Papers by Simon Persighetti
contemporaries of the Dada movement Contact details
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Using the notion of the pedlar as a carrier of multiple viewpoints, Katie Etheridge, Simon Persig... more Using the notion of the pedlar as a carrier of multiple viewpoints, Katie Etheridge, Simon Persighetti & Phil Smith peddled ideas through trade, exchange and conversations. Through located performances and walks along city streets, in the marketplace and down country tracks they distributed specially commissioned tokens and wondrous pamphlets. Through extensive research the works responded to the story and surroundings of the infamous Lancashire Witch Trials (1612) by examining the meanings we invest in objects and reacting to the evocative local landscape. Commissioned by Green Close and LICA, funded by Arts Council England., Following this public project, we reworked the performances and outcomes for a gallery setting in a process that accorded with Live at LICA interest in artists working across disciplines and contexts. Originally manifesting as performance walks and site-specific live art installations, the reconfigured work created new experiences, questions and exchanges in T...
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An Exeter Mis-Guide, a pocket-size guide-book designed collaboratively with visual artist Tony We... more An Exeter Mis-Guide, a pocket-size guide-book designed collaboratively with visual artist Tony Weaver, suggests a series of walks and points of observation/contemplation within the city of Exeter. Unlike conventional guide-books, it is informed by ‘mytho-geography’: a Wrights & Sites concept and practice which seeks to value the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal as much as the 'factual' within municipal histories. In this sense, it seeks to disrupt institutionalised city tour guides and conventional practices of tourism. The book proposes other models of engagement with urban space through invitations to explore (routes, roles, realities). Here, author and walker become partners in ascribing significance to place. Many of the walks were developed in conjunction with Exeter citizens, generating a variety of perspectives on the ways we negotiate ‘our’ city. The goal was to help local people discover unknown or overlooked aspects of their city, and to celebrate and prol...
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International responses to Wrights & Sites’ first book suggested that many non-residents of Exete... more International responses to Wrights & Sites’ first book suggested that many non-residents of Exeter were able to employ versions of the book’s strategies in other places. Therefore the company explored the creation of a 'Mis-Guide' that deliberately sets out to provide transferable ideas, tools, inviting inventive dis-placement. Initially it was conceived as a 'generic' guide: an unusual approach for ‘site-specific’ artists, given the company’s recurrent focus on specific localities rather than 'types' of place. It became apparent that the same set of instructions/stimuli become radically different when transferred between places, and that these differences are informative and generative. After two years of research and walking experiments in Manchester, Channel Islands, Copenhagen, Zurich, Paris, New York, Shanghai, rural Zambia, etc, 'A Mis-Guide to Anywhere' was launched at the ICA (London, April 2006). In conjunction with 4 ‘Mis-Guided Tours’ that ...
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Wrights & Sites curated projects by international artists; mentored the stages of development: cr... more Wrights & Sites curated projects by international artists; mentored the stages of development: created the Mis-Information Office, elements of the artists’ work were exhibited and maps for 'mis-guided' events were provided. Here, we hosted artists' dialogues and offered opportunities to walk, talk and construct situations with Wrights & Sites. Also the location for the launch of the festival, the M-I Office including an exhibition presentation by Wrights & Sites about our work and the significance of the chosen projects. My practical and theoretical contributions to Wrights & Sites is research on a continuum with the development of the company practice. We work with agreed and shared structures on each project whilst identifying the individual angle, lens and content that each member wishes to pursue. This allows for individual voices to thrive within collaborative outcomes., My research into the contextual impact of this project surfaced via theoretical framing of the o...
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‘Everything you need to build a town is here' emerged after several months of reconnaissance.... more ‘Everything you need to build a town is here' emerged after several months of reconnaissance. Through this extensive site research, Wrights & Sites developed a constellation of 41 signs that each engage with their immediate vicinity and are dispersed across Weston-super-Mare., Each of the signs refers to aspects of architecture in Weston-super-Mare and contains a carefully worded instruction, observation or comment, designed to encourage the reader to think again about its specific location, to conduct an action or thought experiment., Each member of the company identified locations and references points to devise signage specific to their own areas of interest. My own research into the town was framed by the discovery of a Botanical survey that revealed locations and patronage in addition to providing a kind of ecological snapshot of plant life of the town. The interweaving of the botanical with architectural models was also used as a template for considering present built environments in consideration to future town developments. This approach chimed with a continuing strand of personal research into place as a sensorium also including consideration of the sonic, acoustic and musical cadence of architectural structures of towns and cities. These areas are further represented in a paper (Hodge et al 2013) in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (Graves-Brown et al)., Wonders of Weston was part of the Sea Change programme (2008 - 2010), managed by Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (1999 - 2011) on behalf of DCMS. Situations and Field Art Projects were a series of commissions aimed at sustainable, social and economic regeneration., Situations is a research programme based at the University of the West of England, experienced in commissioning projects outside conventional gallery or museum contexts, and developing curatorial research, public events, seminars and publications. www.situations.org.uk
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This output investigated the concept of 'Mis-Guidance', a recurrent focus in the practice... more This output investigated the concept of 'Mis-Guidance', a recurrent focus in the practice-as-research work of Wrights & Sites since the collaborative group’s inception in 1997; Persighetti is co-founder/core member. In conjunction with Tanzquartier Wien and Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival), Wrights & Sites selected, led workshops for and mentored Viennese artists, culminating in a series of public events/performances in June 2007 (see published programme detailing all events). Core areas for exploration here included: relationships between text/body/image and site/architecture/cityscape; journey and narrative; personal and public material. Wrights & Sites led tours through the city, responding to personal, found/gathered, fragmentary and questionable material, whilst encouraging strategies of playful subversion in relation to the Heritage or Municipal frameworks employed in conventional guided tours. Having framed the final pieces of work under a collective title, 'Vienna Mis-Guided', Wrights & Sites invited artist-participants to create a 'mis-guided' work for a chosen site or journey through the Viennese cityscape, drawing from their own practices: e.g. choreographed scores, discrete artist-led walks, meetings in unusual places, work with new/locative media, provocations taking the form of maps, apparently mislaid personal letters, lists or timetables. An expert jury from the disciplines of sociology and urban planning (Anette Baldauf), cultural philosophy and anthropology (Herbert Lachmayer), composition/music (Bernhard Lang),and architecture (Barbel Muller) selected 16 projects from 140 Mis-Guide proposals submitted by Viennese artists. Wrights & Sites mentored the development of projects during a three-week working process; performance events took place throughout the city. This festival of events was previewed with a presentation by Wrights & Sites, and a lecture by philosopher and chair of the Da Ponte Institute, Herbert Lachmayer, on ‘Walking and Talking into Existence’.
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Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2010
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Performance Research, 2012
Walking Artist and core member of Wrights & Sites, Simon Persighetti worked for a famous, UK ... more Walking Artist and core member of Wrights & Sites, Simon Persighetti worked for a famous, UK based shoe company in the 1970's before embarking upon a career in theatre and community arts practice. During his work at C& J Clarks he illustrated The Manual of Shoemaking, filmed industrial processes and lit fashion shows promoting new shoe ranges. For 'On Foot', this Doctor of Ambulant Investigations proposed making artist pages recording a visit to his old work place including a barefoot visit to the Clarks Shoe Museum.
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Performance Research, 2006
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Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
This chapter is perhaps best treated as a ‘site’ rather than a treatise. It employs disrupted wri... more This chapter is perhaps best treated as a ‘site’ rather than a treatise. It employs disrupted writing strategies, based in turn on ‘walking’ practices and the authors’ background in performance, as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention, and spatial meaning-making. The chapter, like our walking, is intended to be porous; for others to read into it and connect from it and for the specificities and temporalities of sites to fracture, erode, and distress it. It draws on the outcomes of previous works including site-specific performance works such as Mis-Guided Tours or published Mis-Guides (for example, A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, 2006), ‘drifts’, mythogeographic mapping, public art or installations, explorations of the Wienfluss, excavations of subterranean library stacks, and a recently installed network of plaques across an English seaside resort (Everything you need to build a town is here, 2010).
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That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than that which changes our wa... more That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than that which changes our way of seeing paintings ... (Debord 1957, 1 07) The politics of place and walking as an arts practice form the core concerns of my research. The research is being conducted with particular reference to the ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the site-specific arts company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. Our apparent rejection of performance-making for an audience has led to walking with spectators as collaborators in the work, and has made the physical journeys and verbal exchanges along the way an integral part of the practice. Through this work, which revolves around place, site-specific arts and urban walking, I am harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the Flaneur, the Dadaist, and the Situationist and in recognition of contemporary works by artists who use journey and place as the text, reference points and resources tha...
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Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2016
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Talks by Simon Persighetti
n/a, 2006
This is a transcript of a performance lecture given as part of Material City, a programme of inte... more This is a transcript of a performance lecture given as part of Material City, a programme of interdisciplinary conversations and fieldwork led by Situations in partnership with Arnolfini and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Wrights & Sites (A Mis¬Guide To Anywhere) presented a performance-lecture on their site and walking¬based practices that overlap with architecture, urban exploration, activism and autobiography.
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Papers by Simon Persighetti
Talks by Simon Persighetti