Detours, Derives, and Derailleurs
Detours, Derives, and Derailleurs is an experiential and collaborative interdisciplinary workshop that combines performance studies and creative writing practices in a novel approach to urban studies in order to examine relationships between cycling, embodied memory, and cultural memory. Utilizing simple performance exercises and storytelling techniques, the workshop aims to guide participants in exploring connections between different narratives based on their lived experiences as cyclists in city spaces, both in terms of their current practices, their affective memories, and their visions and hopes for the future of cycling. Over the course of the workshop, participants will experiment with different forms of bike-centred narrative practices and theatre games. The workshop will culminate with the collective creation of a group-driven narrative “derive.”
Michel de Certeau famously compares the act of walking in the city to narrating and inscribing experiences in urban spaces. This workshop posits that urban cycling is a related but distinct form of articulating our bodies’ experiences as they traverse different territories and come into contact with a variety of landscapes, topographies, and other bodies. Exploring some of the memories that these different forms of contact produce – both within individual bodies, embedded into the geography of cities, and as part of larger structures of cultural memory – is a central focus of the workshop.
Drawing on a variety of sources – including Certeau, Guy Debord, the Theatre of the Oppressed methodology, and a range of cycling-specific literature – the workshop proposes an interactive and playful examination of individual, embodied, and collective memory in which intellectual and creative expression go hand in hand; in which different experiences of protagonism can be explored and in which individual memories of biking in city spaces spur collective creation and can serve as inspiration for future planning.
raphi soifer (they/them) is a performer, researcher, and avid bike rider whose work explores memories, territories, and dreaming in city spaces. Borne and razed in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), raphi lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they work as a researcher and translator, in addition to creating solo and collective street-based solo interventions.
raphi holds a BA in Theatre Studies and Anthropology from Yale University, an MA in Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense, a PhD in Urban Planning from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and an acute distrust of institutional credentials. Nevertheless, the strictures of late-stage capitalism, together with their love for pedagogical experimentation, has brought them to Universidade Federal Fluminense, Colby College, and the Bard Prison Initiative as a professor of Performance and Cultural Studies. raphi is currently a visiting post-doctoral scholar at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where they are writing a book on biking, collective memory, and identity in the context of contemporary discourses of so-called "revitalization."