here, the palimpsest, a paper 'which has been written upon twice, the original
having been rubbed out' (Onions 1973) or 'prepared for writing on and wiping
out again' (Onions 1973), not only provides a model for the relationship of
non-place to place, but, in the context of a transitive definition of site, of site-
specificity itself. Thus, Nights In This City approaches the real city as
palimpsest, by acting out a writing over of sites already written upon.
Furthermore, in this moving on from site, this site-specific performance
attempts to define itself in the very sites it is caught in the process of erasing.
It is in processes such as this that site-specific art and performance frequently
works to trouble the oppositions between the site and the work. It is in this
troubling of oppositions, too, that a wide range of approaches to site in visual art
and architecture may also be read through the terms of performance. Indeed, where
such work approaches 'site' in its transitive sense, and so in the act of locating or
placing, then it is performance which returns to define site-specificity, not only as a
set of critical terms and as a mode of work, but as a way of characterising the place
that site-specific practices reflect upon.
References
Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
London: Verso.
Crimp, D. (1993) On the Museum's Ruins, London: MIT Press.
de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, Cal.: University of
California Press.
Etchells, T. (1995) Nights In This City, unpublished manuscript.
Etchells, T. (1999 [1995]) 'Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City' in Tim Etchells
Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London:
Routledge, 76-81.
Kaye, N. (1996) Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents,
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press.
Onions, C.T. (ed.) (1973) The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Source: http://www.rudi.net/books/10422 (Retrieved 09/11/2010)