Skewed Visions' The City Itself
Among proto-situationist visual works, Ansger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague () is distinguished by its radical approach to cartography. While in The Naked City () Debord takes fragments of a city map and conjoins them with arrows that indicate jumps from one area to another, in Fin de Copenhague the map almost disappears in the labyrinth of visual poetry, collage, and modifications of readymade visual material. The end result is not illegibility, but a shortcircuiting of different technologies of reading: the text reads like a map, collage like a text, and map like a drip painting. The title, Fin de Copenhague, which seems to underline the cartographic approach, can be read as the pronouncement of the end of the city understood as a unified utilitarian organism; however, it also suggests the abolition of city planning in terms of center and periphery. It is a call for a city that has no single center of gravity, but instead consists only of ends, edges, corners, particular locales as unique places of intimacy. In a word, Fin de Copenhague is the personal cartography of the city, which Debord in his text “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” defined as “psychogeography”: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Therefore: