.
There is more than one mythogeography. In 1998, for site-specific artists Wrights & Sites the term became both practical shorthand and a flag of convenience for describing their work to each other and anyone else who might be interested. Not wishing to nail their colours to the situationist mast (putting some distance between themselves and both small groups politics and an occult-slanted anglo-psychogeography) “mythogeography” served to describe an approach to performing places (not just performing in places) that contested attempts to give those places restricted meanings or restrictive uses.It took a year or so after their first performances for Wrights & Sites to discover the uses of walking, but walking would, increasingly, define their work. Where mythogeography had begun as a description of the differences and dynamics of particular sites, it also came to mean the various mobilities through those spaces.
“The walker experiences space as process, lived in rather than conceived, moved through rather than viewed from a neighbouring hill.
“The walker's perspective subverts static notions of place as imposed by bureaucracy or commerce.
“The walker experiences a layering of narratives, personal, socio-political, historic or mythic.
“We call this the practice of mytho-geography: an approach to the layered nature of site.”Cathy Turner from ‘Out of Place: The Politics of Site-Specific Performance in Contested Space’ (a performance presentation) 2001
The first time Wrights & Sites put the word “mythogeography” online there was only one other use of it on the web: in a poem, Dreaming of Houston, by Bess Lovejoy,
"territories of my dreams, mythogeography
I need to touch
the black sheep of my country
the great closed door, the great embarrassment..."
Bess had been taught by Michael Kenny, Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University who used and defined the term as "shorthand for the way in which 'myth' ascribes meaning to landscape... projections onto ... sites from a future perspective that rationalised... history... into a coherent narrative - incorporating previously existing shrine-sites and the like into an evolving metahistory." (email to Phil Smith)
This definition, of a restrospective rationalisation of divergences and inconsistencies, was somewhat at odds with Wrights & Sites’ more disruptive and de-cohering use of the term (although, perhaps with hindsight, there was more connection than understood at the time), and for a while the company reined back its use of the word. But when there seemed no danger of any confusion between the two applications, the company resumed its use. Since then the word has emerged as a fictional discipline in Through Darkest Zymurgia by Leon Thintwhistle III, DMg., a webnovel “(B)eing a narrative of the expedition undertaken in the year 680 by Dr. Thintwhistle and his colleagues Thomas Carbuncle and Dr. Thaddeus Philpott, all of Glastonbury University, of their explorations in the remote land of Zymurgia”.
The term is also used by Ivan Mitin of the Russian Research Institute for Cultural & Natural Heritage: “The newly established mythogeography suggests the palimpsest as a model of place structure. The palimpsest is a united totality of layers, no matter that some of them are found under the others. The model of palimpsest shows multiple semiological systems, co-existing in the sense of any place. Each of the layers of the palimpsest is in fact one of CGDs of place or one of spatial interpretations & myths, that is it is one of the multiple contexts (realities) of a place. Hence, “game with space” is the main method of mythogeography.”
It is not quite clear who has “established” this “mythogeography” but Mitin cites Barthes, Crang and Tuan among others in his paper, and the engagement with myth is common in critical theory around many practices; tourism being a case in point. Mitin’s language of layers has some similar to Turner’s use of the same in the Wrights & Sites document quoted above. As also perhaps with Michael Kenny, there are differences and coincidences.
There are distinct advantages to a multiple tenancy upon the site of mythogeography.
Any confusion over what “mythogeography” is a helpful, perhaps essential, introduction to the disciplines of mythogeography.
While it may irritate some, the alternative is there for all to see – observe the vagaries of psychogeography. With its singular origins, rigorous theoretical and stylist purities, recorded genealogy and restricted practice, it is on the one hand a resilient and reliable source of key ideas, returnable to with confidence. On the other hand, it is a recognisable and apparently coherent brand that shelters all kinds of vagueness and small-busynesses from Sunday-strolling to occult practice. (And recently has been vulnerable to Merlin Coverley’s masterstroke of calling a book about literature Psychogeography – much good literature, but, all the same, literature – how many aspirant dérivistes has this ‘first stop’ book kept from the ‘drift’?) Mythogeography is fortunate to begin from the very start with all the confusions and opportunities for opportunism, theoretical multiplicity and incoherence that psychogeography took almost a quarter of a century to accumulate.
While there is a history here, it is no genealogy. The history of mythogeography is something like the ‘invention’ of the cinema camera/projection-system: Lumière, Dickson, Le Prince, Marey, Eastman, Acres, Paul, Edison, Frieze-Greene and Meester probably all have some call on the title of “inventor”, though most of them never met, Louis Le Prince might have been murdered because he got ahead of the field and William Frieze-Greene is probably only there because Robert Donat played him in The Magic Box. While various cogs, threads, wheels, sewing machines, spools, films, tapes and solutions mutated away from their previously mundane lives to make the dream machine.
Other sightings – mythogeography turned up in the title of the Hidden City Symposium: Mythogeography, Writing, & Site Specific Performance (Plymouth University, 2008) and of at least one ongoing PhD.)
But mostly people just do it without knowing they do.
