A path in the desert. Las Vegas, NV. Personal archives, 2021.
I have chosen the name of this blog "Inbuilt Landscape" as a representation of my inner terrain-desire to be in contact with nature, and feel it as part of me. Being a child, I used to walk alone among Eucalyptus trees in my father's farm, crushing the leaves on the ground, smelling the leaves, sometimes graving my name on the trunks.... And when I went to a beach city for vacation, my favorite sidewalks where those adjacent to pine trees with branches I liked to touch and smell while walking. Being in any city, the detours to hidden streets are my favorite ones. Even in cemeteries, my passion is looking inside all mortuary buildings and walking randomly in a search for abandoned tombs.
What I did not know at the time of my childhood, was that I have always been an unconscious situationist practitioner of "drifting" or "dérive," with the difference that I prefer to walk alone, rather than in small groups, and discover the "mystery" of the surroundings by myself.
From Theory of the Dérive. Guy Debord Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958) Translated by Ken Knabb:
ONE OF THE BASIC situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.
An informal path at the Long Beach Green Belt, CA. I took this photo with a special interest in the cactus scale. Personal archives, 2023.
Walking down an informal path to the lake among Eucalyptus trees. Note the colors, the light and shadows. Huntington Beach Central Park, CA. Personal archives, 2023.
I'd call this path "the light at the end of the tunnel", that's they way I felt when I walked along this path at the South Coast Botanic Garden, Palos Verdes Estates, CA. Photo from my personal archives, April 2024.
In this post, I am applying the term "drifting" to walk in landscape. Here I am sharing some of my impressions -which I love to keep represented in photographs-. It is important to see and feel the sounds, textures, enjoy the -healing- forest, the colors, the smells, the light and shadows.
Walking along a path in the Secret Garden of Huntington Beach Central Park, CA. Personal archives, 2022.
Walking along a path in the Secrete Garden of Huntington Beach Central park, CA. Here, at the fork, we have the choice of taking one path or the other. This will lead us to a different experience. Personal archives, 2022.
A path surrounded by cactus and succulents. Rancho Dominguez, CA. Personal archives, 2019.
Phil Smith, in his book Enchanted Things (Triarchy Press, 2014, page 70) illustrates the concept in this poetic way:
"When walking in relation to the terrain is complemented by a dancing in relation to entangled inner and outer lives (what the choreographer Siriol Joyner calls "mining", the extractive counterpart to our construction of an inner landscape), then this is where the resources of an otherwise irrecuperable surplus can be spent: in the reconstruction of interiority.
But the starting point is not within, subjectivity has been too damaged recently to sustain a simple quietist mysticism. Instead, the increasing scatterings of enchanted objects in the streets are the required things "ready-to-hand" (or rather, escaping Heidegger, "ready-to-tentacle") to fashion new inner landscapes of terrain-desire."
For further information, please read my interview with Phil Smith on concepts of Mythogeography:
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