confessions of an agoraphobic flaneur

This is a Ballardian themed spatial investigation into the emotional memory associated with the hysteria and anxiety of the female flâneur in an urban environment. The project serves as an investigative narrative proposal to chart the emotive journey of a lone agoraphobic flâneur, walking through the contemporary city of London where the promenade architecturale may become a journey through fear, anxiety, curiosity and perhaps even a sense of joy. Initially informed by a list of some of the emotional and mental personal safety instructions that women carry around with them on a day to day basis as they navigate their way through urban architectures of fear and anxiety, the project is presented through a series of photographic investigations of womens sight and site of the city, their verbal recollections of their personal spatial experiences and the emotional spatial mappings of the female body which link architecture as an artistic artefact. The project also focuses on the idea of de-familiarisation and the sensibility of the contemporary city as a place of unnatural existence, which exudes a sense of the unfamiliar and the uncanny. Here a camera and digital editing techniques were used as drawing tools to frame, cut, edit and reassemble the city into a series of fragments. These fragments, the emotional mappings and edited conversations of interviewed women, were all combined and reworked into a filmic landscape to fabricate a gendered distorted mental projection of the female flâneurs subjective experience of the city.