explorARTa
Psychogeographic experiences
in the urban environment.
explorARTa is an artistic research project, the result of a serendipitous experience that began with the study of the perception of the environment of adolescents and children with autism. It started from the hypothesis that an exploration through discovery of the environment, following the way it occurs visually the selection of fragments from the real landscape, is representative to define the way of thinking and the identity of the individual. The explorations in the urban tissue or in nature made for this purpose, led me to areas of knowledge not yet explored by me such as psychogeography, discovering through these emotional and sensory experiences new ways of artistic expression.
Walking without a determined goal in exploring the City that can reveal the unseen aspects of the environment, is specific to psychogeography and represents an essential factor for understanding the urban and the natural landscape.
For me, drifting through an urban environment is a kind of artistic research and this attempt to discover the details of the City, in which the stratigraphy represents a deeper immersion into the attributes of the details, can also be transformed into an archaeological research, more precisely of experiential archaeology.
In order to discover the way we perceive the surrounding reality, I consider that a psychogeographic exploration can be a synthesis between the experientiality of a performance and the visual analysis of an artist who immerses himself in a research of fractal dynamics. Using photography in psychogeographic experiments, I discovered its artistic potential and I saw it as a visual art form generating virtual worlds.
The art of walking can be experienced as a reconceptualization of an environment, so my project focuses on experimenting of new ways of perceiving the surrounding reality by combining emotions with image and poetry, developing projects that aim to discuss a different vision of the world, presented in the form of visual narratives.
Mihaela Moțăianu - Visual Artist
"To see a city it is not enough to keep your eyes open. You must first discard everything that prevents you from seeing it - all inherited images and preconceived ideas." (Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities, 2011).
