Pedestrian Levitation

Commissioned by: the cultural department of the Ixelles municipality, Brussels · Year: 2005 · My role: concept, design and execution

A pedestrian crossing of white stickers runs off the pavement, around the corner and on up a brick facade.

Pedestrian Levitation Research (2005). There is also a full nine-minute version. Clicking loads the player from Vimeo.

The question

What struck me at that crossing was not the crossing itself, but how little people keep to it. They pick their own line, straight through the rules. That became an image of liberation for me: the imaginative force of the people moving through a city, independent of the infrastructure laid out for them. The question was how to make that force visible.

What I made

I glued white stickers onto the street and onto a wall in Ixelles: a crossing that ran off the pavement, around the corner and on up the building. Just a familiar marking in a place it does not belong.

The shape did not come out of my head. I drew it from Pedestrian Levitation Research, the video above. In it, the pedestrians cut up the crossing themselves: their walking lines slice straight through it and set it levitating. In the installation that same force pushes the crossing on, in imaginary directions: off the pavement, around the corner and up the facade.

What came of it

One day I watched a young girl trying to walk up the stickers, jumping, in a way so personal and playful that for a moment she became one with the work. The stickers were static; what she did with them was alive. That moment shaped the rest of my practice, and eventually my PhD: I wanted to make interventions that people can appropriate. Where that led is on the research page.

Seen from below, the white stickers continue up the facade against a grey sky.

A black-and-white overview of the crossroads: the crossing on the street, and the pieces pasted up the building.