‘I want to give a view of the world that can only emerge by not pursuing any particular theme, by refraining from passing judgment, proceeding without aim. Drifting with no direction except one’s own curiosity and intuition.’ – Michael Glawogger, Untitled, 2017

The city is the place par excellence where the individual defines himself in relation to the group of his fellows – by mimicry or opposition, by rupture or by adhesion, by not being able to avoid the weight of the rules that govern the group. The open stage of this great social game, the street, is where every multifaceted rule is in constant action. The micro-scale observation of the events of the street has the subtle capacity to reveal the hidden mechanisms of the whole social system.

In line with the great steps of evolution of his species, Homo Urbanus has become a strange creature. DIP16 will observe and analyse him on the public stage of the street. This unit will entirely be devoted to training students to engage their deep human sensitivity, developing their receptivity to those that surround them and refining their capacity for observation of the overlooked; ordinary urban movements, mannerisms, habits and behaviours – a world of actions that escapes the attention of busy city-dwellers, but which forms the very essence of our contemporary urban condition. Stepping out of the habitual activity of daily life, students will become barbarians in the urban environment in order to rediscover astonishment and surprise as key values in conceiving of the city as a land of exploration and a laboratory for new ways of living.

Working in London throughout term one, during the second term each student will choose a city in which to individually make a film over ten days. Video installations, written texts, drawings, maps and urban wanderings will be used to feed the development of this work, from conception to postproduction. Beyond a conceptual and theoretical process, the work of the unit will be based on concrete, vibrant, sensory and emotional thinking as a guiding force in the production of individual films. Personal, intimate and spontaneous, these filmic forms will create new readings of the city not as a sequence of flows and an assembly of masses, but as a tangle of individual people, relationships and emotions. The collective research of the unit will eventually be drawn together in an anthropological cartography of the mannerisms and habits of the global Homo Urbanus.