Documentation, Progetti/Projects, Trasformatorio 2021

Wish You Were Here

A resource for collecting Cosio’s places of personal meaning –  and creating postcards and signs to put these psychogeographic landmarks on the map

Where are the important places in Cosio ? There are map pins for religious, commercial and public service locations; tourist brochures for art, culture and history. But absent are the sites of personal significance, the landmarks of feeling, the local sense of place.

Not only are these places unmapped, they are often undepictable. They exist in sensations and essences: more suited to being verbalised than visualised. 

What if we could find a way to put these absent places on the map ? 

Inspired by the Situationist concept of psychogeography, Wish You Were Here was created to give presence to the personal and emotional landmarks of Cosio d’Arroscia – using postcards, plaques and pins to literally and figuratively put these places of meaning on the map. 

In a world saturated with images, where we have too often seen every sight before we have been there, Wish You Were Here eschews all pictures in favour of the power of words, playing with phrasing to bring a grandiose presence to less publicly celebrated places, and inviting people to revisualise, reimagine and reinterpret the urban and rural landscape around them.

In keeping with the lexical thematic, Wish You Were Here maps each place of meaning using What3Words – a word-based geolocator that gives every 3mx3m square in the world a unique three-word address.

– Vanessa Inggs