Bryonie Reid

'A profound edge': 1 performative negotiations of Belfast

The lack of an overarching narrative of place for Northern Ireland, and its territorial conflict, have resulted in fragmented, highly localized and strictly bounded senses of place. This is nowhere more evident than in Belfast, a city profoundly shaped by its sectarian geographies. As a result, what theorists have come to characterize as the relative liberty of urban space is overtly compromised, with movement through and within Belfast being restricted by the policing of its internal boundaries. These difficulties, and their gendered effects, are focused here in relation to the particular experience of artist Sandra Johnston. Johnston made two performative pieces in response and resistance to the spatial constraint she had undergone on the Lower Newtownards Road, a loyalist area of East Belfast. Johnston disrupts the performance of order and control evident in Belfast's politico-religious territories, and offers a radically alternative negotiation of space, which I argue is personally, communally and politically significant.

'Remembrance-rethinking-recovery': 2 identity in the Northern Irish city U ntil relatively recently, the city has not figured significantly in the dominant discourses of Irish place. 3 Irish nationalisms have traditionally found their deepest source and purpose in rural life, in terms of landscape and of people, although this stance now attracts increasing criticism and revision. Unionisms have left both urban and rural place largely untheorized; nonetheless, Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly argue that unionism in some sense depends on the countryside as a nostalgic symbol of unity and harmony, in the face of Protestant class divisions and crumbling power. [START_REF] Allen | Introduction[END_REF] Outside these discourses the city has been conceived as a place of complex and fascinating meaning in relation to identity. For cultural and social theorists, the import of cities lies in their transience, their simultaneous external homogeneity and internal heterogeneity, all of which have differing impact upon how we understand and relate to place. The relative anonymity and frequent shifts in surroundings and neighbours offered to a citydweller disrupt traditional understandings of rural place-based identity, dependent upon stable and uniform communities and landscapes. Richard Sennett captures the particular complexity of city life in his definition of urban inhabitants as 'people in the presence of otherness'. [START_REF] Sennett | Introduction[END_REF] Through the encounters offered with various others, the city may free us to imagine the significance of place and identity in different ways, but also channels the anxiety of identity dissolution. Celeste Olalquiaga, for example, observes the plethora of surface imagery provided in a cityscape, imagery which closely reflects that of other cities, enabling 'a ubiquitous feeling of being in all places while not really being anywhere'. [START_REF] Olalquiaga | Megalopolis: contemporary cultural sensibilities[END_REF] However, the discomforts and gratifications of dwelling within, and moving around, the city are inflected differently for different groups. It can be a place of limitation and oppression for those who lack the time or resources to take advantage of what the city has to offer, and for those who find the relative lack of stable and extended communities alienating rather than liberating. Further, and importantly in the context of this paper, the figure of the fla ˆneur, the ideal leisured consumer of the city's ideal freedoms and pleasures, 'has by and large been constructed and used as an ideal type to denote men'; [START_REF] Harman | Resident alien: feminist cultural criticism[END_REF] Gillian Rose emphasizes women's marginalization in the city, pointing out that 'the space available to our movement is a constricted one'. [START_REF] Rose | Feminism and geography: the limits of geographic knowledge[END_REF] Women's individual spatial experiences are clearly and significantly shaped by their historical subordination to patriarchal power but, under close investigation, reveal subtle negotiations of potential freedoms and alternative meanings within the city. Although Jane Rendell states that 'men own and occupy spaces and women, while women occupy space', [START_REF] Rendell | Bazaar beauties'' or ''pleasure is our pursuit'': a spatial story of exchange[END_REF] Lynne Walker points to women who become 'producers as well as consumers of the built environment'. [START_REF] Walker | Home and away: the feminist remapping of public and private space in Victorian London[END_REF] There are further complexities to theorizing the Northern Irish city in light of the province's historical and current conditions, and this paper examines negotiations of place and identity for women in the specific context of the city of Belfast. [START_REF]from the plantation or settlement of Ireland, principally by Scots and English, as an official strategy of conquest in the 16th and 17th centuries, has had the most apparent and long-lasting consequences[END_REF] The northeast of Ireland has traditionally been the island's most urbanized and industrialized part, a fact which contributed to ambiguities in a rurally focused southern nationalism concerning the Irishness of the six counties around the time of partition. As Clare O'Halloran indicates, predominantly Protestant Belfast in particular was a symbol of 'unionist supremacy' [START_REF] O'halloran | Partition and the limits of Irish nationalism: an ideology under stress[END_REF] in the north, and as such was characterized as 'a very un-Irish city in a very Irish setting'. [START_REF] Maccartan | Partition and the limits of Irish nationalism[END_REF] Native Irish, and later Catholic, communities were excluded from, and marginalized within, urban spaces in the north east of Ireland, but despite Á/ or perhaps more accurately Á/ because of their disadvantaged position within Belfast and Derry in particular, present-day nationalist communities have established strong senses of belonging in these cities. Equally, the two cities' historic positions as unionist strongholds mean that unionists find in them deep significance for their senses of identity and belonging. Unionists and Protestants have dominated the shaping of Belfast and Derry, economically, politically and socially. However, throughout the gradual breakdown of the former unionist state, these cities are demonstrating their fragility and tendency to elude total control, threatening unionist and nationalist definitions of place and belonging based on territorial ownership, and exposing the need for new definitions.

In seeking out ways in which place and belonging are negotiated differently and more inclusively in Belfast, this paper focuses on two performative pieces by a visual artist, Sandra Johnston. The works are entitled respectively To kill an impulse and Broad daylight , and concern a woman's physical presence in, and navigation of, factional spaces in Belfast. After examining the particular political, social and cultural stresses to which Belfast's spaces are subjected, I use Johnston's artworks to concentrate on some resultant issues as they specifically affect women. The work is discussed in connection with constructions of territory in Northern Ireland; the supposed dichotomies between private and public space; the idea of places as containers of memory; the relation of women to place in Belfast, including the relation of women's bodies to cities in general; and the potential of this kind of performative visual art to empower women and to disturb the imagined and actual sectarian geography of the city. I contend that Johnston's work quietly but radically opens out the possibilities of making a place for oneself in a sectarian and oppressive cityscape, providing a model for art practice, for feminist practice, and perhaps even for political practice in Northern Ireland.

Bigotsborough? [START_REF] Longley | The writer and Belfast[END_REF] The psychogeography of Belfast

The power emanating from the conjunction of community and territory could be argued to rest in the known. In the early stages of European colonialism, 'newly discovered' lands challenged monopoly by remaining unknown, a situation which provoked great unease. Although mapmakers may have been thwarted in the quest for complete information by antagonistic natives or difficult terrain, cartographic practice was still 'relentlessly' [START_REF] Baker | Off the map: charting uncertainty in renaissance Ireland[END_REF] exercised over conquered lands in a continuous exhibition of control. Mapping ordered the space into areas known, but also threw into relief how much of it was unknown; it was not a matter of simply and easily transforming uncontrollable space into controlled text, but a constant struggle with shifting supremacies and classifications. Connections may be drawn between this colonial anxiety and the territorial anxiety of contemporary Belfast, and these again relate to cartography. Belfast's official, mapped geographies tell a spatial story that is constantly disrupted and contradicted by any physical exploration of the spaces to which they refer. As Ciara ´n Carson puts it in the poem 'Turn again', There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was never built. A mapping which shows the bridge that collapsed, the streets that never existed . . . Today's plan is already yesterday's Á/ the streets that were are gone. And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons. [START_REF] Carson | Crossing boundaries: Belfast: contemporary art from Northern Ireland (exhibition catalogue)[END_REF] Clearly, the city's physical fluidity is unrepresented textually, and for inhabitants and visitors, an imperfect knowledge of territorial permutations can result in real vulnerability to violence. In Eoin McNamee's novel Resurrection man , the protagonist Victor Kelly's belief in his control over the cityscape is based on his knowledge of the streets and their names. [START_REF] Mcnamee | Resurrection man[END_REF] That belief is overtly disrupted by the constant changes in Catholic/Protestant demography and the destruction and construction of streets in the bombed city, but this special situation merely throws into relief the real fragility of geographical knowledge. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, quoting from Brian Friel's play Translations , perceives Kelly's confusion as a symptom of necessary political change:

the street names become untrustworthy because they imprison the citizens of Belfast 'in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . . fact' (the history of Empire which they tell), and can no longer be relied upon to delineate the contemporary narrative of Belfast: the remapped city no longer corresponds to the deeply etched topography of Victor's racial memory. [START_REF] Kennedy-Andrews | De-)constructing the north: fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969[END_REF] Taking into account the escalation of processes of change and flux due to the Troubles, does the opportunity exist to read Belfast as an exemplary postmodern city? Writer Glenn Patterson makes overt reference to this theoretical positioning in his comments on the city's fluidity: all this (I choose the words deliberately) deconstruction and revision . . . contains within it a certain liberating potential. In particular it resists the closure of traditional interpretations in which one unchanging territory is endlessly contested by two mutually exclusive tribes . . . Identity becomes dynamic rather than birth-given or static. Concepts of flux and exchange replace the language of original states. [START_REF] Patterson | [END_REF] Patterson describes the physical condition of the city of Belfast in words closely associated with textual criticism, whether from within philosophy, history or linguistics, evoking the notion of the city as a text. To imagine the city as text, it is suggested here, is to open out its meanings and subtleties. Returning to the motif of mapping, this kind of argument is often used to point to the makeshift nature of maps, with Richard Phillips stating that 'as a text, the map is inherently unstable, its meaning open to challenge and change'. [START_REF] Phillips | Mapping men and empire: a geography of adventure[END_REF] However, the metaphor of city/text tends dangerously towards abstraction in this context, neglecting the significance of bodily practice in constructions of the city. Jacqueline Rose cautions against the postmodern assumption that instability necessarily liberates. She gives this warning in relation to the struggles to belong in place, politicised and (at times) violent struggles which cannot be theorized away with talk of 'belonging everywhere and nowhere'. 21 Hence, she writes, 'loss of confidence may be welcome, especially when it was misplaced, coercive, oppressive . . . but it is far from clear that the mind leaps from here into freedom. Hearts can retrench; the body which feels weak rearms itself.' 22 The results in Northern Ireland of just such a loss of confidence are evident in Belfast's intercommunal violence, and geographical fragmentation and closure. In Lost lives , a chronicle of those who have died as a result of the Troubles, the authors estimate that Belfast has been the most dangerous place in Northern Ireland for civilians; and in terms of the total deaths attributed to the Troubles, the city claims the vast majority. [START_REF] Mckittrick | Lost lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland Troubles[END_REF] Ciara ´n de Baro ´id, in a history of the west Belfast estate of Ballymurphy, points out that in the 1970s Belfast 'was a city stalked by terror, where only fools strayed onto the main roads'. [START_REF] De Baro ´id | Ballymurphy and the Irish war[END_REF] Re-arming is clearly evident, in terms of bodies, hearts, minds and, importantly, spaces. The constant threat of both random and directed aggression has had marked spatial effects, as areas of the city that once housed Protestants and Catholics together gradually become religiously and politically homogeneous, at least rhetorically. Further, as the city's minority ethnic communities will attest, any kind of difference is unwelcome in certain of these sectarian territories, which are ever more compact and more meticulously defined, down to the scale of individual buildings in some places. [START_REF] Anderson | Sectarian demography, territoriality and political development in Northern Ireland[END_REF] As de Baro ´id claims, this results in extreme levels of restriction of movement around the city, particularly for younger people who have grown up with a psychology of spatial confinement. It is imperative to note that closure and openness coexist in Belfast, as in any other city; the attempt to fix boundaries and territories definitively occurs because such a task is impossible. Belfast's sectarian boundaries are still permeable. Nonetheless, efforts at segregation and spatial control have real, and often negative, effects on physical and psychological experiences of the city, and although attempts have been made to mitigate the establishment of segregated spaces through creating mixed housing areas, for example, fear of the unknown and the need for physical safety often instigate retreats from such ambiguous spaces. Some theorists turn to the arts to find measures of openness and subtlety in understanding and making use of Belfast's sectarian divisions of territory. Echoing Glenn Patterson's positive appropriation of the city's instability, Edna Longley sees optimism in Belfast's state of paradox and incompletion, suggesting that 'its spiritual, political and social complexity . . . is capable of testing the imagination to its limits'. [START_REF] Longley | The writer and Belfast[END_REF] She is referring to the potential and existing richness in literature coming out of Belfast, where critical minds struggle with the city's physical and psychological obstacles and discrepancies. Others see a similar engagement within visual art. Brian McAvera contends that visual artists in particular maintain 'a premium on intelligence, on emotional discrimination, on the rejection of bigotry, on the questioning of all the old loyalties'. [START_REF] Mcavera | Directions out[END_REF] Belfast's sectarian geographies are clearly marked visually in the landscape, most obviously through flags, and colour coding of kerbstones and lamp posts; [START_REF]'s Tricolour (green, white and gold)[END_REF] the visual nature of these signs can be of special interest to artists. For inhabitants of the city, it is almost impossible not to know where you are (or at least make an educated Á/ or bigoted? Á/ guess), with cultural, political and religious markers ranging from the obvious to the extremely subtle. Nuala Gregory, an artist based in Belfast, believes that the inevitability of these overtly polarized political signs forces artists to 'incorporate' the imagery, or 'find expressive means to combat it'. [START_REF] Gregory | Art beyond conflict: an exhibition of work by eight Belfast artists[END_REF] Daniel Jewesbury concurs, pointing out that 'the city is the venue in which meaning is contested, but it's also the contested meaning itself'. [START_REF] Jewesbury | Aperto Belfast[END_REF] McAvera contends that this has resulted in a way of making art that is 'oblique, layered, subterranean . . . [Northern Irish artists] juxtapose, collage . . . they use emblem, symbol, myth.' 31 Sandra Johnston's two pieces, To kill an impulse and Broad daylight , add further levels of complexity to the analysis of Belfast as a place, not least in their personal, performative nature. This paper argues that these negotiations of sectarianized, bounded, oppressive urban places provide a subtle, thoughtful and radical alternative geography, one with quiet political meaning.

To kill an impulse 'To kill an impulse' was put together in 1994. During this period Johnston lived on the Lower Newtownards Road, a strongly loyalist and Protestant part of inner East Belfast, notorious for periodic sectarian conflict with the neighbouring Catholic and republican area of the Short Strand. She had been aware for some time of the extreme levels of tension in the area, and the spatial restrictions and risks imposed on her as a woman and as a newcomer to the road. [START_REF]The Lower Newtownards Road houses a largely Protestant and unionist community, and historically has been the site of violent conflict between Protestant and Catholic due to its proximity to the largely Catholic and nationalist community of the Short Strand. The road is one of the heartlands of loyalist politics and paramilitarism in Belfast[END_REF] In 1994 she suffered a serious attack on the interface between the Short Strand and the Lower Newtownards Road. Within a few days of this incident, a Protestant woman from West Belfast, Margaret Wright, was murdered on the Donegall Road by members of the Red Hand Commando, a loyalist paramilitary group, apparently because they believed her to be a Catholic. [START_REF] Mckittrick | Lost lives . The circumstances of Margaret Wright's murder echoed those of other Protestant women beaten to death by loyalists, including Lorraine McCausland in 1987 and Ann Ogilby in[END_REF] The sense of women's vulnerability to violence, and the tacit community acceptance of violence directed against women, led Johnston to attempt to pay homage to the murdered woman, as well as to express the trauma of her own experience. The first part of the piece that became To kill an impulse involved five or six performance sequences which took place in two skips, one in a rural location and one in Belfast. Margaret Wright's body had been taken from the place of her murder in a bin, and for Johnston, these rubbish receptacles were symbolic of a horrifyingly casual attitude to a woman's life and death. She investigated some skip sites and chose two particularly evocative locations, then made and filmed performative responses to them. Johnston stripped naked and climbed into the skips to interact with their contents, which were mainly the detritus of women's and children's lives; old toys, discarded shoes and clothes, domestic rubbish. She describes her movements as 'frenzied'; 34 while the actions in themselves may have been random and irrational, they represented a determined effort to draw out the emotive qualities of these unwanted items. The speed and vigour of her gestures echoed the sense of attack, but attempted an opposing meaning, where the objects act as surrogates for the violated female bodies. Rather than brutalizing or ignoring these substitutes, she paid minute and passionate attention to them.

Simultaneously, Johnston had been thinking about women's experiences of paramilitary funerals in the area. Such a funeral on the Lower Newtownards Road was a key event, and Johnston had recently found herself caught up in one. The streets had been lined with people, standing still, the shops were closed and shuttered, and a massive corte `ge was moving slowly up the road. Johnston was moving down the road, and drawing disapproving attention to herself by her movement; she began to feel an increasing sense of threat, and was relieved to reach a grocer's shop at the end of the road whose shutters were half-up, in which she could shelter while the procession passed. The shop was positioned at the road's interface with the Short Strand, and the female owner was known to serve both communities. Johnston found herself in the back of the shop along with a few frightened women from the Short Strand, where the shopkeeper was attempting to protect them by bringing the shutters down. Subsequently, senses of these funerals began to infuse Johnston's thinking. The pivotal issues arising included how the corte `ges dominated the area; how women marked the degree of community grief for the deceased, but were denied an active, mobile role in the funeral; and how media attention focused on the protective/repressive stance of the men towards the women in such events. 35 Eventually the two strands came together conceptually and visually for the artist. She connected them through the idea of impulse and the female body; having observed the male impulse to make protective gestures over women's faces and bodies during paramilitary funerals, she related this to the impulse to protect 'your own' at any cost. 36 On the Lower Newtownards Road, as in other parts of Belfast, this can result in inwarddirected violence, the oppressive impulse existing in tandem with the protective impulse. Just as women's bodies channel mourning in a funeral context, and require protection, they may channel difference and disruption in a male-dominated, sectarian territory, and also require suppression. To kill an impulse was eventually exhibited in Berlin, six weeks or so after the attack on Johnston. It was distilled down to two sets of images on slides, one set of the artist's performative movements in the skips, and one set of media images of women at paramilitary funerals (Figure 1). Each was projected from opposite ends of a darkened room, meeting in the middle on a suspended piece of glass she had found in the gallery, marked with greasy handprints and dust. The marks on the glass focused the details of the images against each other, although they materialized simultaneously and more vaguely on the walls of the room. The slides moved rapidly, and the carousels rocked, creating the impression that the projected images were colliding, and evoking a sense of catharsis. 37 The question remains of how To kill an impulse relates to the imagining and understanding of place in Belfast. Of course, the attack suffered by Johnston was woven intimately into the character of place in Belfast; it could be argued that it happened because of place, because of the close proximity of two territories in politico-religious conflict. [START_REF] Johnston Was | The murders of Protestant women Margaret Wright[END_REF] However, aside from its origins in an actual place, the piece itself shows striking contrast between physical and symbolic spaces. I would argue that through To kill an impulse Johnston positions herself, and symbolically positions certain Northern Irish women, on the 'profound edge' of the paper's title, an edge existing on the margins between multiply different spaces. The artwork can be usefully and principally read as a negotiation of the simplistic opposition between public and private space. This does not of course exhaust the possible readings of the piece but, given the historical significance of the public/private opposition for women, seems an appropriate focus. Physically, the public space of the funeral corte `ge is juxtaposed against the private space of the skip. The definition of public space is problematic in Belfast, if it rests on an understanding of 'public' as open and generally accessible. The city being divided into semi-discrete locales, 'public' space on the Lower Newtownards Road is certainly not 'public' space for the people of the neighbouring Short Strand. Nonetheless, in comparison with the skip sites, and in the context of the local Protestant community, the road functions as public. The physically private space of the skip, while real in relation to the road, is equally contingent. Skips are often to be found between or behind buildings, in deserted streets and back alleys, or on waste ground. Johnston chose secluded sites due to an obvious desire for privacy while carrying out her performances, but the physical rawness and vulnerability of the piece emanates from her inability to guarantee that privacy, and hence the heightened risks she took. The two spaces function in symbolic fashion also. In the public space of the road, the funeral corte `ge forms a heavy and unavoidable presence. It moves, but demands stillness from observers. It dominates the space, in other words, as Johnston and the women from the Short Strand discovered. In addition, it reveals an aspect of male spatial control of the area, the female mourners being denied a place in the corte `ge and subjected to bodily censorship by the men. Suzanna Chan relates the suppression of female grief by men in this public context to the threat posed by emotional display out of place Á/that is, outside the private realm. [START_REF] Chan | Women and cities: selected artworks from Belfast[END_REF] In contrast to the space of the funeral, the space of the skips is symbolically as well as literally edgy, or marginal. These containers are positioned on the borders between private and public space, interior and exterior space. In skips the intimate and personal contents of homes are exposed to loss of meaning and affect in the outer world. Skips absorb what doesn't fit neatly into categories of use and value; they become vessels of excess and superfluity, and in this way relate to understandings of women's bodies. Mary Douglas's famous definition of dirt, as 'matter out of place', [START_REF] Douglas | Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo[END_REF] is appropriated by Lynda Nead to analyse the reasons for the male desire to contain the female body through art. Nead describes the female nude in art as 'precisely matter contained', [START_REF] Nead | The female nude: art, obscenity and sexuality[END_REF] the implication being that in its 'natural, un structured' 42 state, it is excess and superfluity, much like the contents of the skip. To return to the notion of a 'profound edge', Nead further emphasizes the importance of the margins of the marginalized female body, which threaten permeability, and therefore become the focus for policing what lies within them; art can 'momentarily [repair] the orifices and tears', 43 but is only ever a temporary solution. Johnston, as a naked woman, performs explicitly and uncomfortably on a spatial margin, and invokes multiple other feminized margins or edges as she does so.

The last comments on the piece concern the final manner of display of the sets of images. The images originate in the structuring of place in a specific part of East Belfast, and their place-based themes persist through the specific structuring of space in the exhibition. Johnston mentioned the rocking of the slide carousels, creating the illusion that the images were jarring against one another in the meeting place of their projections. The difference between the provenances of the images is clear and reinforces the discord; the images of the artist were self-filmed in privacy, whereas the images of the women were filmed by journalists and later broadcast publicly. The complex dichotomy set up between public and private space, between central and marginal places, between male-dominated and female-relegated places, on the Lower Newtownards Road, is eloquently echoed in the exhibition of the work. The image of a lone naked woman frantically working with rubbish in a skip contrasts with the images of static, clothed and protected women, surrounded by men and in a public thoroughfare. The power of the piece lies in the suggestion that these spatial and symbolic dichotomies are fragmentary and permeable, and can be read as such through the linking of the grief of the artist with the grief of the bereaved women. This emotional connection presents us with a difficult double perspective of women's place in the sectarian territories of Belfast, further symbolized in the transparency of the projected-upon surfaces, where the sets of images infused and passed through each other. The protective gesture of the male in the public space is visually transformed into the trace of his oppression in the private space, and vice versa; thus artificial separations of public from private, with accompanying gendered assumptions, are exposed. The 'profound edge' between public and private, male and female, violence and civility, established through the dissonance of the images, is crossed and blurred.

Broad daylight

The ordeal of her attack led Johnston to leave Belfast, and she did not return until 2000, specifically to make a follow-up piece to To kill an impulse which, she hoped, would release her from the trauma associated in her mind and body with the Lower Newtownards Road. 44 That piece was Broad daylight . The risk of essentializing local women's experiences of that area, and making an exploitative performance divorced from its context, was present in Johnston's plan. However, the artist worked closely with women's community groups while she lived on the Lower Newtownards Road, and was not operating wholly on an outsider's assumptions; in addition, and importantly, although Broad daylight was separated in time from her period of living on the road, Johnston explicitly describes it as personal catharsis, and it is less heavily and less obviously inflected by other women's stories than is To kill an impulse . The piece was developed in conversation with two female artists from the Republic of Ireland, Frances Mezzetti and Pauline Cummins. The three women had decided to deal with what they called 'places of the heart', 45 places of such intense personal significance that they had become almost unapproachable. As artists, they also shared an interest in performative techniques, and an ethos that performance work should take place where it has most meaning. Each artist would choose such a site, and the three artists together would create a piece of work there.

Johnston's chosen site was the Lower Newtownards Road. She, Mezzetti and Cummins took time to develop their experience of the area and plan their work. Eventually they set aside five days in which to perform responsively and spontaneously in four places along the entire length of the Newtownards Road, which runs from the Short Strand in the centre of Belfast, south-eastward to the shores of Strangford Lough. Each stage produced 'spontaneous moments of reaction and interaction' which informed the next day's performance. The performances were partially documented, but the piece essentially existed for those brief times in those precise places, and did not have a gallery life; during much of the piece, the women's movements were subtle and understated, and may not have been recognizable as performance to observers, although at times, according to Johnston, movements were 'unrestrained'. 46 Johnston describes the process as the working out of 'an idiosyncratic and deeply personal language that goes in and out of focus according to the environment and circumstances', a bodily language which had been developed among the three artists over the previous year, and which had 'its own internal logic'. 47 The first stage of the work took place over two days on the northern shores of Strangford Lough, involving bodily interaction with the sea, which Johnston represents as a space of innocence and hope, redolent of her childhood, and as a strategic preparation for the difficult experience that lay ahead. The second stage took place around the lower part of the road. Mezzetti discovered a small derelict garden, a relatively enclosed and sheltered space, which she made the locus of her performance. From there, Cummins moved out on to the road, bringing with her a discarded telephone book they had found in the garden. Her performance involved making random calls from a phone box, using the numbers listed in the directory. Johnston then led them towards the site of her attack, facing the memories of fear and vulnerability associated with that place through a series of small gestures and armed with props signifying familiarity, security and love. At one point, Johnston made use of an old coat belonging to her sister, who also used to live in the area. She had it turned inside out, in front of her body, developing movements around the coat imagined as armour and both bringing it to the body and letting go (Figure 2). 48 The third stage took place at Stormont, the seat of Northern Ireland government and a place heavy with the symbolism of power. The artists responded to the steep hill leading up to Stormont's imposing fac ¸ade, moving quietly and reflectively; Johnston says that 'in the doing there was . . . strength, we kept our concentration'. [START_REF]Personal communication from Sandra Johnston by e-mail[END_REF] The fourth stage was intended to draw the ideas and experiences of the previous four days together, and was performed before an invited audience at Scrabo Tower, outside Newtownards. There, the women employed the tower's four floors, the physical proximity of the audience, abstract movements, and sounds and voices recorded purposely for the performance, in order to communicate some of the meanings they had gathered and expressed during the whole work.

Johnston's period of living on the Lower Newtownards Road allowed her to observe the gender-based differences in the use of space there. She noticed that women and children tended to move about the area via alleys running between and beyond houses (again, margins), rarely alone, and rarely via the main streets and the road itself, where solitary men could be clearly seen during most of the day and night. The men were operating as a means of territorial surveillance. She also noticed women's frequent use of cars for trips that could easily be made on foot. 50 This combines to reinforce the sense, suggested in To kill an impulse , that the space of the Lower Newtownards Road has been made inimical in some ways to women, or that, at the very least, women may experience the space as restrictive and threatening. This is central to the shock of Johnston's assault, and to the meaning of the two pieces arising from it.

Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie contend that 'the modernist city' [START_REF] Mclaughlin | Walled cities: surveillance, regulation and segregation[END_REF] has been deliberately constructed to ensure women (among others) are 'restricted, controlled and monitored', resulting in women 'perform [ing], concretized in the flesh, in their very being, the abjected, excluded other of hegemonic masculinist order'. [START_REF] Hooper | quoted in McLaughlin and Muncie[END_REF] Gillian Rose corroborates the notion that certain spaces can be physically oppressive for women; an intrinsic principle of feminist geography is to uncover all ways in which women are spatially marginalized, from the subtle to the overt. Rose argues:

for feminists, the everyday routines traced by women are never unimportant, because the seemingly banal and trivial events of the everyday are bound into the power structures which limit and confine women. She goes on to mention the extreme import of the division between private and public space for maintaining the subjugated position of white women. The qualifying adjective 'white' registers recognition of the differing significance of private space for black and coloured women, for whom the home has been able to function as a place of safety and affirmation, in contrast to the threat of indifference, abuse, and hostility in the public space. Black feminist bell hooks advocates a self-positioning between the two: for me this space of radical openness is a margin Á/ a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a 'safe' place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance. 54 Johnston clearly follows this strategy in To kill an impulse, and indeed is not guaranteed safety, as she wasn't guaranteed safety during day-to-day life in this period. However, existing on this 'profound edge', as a woman in a male-dominated space, and on the border between Protestant and Catholic territory, had damaging emotional repercussions for her. The margin became not only a strategic place of critique and opposition but a place of remembered terror and trauma; in Broad daylight she returns to the margin with 'a community of resistance' in the form of Mezzetti and Cummins. The women helped each other to see each place differently, and provided creative and moral support, but could not assure each other total protection. All three were at risk as women; in performing they were acting to draw attention to themselves within a space of wariness and suspicion; and Mezzetti and Cummins, being from the south of Ireland, were exposed to potential hostility in this loyalist stronghold each time they spoke. Johnston acknowledged that each of them was very nervous about being on the Lower Newtownards Road. She herself felt extremely vulnerable in the space, but simultaneously felt the need to protect Mezzetti and Cummins, and the three were determined to maintain the integrity of their relations and the independence of their performance despite their exposure. 55 The performative nature of the artwork ensured confrontation of this vulnerability at its source, in public space, which leads me to define it (provisionally) as 'performative negotiations'; the artists, rather than definitively altering the circumstances of spatial restriction and fear on the Lower Newtownards Road, were using their bodies and minds to navigate possible alternative paths, negotiating with the space and its inhabitants for their own safety and successful completion of the work. The 'community of resistance' which partnered Johnston in the exploration of her place within sectarian city spaces facilitated her recuperation of the 'profound edge' as a place of action and resistance rather than passivity and acceptance.

The expression of these women's experiences of the Newtownards Road through performance also holds gendered significance. The use of bodily performance by women artists has occasionally attracted controversy. As Ellen Rooney points out, 'the body is of course essentialism's great text', [START_REF] Rooney | In a word (interview with Gayatri Spivak)[END_REF] white Western males' Others being categorized and described through bodily difference. Given the history of women's bodies having been 'folded into the patriarchal regime as fundamentally objectified and alienated from the women's ''self''', [START_REF] Jones | Body art: performing the subject[END_REF] feminists have struggled to assert women's ability to make visual use of their bodies without necessarily objectifying themselves. Despite the risks of being misinterpreted as having offered their bodies to the sexualized male gaze, many women artists consider performance has the potential to upset phallocentric attempts at essentializing and disarming the female body. In postcolonial theory, the bodies and voices of the West's Others are sometimes employed to unsettle the 'Eurocentric and logocentric' 58 reliance on textual meaning, within which those bodies and voices can be seen only as absence. Performance in visual art and in theatre affirms the existence of diverse and individual bodies, and their validity as sites of agency and meaning. Helen Gilbert believes the transgressive power of these kinds of performance for women particularly to reside in the activity of the body, 'a moving subject that actually looks back at the spectator, eluding the kind of appropriation that the ''male gaze'' theories of cinema outline'. [START_REF] Gilbert | Dance, movement and resistance politics[END_REF] In addition, a woman performer's appearance and its coding constantly shift, as she moves and assumes poses and roles, asserting human mutability and denying the desire for a single, static, and coherent representation of 'Woman'. Johnston, Mezzetti and Cummins refuse the traditionally passive and invisible roles assigned to women in these spaces, confronting both the relative defencelessness of their bodies and their power to act differently and disruptively within the spaces. More generally, performativity is suggested by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to be a means of evading an unhelpful choice between falsely polarized mind and flesh, in this case in understanding place. Its combination of thoughtfulness and bodily practice enables 'a more nuanced understanding of what might have been blandly, confidently distinguished as ''text'' and ''context'''; [START_REF] Parker | Introduction: performativity and performance[END_REF] performance, it could be argued, was one means of avoiding a merely intellectual and logocentric revision of the meaning of the Lower Newtownards Road, a revision which would have had no presence in the space itself. The artist's statement which accompanied this piece mentions the importance of memory in the construction of places, linking body, mind and space, the poet echoing Ciara ´n Carson's concerns with the discrepancy between memories, imaginings and actualities of the city apparent in his poem 'Turn again' discussed earlier. Johnston writes:

witnessing change is a persistent challenge in Northern Ireland, in order to rethink environments disfigured by paramilitary boundaries. Within the processes of regeneration, there is an internal mental geography, which lags behind the physical transformation, a reluctance to acknowledge the facelifts. In areas of deep division where street names are still synonymous with death and terrorism, how can memory be reconfigured [?] 61 The work attempted this reconfiguration of memory, performatively and personally excising the trauma associated with the place for Johnston. Joseph Roach highlights the 'interdependence of performance and collective memory', [START_REF] Roach | Culture and performance in the circum-Atlantic world[END_REF] defining performance as '''restored behavior'' or ''twice-behaved behavior'''. 63 Although performance depends on repetition of remembered actions, no action may be performed in precisely the same way twice; thus, Roach contends, 'in this improvisatory behavioral space, memory reveals itself as imagination'. 64 This is extremely important for Johnston's asserted personal purpose in performing Broad daylight . In addition, she suggests that the piece symbolically performed a partial and provisional release of the place itself from the tyranny of its sectarian associations, which affect many people other than Johnston. This notion echoes that of 'rememory', occurring in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved: in the context of African-American slave history, remembering is a thoroughly fragmented and painful process, and Morrison develops the idea that memories root themselves in places and recur there, independently of those to whom they originally belonged. [START_REF] Morrison | Women and cities[END_REF] A similar understanding of the effects of memory on place can be seen in Broad daylight , applied to the history of terrorism and violence in Belfast. Edward Soja, unfolding his concept of 'Thirdspace', or the spaces between the binaries of history and geography, ponders the potential of a 'remembrance-rethinking-recovery of spaces lost', 66 bringing to light the potential of memory and imagination to transform space. In line with these theories, Johnston struggled to break the hold of individual and collective memories on Belfast's spaces and to imagine places differently through art practice, with both personal and communal implications.

As the city's physical geography shifts, so eventually must its mental geography, and the idea of movement is central to Broad daylight and central to any challenge of the spatial stasis and flux of Belfast. Suzanna Chan, for example, notes the symbolic power of movement in this artwork in a city where 'arbitrary wandering has not been an option'. 67 The control of territory in Belfast is enacted obsessively and anxiously because territories alter shape and shift hands; like colonial mapping, it is a performance of order in heterogeneous and elusive space. The physical implications of this use of space are clear. Areas of control are marked out, borders are defended, defined routes develop within and through the city, which allow people of any community to avoid spaces in which they feel threatened. The symbolism of stasis and flux is also important here. Stasis, for example, is often made to connote masculinity and flux femininity within feminist discourses; of course, in masculinist world-views, woman has traditionally been associated with the static immanent and man with the mutable transcendent. In geographical terms this has been translated into the conception of home as an unchanging feminine realm, and the conception of the outer world as an unpredictable masculine realm. However, French theorist He ´le `ne Cixous identifies a 'masculine' economy (philosophical, linguistic and actual), which is predicated on rationality, singularity, unity, transparency, categories and borders, ownership, anxiety and stasis. She names this economy 'the Empire of the Selfsame', [START_REF] Cixous | The newly born woman[END_REF] and against it contrasts what she believes to be a feminine economy, expressing the 'wonder' of 'being several and turmoil'. [START_REF] Cixous | The He´le`ne Cixous reader[END_REF] This facilitates a reading of Broad daylight as a strategic mapping out of 'feminine' geographies inside a 'masculine' space, both literally, in that the three women operated within a male-controlled area, and metaphorically. 70 Johnston, Mezzetti and Cummins moved through the length of the Newtownards Road. Their use of its entire length emphasizes its linkage of a variety of spaces, from the rural to the inner city, and from the official spatial symbols of the former unionist state (governmental buildings at Stormont) to the intimate and troubled underside of that state (Short Strand and the Lower Newtownards Road). They negotiated boundaries between the private and the public, the urban and the rural, working-class space and governmental space, and in this way explicitly performed the real permeability and contingency of these categories. They made unorthodox movements within the spaces of Stormont and the Lower Newtownards Road, movements which enact the deeply personal against the indifference or even hostility of the public domain. The radical potential of women's movements is highlighted by Jane Rendell, who points to the little-mentioned 19thcentury figure of the cyprian, or peripatetic urban prostitute. She identifies the cyprian as 'the only female to move through the streets and public spaces of [the city]', and goes on to reveal that: while the rambler [a 19-century male archetype] is celebrated as an urban explorer, actively engaged in the constant pursuit of pleasure, the figure of the mobile cyprian is a cause of concern. Her movement represents the blurring of public and private boundaries, the uncontrollability of women in the city. 71 According to Rendell, women may still move around the city, but the historical context for such movement positions mobile women as potentially illicit, and certainly on the edge of acceptability. Indeed, for the cyprian, 'her mobility, her link to the street, to the public places of the city, is represented as the cause of her eventual destruction'. 72 Broad daylight , then, performed two distinct facets of the transgressive potential of movement. First, the accidental or unknowing transgression of spatial codes and restrictions, which could result in attack, and second, the deliberate transgression of spatial codes and restrictions in order to assert an alternative and liberating geography. This Other geography is imagined as overtly female by Elizabeth Wilson: the city is 'masculine' in its triumphal scale, its towers and vistas and arid industrial regions; it is 'feminine' in its enclosing embrace, in its indeterminacy and labrynthine uncenteredness. We might even go so far as to claim that urban life is actually based on this perpetual struggle between rigid routinized order and pleasurable anarchy, the male Á/female dichotomy. [START_REF] Wilson | The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society[END_REF] Wilson slips into essentialism in her definitions, but importantly recognizes that 'masculine' and 'feminine' spaces within the city Á/ that is, multiple and different spaces and uses of space Á/ coexist, overlap and mesh together, as demonstrated by Johnston, Mezzetti and Cummins.

These myriad versions of space are tied together in part by the use of the women's bodies, which can be read as a feminist strategy also. In negotiating the spaces personally, through their unmediated bodies, they exposed themselves to bodily risk, but also challenged the politics that result in women shielding themselves in cars in order to move about a space. The editors of The unknown city commend the attention to bodily practice in revealing the layered meanings of place: the body is particularly useful for thinking about the triad of the perceived, conceived and lived . . . this body is practical and fleshy. Contemplating space with the whole body and all senses, not just with the eyes and intellect, allows more awareness of conflict and so of a space that is other. [START_REF] Borden | Things, flows, filters, tactics[END_REF] Broad daylight exemplified this notion of space, in its weaving together of bodily vulnerability and resistance, and of experience, emotion and understanding. It is its grounding in bodily experience which provides some of the power and the feminist significance of the work. Women have been instrumental in refiguring spatial awareness through the instatement of the body as 'the geography closest in'. [START_REF] Rich | Blood, bread and poetry: selected prose 1979 Á/1985[END_REF] This is Adrienne Rich's phrase, and she uses it to demonstrate the need to avoid abstraction when discussing space and place. In order to be able to speak and act politically with some authority, women need to locate themselves, which in Rich's mind means location within the 'particular, living . . . individual' 76 body. She negates the possibility of transcending the body, asserting rather that power comes from the ability to 'reconnect our thinking and speaking' 77 with our physical bodies. This practice attests to the multiplicity of experiences of space. In the case of Broad daylight , the space negotiated through the three women's bodies, and those bodies themselves, facilitated a more complex and fluid understanding of the apparently closed and static territories of Belfast. Through bodily and 'potentially emancipatory praxis ' 78 Johnston, Mezzetti and Cummins achieved a critique of: the dominance of the visual [and the textual . . . which] allows us to understand the city and the female as more than objects of the male gaze, opening up possibilities both of self-representation for women and of new ways to comprehend the experiential qualities of the city. 79

Conclusion

To kill an impulse starkly depicts the difficulty and vulnerability of women's spatial experiences in Belfast. This artwork is followed by Broad daylight , which enables the imagining of Belfast as a more permeable and fragmented space than it appears, not through theory alone, but through the interpretation and reworking of bodily experiences. The willingness of Johnston, and later the three artists together, to be bodily and emotionally exposed in a potentially hostile space gives each work a radical edge. Johnston's body actually suffered a random attack, but she confronts that sense of helplessness through the subsequent deliberate choice to put herself in marginal, unpredictable and insecure places as a strategy of recovery and spatial refiguration. The performative enactment of this particular woman's mental and physical geography draws attention to the threats, restrictions and closures which many women negotiate in these territories as a matter of course. The act of performance itself asserts agency and disrupts the attempts to control difference and movement within Belfast's disturbed locales, and accrues further significance in a city and province where collective memories of the painful cost of standing out are strong. The artists' uses of their bodies, and those bodies' particular encounters with particular spaces, effectively ground the attempt to challenge the city's sectarian geographies within the actual oppressions and restrictions of those geographies, but also expose alternatives within them, and reach beyond them. As noted by Hilary Robinson, 'art . . . feeds back into its context and thus is co-productive of its future context'; [START_REF] Robinson | Fragments and speculations towards a context for ''crossing borders[END_REF] Johnston's long-term and intimate engagement with the Lower Newtownards Road prior to making her artworks goes some way towards ensuring that such a use of context is neither shallow nor exploitative. I contend that the most profound relevance of Johnston's work to the political and religious contexts within which it was conceived and carried out lies in its public and personal nature. It is rare to find such a resolute exposure of the private and painful consequences of publicly manifested sectarianism in the spaces in Northern Ireland which most nearly approach politico-religious neutrality, let alone in one of the most troubled spaces of its troubled principal city; this kind of personal honesty and courage should resonate beyond the art world, especially in a province where the cultural imperative towards pragmatic silence persists in strength across communities. Johnston has made an important contribution to a fragile precedent in Northern Ireland for telling stories as a means of overcoming mutual fear and suspicion; 81 she bore witness to her own harsh experience, and invoked that of others, and managed to do so publicly but subtly. The political significance of these works, while understated, should not be underestimated.

settlement happened post-Reformation, which inhibited the wholesale integration of the (substantially Protestant) English and Scots planters with the (substantially Catholic) native Irish population. Ireland was predominantly rural before plantation, and indeed for a long time afterwards, with significant alteration in the demographic balance between town and country only happening in the past few decades. Hence, towns and cities have been seen historically as bastions of planter power, which is significant for this discussion of the spaces of Belfast. Centuries of mutual suspicion, fear, frequent intercommunal violence, and subsequent segregation and oppression eventually led to the partition of Ireland into the (mainly Catholic) south and west and the (mainly Protestant) north and east in the early 1920s. Northern Ireland was created for, and for a long time controlled by, unionists, but still contained a substantial proportion of Catholics and Irish nationalists, many of whom were deeply unhappy with their inclusion in a specifically Protestant and British statelet. In addition, they were subjected to varied injustices by the unionist government in the north on the grounds of religion and politics. Thus, after sporadic and relatively ineffective periods of nationalist resistance in the decades since 1920, the phase of conflict now known as the Troubles broke out in the late 1960s. These years saw the beginning of peaceful agitation for civil rights for Catholics, and the intercommunal tensions arising from such a challenge to the status quo soon escalated, with provocation from all sides Á/ unionist and nationalist communities in the north, the Northern Irish, Irish and British governments, the Northern Irish police and British military, and established and emerging paramilitary movements. Although the Troubles have been officially superseded by a peace process, since paramilitary ceasefires in the mid-1990s, many communities remain deeply affected by sectarianism, paramilitary control, violence and poverty. In this paper, at the most simple levels, in references to 'nationalists' the term means those on the island of Ireland who want the whole island to be under Irish governance, and who consider themselves to be Irish first and foremost; references to 'unionists' mean those on the island of Ireland who want to remain under British jurisdiction, and who maintain a British identity on the island. The terms 'loyalist' and 'republican' are commonly used to represent the extremes of unionist and nationalist politics respectively, although those who identify themselves with either term by no means necessarily support political violence.

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Sandra Johnston,To kill an impulse , 1994, mixed media installation. (Image courtesy of Sandra Johnston.)

  53

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Sandra Johnston, Broad daylight , 2000, performance. (Image courtesy of Sandra Johnston.)

'A profound edge': performative negotiations of Belfast

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the financial support of the AHRC. I would like to thank Suzanna Chan for pointing me to the pieces of art used in this paper, and for providing me with a copy of her essay (in which they appear), 'Women and cities', prior to its publication. I am very grateful to Sandra Johnston for the time she took to discuss her work with me, providing valuable insights into its provenance and context. Finally, I greatly appreciate Brian Graham's advice and encouragement, and his reading of and comments on a draft of this paper.


Jill Fenton

Space, chance, time: walking backwards through the hours on the left and right banks of Paris

In connection with cultural geography's current interest in themes of exploring and intervening in the city, this paper narrates an intervention in Paris authored by Jean-Pierre Le Goff. Le Goff is renowned in France for his interventions in both town and country that play with the dictates of chance. The walk takes participants to 12 locations on an imaginary geographical clock that Le Goff has plotted on a map of Paris. Participants are invited to walk anticlockwise the hours on the clock and at the site of each hour to place as many cards as the hour, drawn at random from a deck of tarot. In the progress of the walk the participants find themselves caught up in disclosing a cryptogram that links with individual mythologies while revealing a city within a city . The subterranean temporalities of Le Goff's intervention connect with ideas of play and re-enchanting the city; they unearth incidences of objective chance and the uncanny as well as the city's hidden signs. They enable countercultural practices to evolve that suggest the lived moment is significant to thinking about alternative narratives in studies of urban geography. I invite you to accompany me the length of this journey to trace with our steps the circle of a clock of which the hands turn in reverse. From 12 we will pass to 11, from 11 to 10 and so on until we return to our point of departure.

On the 12, at the foot of the cork tree, will be pulled at the dictates of chance 12 tarot cards; on the 11, 11 cards chosen similarly; on the 10 and the rest the principle will continue. Make the calculation and you will see that the sum of the 12 numbers is 78 as the number of cards of the game of tarot.

I think that we will arrive at our point of departure well before parting there. Therefore, if you would like to regain your youth, be in front of number 10 rue Tiquetonne (me ´tro E ´tienne-Marcel) Sunday 10 November 2002 at 10 am; the walk will be long, perhaps en route we will stop for lunch. [START_REF]Extract of undated invitation of Jean-Pierre Le Goff entitled 'Le temps a `rebours[END_REF] A n invitation from Jean-Pierre Le Goff, who is renowned in France for his interventions of place that play with the dictates of chance. Le Goff is drawn to the city's concealed, out-of-the-way, obsolete and banal places that in the course of the everyday go unnoticed. Within these he is fascinated by the plane trees, flora, street names, signs and messages that evoke curiosity: 'If a place emits some sort of vibrations or waves I can feel this and I am able to translate these into words. Always there is a correspondence with places, resonance and correspondence.' 2 Participants in Le Goff's interventions in the city are exposed to its mysterious layers that connect with individual mythologies, while uncanny moments reveal the city's cryptogram. 3 Le Goff uses his knowledge of etymology, astronomy, geometry and historical geography to investigate the innermost of places and he combines this with a natural curiosity: 'I am very receptive, permeable to things going around, and there are some things that fascinate me, for example, anodyne, non-quiet places that disturb me, where I can find interest in the non-immediate and the strange.' 4 Le Goff is a pataphysician, 5 banalist 6 and surrealist who joined the surrealist movement in Paris in the 1960s. Although subsequently he has not been involved in surrealist collective activity, he is intrinsically surrealist, and motivated by the same obsessions about place and individual mythology that inspire surrealists today both to participate in his interventions and to have a unique engagement with the city. It was through my doctoral research on contemporary surrealist utopian practices and knowledges in Paris that I first heard about Le Goff's interventions and arranged to meet him. We talked endlessly of our shared fascination with symbolism and the city, and I was invited by him to participate in an intervention he had organized in Fe ´camp, Normandy. The importance of Le Goff's interventions to my research became increasingly apparent to me, in that they epitomize contemporary surrealist spatial practices. This has extended to a personal interest: I have joined the vast following of people on Le Goff's mailing list, and from time to time I participate in his interventions.

This paper, in connection with cultural geography's interest in themes of exploring and intervening in the city, is about walking backwards through the hours on the left and right banks of Paris as part of an expedition involving space, chance and time. Spatially, a correspondence occurs between ground level and a mythical subterranean plain, uncovering hidden layers of the city and embracing signs that have an effect of wonderment. Chance is an important element in encountering en route these extraordinary signs that demonstrate both coincidence and the uncanny. Time is experienced both in a linear form and as having momentum connected to ambience, mood and motivation.

The paper opens at the first location of the geographical clock, the 12th hour, and reveals the intervention's subterranean significance. At points around the clock the intervention is examined in terms of play, adventure and the 'speech act of walking'. It is discussed with reference to objective chance and the uncanny. At the location of the 6th hour, the intervention is considered with reference to countercultural practices that challenge the city's visual order and dominant narratives. At the 5th hour, it is discussed in terms of enchantment resisting disenchantment, while at the location of the 4th hour it is examined with reference to the lived moment as an alternative geographical imagination of the city that evokes utopian possibility. The intervention's evoking of secret histories is considered at the 2nd hour, followed by discussion at the 1st hour of narratives that reveal a city other than that portrayed in accounts of urban planning and urban theory. The paper closes reflectively in a cafe ´near to our point of departure at the 12th hour.

Return of lost youth

For exploring time in reverse in Paris, Le Goff's inspiration is two passages of Jacques Yonnet's Enchantements sur Paris . [START_REF] Yonnet | repr. as Rue des male´fices: chronique d'une ville secre`te[END_REF] In the first passage Yonnet proposes that the true centre of Paris is located on a north Á/south axis between two symbols Á/ the sign of a cork oak tree located at 10 rue Tiquetonne, north of the centre of Paris in the 2nd arrondissement, and the ensign of an old oak tree at 69 rue Mouffetard, south of the centre of Paris in the 5th arrondissement. In the second passage, Yonnet makes reference to a clock with hands that turn anticlockwise and permit the return of lost youth. Thus, Le Goff has imagined constructing on this alchemical axis a geographical clock of which the 12th hour corresponds to the sign of the cork tree on the right bank of Paris, and the 6th hour to the sign of the oak tree on the left bank. On a map of Paris, Le Goff has located the central point of the axis Á/ a landmark to the left of Notre-Dame Á/ and he has drawn a circumference on which he has plotted 308 segments representing the hours of a clock (Figure 1).

The 12th hour: beneath the roots of the cork oak tree

The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. [START_REF] De Certeau | The practice of everyday life[END_REF] By implication, Le Goff's intervention is marked by a sense that what takes place beneath the roots of two alchemical trees is of a nature that evokes a city within a city . Like tree roots that secretly travel beneath concrete and tarmac, the meanderings of the invisible roots of the cork oak tree at 10 rue Tiquetonne evoke wandering and wonderment as participants, lured into a world in which esoteric forces are at play, amble around a mythical subterranean plain. Here, in a common surrealist analogy, the subterranean is understood in a Dionysian sense, associated with seeking some kind of ultimate truth or reality in the form of primitive oral cultures or mystic telluric forces and in opposition to the rational, one-dimensional society of the Apollonian overworld. 9 The subterranean terrain in which we are about to travel is thus an urban underworld that evokes the irrational, sublime, mysterious and poetic.

At the location of the 12th hour of the geographical clock, in response to Le Goff's postal invitation and attracted by the possibility of regaining lost youth, eight individuals rendezvous beneath the emblem of the cork oak tree. Apart from the three of us known to each other through the surrealist movement, we are strangers engaging together in an adventure that has an aura of mystery. As is normal with Le Goff's interventions, except for those of us more intimately acquainted, we do not seek to get to know each other nor collectively to share any personal detail that may not be associated with the intervention. As we proceed, we are commonly aroused by its periodic outputs of mystery, our subterranean adventure evoking, as Steve Pile suggests, a counterbalance between surface and depth through the spaces of the city and the body. [START_REF] Pile | The un(known) city . . . or, an urban geography of what lies buried below the surface[END_REF] In the shop window beneath the emblem of the cork oak tree a red sign is displayed on which is printed in large letters the word WONDER. As we gather round to draw randomly 12 cards from a well-shuffled pack of tarot, and Le Goff arranges them on the step of the shop named WONDER (Figure 2), we comment on this sign; it is perhaps coincidence but suggests that the day is instilled with a sense of wonderment or the marvellous in which, as Le Goff proposes, 'all is possible'. 11 With expectations raised, we observe that one of the participants, a member of the present-day surrealist movement, mysteriously draws card VI Á/ l'Amoureux, the Lover Á/ significant not only because it is drawn on one half of the geographical axis of the intervention, but also because it represents one part of the vertical axis of the tarot (Figure 3). [START_REF] Chevalier | Dictionnaires des symbols: myths, reˆves, coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres[END_REF] We are held in a moment of wonderment, and ponder the possible location where card XVII Á/ l'E ´toile, translated the star Á/ will be drawn that would constitute the other part of that vertical axis. The element of chance underlines the intervention; as the hours on the map were decided by the geometry of the compass, so whatever we encounter en route is unknown. Le Goff is familiar with the symbolism on the northÁ/south axis, but he does not have an intimate knowledge of signs we may encounter at other locations as we walk in a reverse sense around the geographical clock. Participation in Le Goff's intervention evokes a sense of playfulness and play's inclination to transform space. We enter spaces with a spirit of intuition and adventure, and in confronting new elements and signs our emotions of childlike surprise and pleasure become appended to the landscape. We are as children; as Alastair Bonnett suggests, we reimagine everyday space, ignite hidden and unused corners with possibility and provocation, enact 'eerie encounters, forbidden games, and . . . destructive passions' that evoke the possible transformation of urban life. [START_REF] Bonnett | The transgressive geographies of daily life: socialist pathways within everyday urban spatial creativity[END_REF] Michel de Certeau proposes that making use of space is to repeat childhood experience Á/ 'to be other and to pass to the other' Á/ and that childhood determines the practices of space, defaces its readable surfaces, and creates in the planned city a 'metaphorical' city as in one of Kandinsky's dreams Á/ '[a] great city built in accordance with all the rules of architecture and suddenly shaken by an unpredictable and incalculable force'. [START_REF] De Certeau | Walking in the city[END_REF] Our adventuring is characteristic of play, in being gratuitous fun that we enter into of our own free will and, as Nigel Thrift suggests, configuring a way of being that engages with fantasy, escape and achievement. [START_REF] Thrift | The still point: resistance, expressive embodiment and dance[END_REF] The 11th hour: at the Cafe ´of Time

We arrive at the location of the 11th hour, the entrance to Galerie Ve ´ro Dodat, where we draw eleven cards that are arranged on the pavement next to a potted tree outside the Cafe ´de l'E ´poque, the Cafe ´of Time. The surprise discovery of this name, both to our master of ceremonies and ourselves, dramatizes the instant in which the cards are placed on the pavement. As Peggy Phelan suggests, we are caught in a moment of presence and absence, of performance occurring over a time that will not be repeated, for whilst it can be performed again the repetition itself marks it as 'different'. [START_REF] Phelan | Unmarked the politics of performance[END_REF] We know the eleven cards that testify to this performance will not be a permanent landmark: this episode is unique and, as Phelan comments, 'honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward'. 17 The 10th hour: the insignia of a wild crabtree According to the cultural theorist Roger Cardinal, signs exist not only to be decoded but also to be felt. They attend to our irrationality, obscure emotions and unspoken desires. [START_REF]Soluble city: the surrealist perception of Paris[END_REF] Crossing the Pont du Carrousel, that takes us from the right bank of Paris onto the left bank, we place 10 cards at the Quai Malaquais then walk up rue des Saints Pe `res. Along this route, one participant directs our attention to the bas-relief of a wild crabtree on the building of Crabtree and Evelyn, causing us to reflect again on the subterranean nature of our journey and to contemplate how the intervention momentarily transforms a symbol of commodification into one of esoteric significance. Rossiter and Gibson comment that this kind of engagement with the city is an invitation to permit 'sudden flashes of illumination and chance stumblings across hidden treasures', and an 'opportunity to reshape urban knowledge, invigorate pro-urban sentiments and write alternative scripts for the postmodern city'. [START_REF] Rossiter | Walking and performing ''the city'': a Melbourne chronicle[END_REF] At the same time there is the discovery of a 'speech act' of walking that entails creating stories, inventing spaces and opening up the city through 'its capacity to produce ''anti-texts'' within the text'. 20 In this ambulatory occupation of urban space, unrealized possibilities surface that give rise to emotions and feelings that may have been dormant. On the pavement, a flow of feelings and speech takes place between participants, coloured by signs of the marvellous, which, as the surrealist Pierre Mabille suggests, go beyond the limits of space and time and evoke a tension that is both passionate and poetic while isolated from the routine and banal. [START_REF] Mabille | Le merveilleux[END_REF] The 9th hour: 'un moment' On arriving at rue du Sabot, we note that directly opposite the location for the placing of nine tarot cards there is a shop named 'un moment'. When walking towards our destination for depositing eight cards, we pass through rue de Rennes and then rue de Vaugirard, in which we notice the premises of two watch-and clockmakers on opposite sides of the road. We stop to reflect on these significations of time and space and discuss if they can be explained in terms of surrealist objective chance . Cardinal suggests that objective chance is 'the recognition of a meaningful relationship between events occurring within the private space of the psyche and events taking place in the world of concrete objects and material circumstance'. [START_REF]Objective chance' is discussed by Roger Cardinal in Breton Nadja[END_REF] To illustrate this, Cardinal invokes Hegel's model of the relation of the subject to the outer world, one that supposes the workings of blind chance are conditioned by systematic dialectical processes through which all phenomena pass. Thus, objective chance is a correspondence between subjectivity and objectivity, between internal impulse and external sign, or the encounter of an external causality and an internal finality. Arguably, objective chance could also be described as magic-circumstantial . [START_REF] Foster | Compulsive beauty[END_REF] Le Goff seems to have an expectation that something will happen along the route, hence confirming this dialectical relation with place that repeatedly manifests itself during the intervention. Alternatively, in making these discoveries en route we are, as Jane Bennett suggests, embracing both pleasure and a sense of the uncanny. [START_REF] Bennett | The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics[END_REF] The 8th hour: could one travel in time?

At the jardin du Luxembourg we place eight cards on a bench and cross rue Auguste-Comte, spotting on the facade of the Armand Colin bookshop the bas-relief of an alchemical tree. In passing a Catholic bookshop we notice in the window a book entitled Peut-on voyager dans le temps? (Can one travel in time?). We become caught up in this instant of the uncanny that evokes Freud's double feeling of strangeness emerging simultaneously with the familiar. Freud describes the uncanny as '[t]he most remarkable coincidences of desire and fulfilment, the most mysterious recurrence of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights'. [START_REF] Freud | The uncanny', cited in Foster[END_REF] Pile suggests that such unconscious, emotional life is at the heart of the city and is an intermeshing of desire and fear, of presence and absence. 26 Walking away from the bookshop window I become aware of a lingering anxiety yet also an energetic desire to encounter more of these instances that are dreamlike, magical and transitory. [START_REF] Pinder | Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city[END_REF] They are occasions of 'profane illumination', illuminating rupturing, and having the potential for other ways of seeing and experiencing time and space. [START_REF] Pinder | Old Paris is no more'': geographies of spectacle and anti-spectacle[END_REF] As we proceed around the geographical clock, there is a common desire to witness more of these signs and to grasp at what Pile refers to as a specifically urban and spatial 'disease', and that Pinder describes as 'something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light'. [START_REF] Pile | The un(known) city[END_REF] We are travelling in a psychic landscape that through mind and body offers other ways of imagining the landscapes of cityness and of evoking its physicalities, juxtapositions, connections and openness. [START_REF] Pile | The problem of London'', or, how to explore the moods of the city[END_REF] As we continue our expedition on the left bank Á/ to the angle of rue Saint-Jacques and rue des Feuillantines Á/ and place seven cards on the pavement adjacent to the brasserie l'E ´toile, we wonder why at this location the card XVII, l'E ´toile, has not been drawn. Momentarily, our anticipation and sense of magic is suspended.

The 6th hour: beneath the roots of the old oak tree

All day the rain has poured down, and at the point where we are nearly half-way around the clock the downpour intensifies. Time for lunch, but not before arriving at 69 rue Mouffetard, where six cards are randomly drawn and we observe that the one drawn by myself is card XVII. Le Goff arranges the cards on a step beneath the emblem of the old oak tree (Figure 4) while we contemplate the persistence of subterranean magic, for in the same moment that the geographical axis is completed, by pure chance the axis of the tarot is also complete. Even more surprising is the fact that the participants who drew both card VI at the 12th hour and card XVII at the 6th hour are members of the surrealist movement, for whom these two cards have esoteric significance. [START_REF]Since the beginning of the surrealist movement there has been an interest in the occult traditions of hermetics, alchemy and astrology. Hence Andre ´Breton's reference to surrealism as l'[END_REF] Furthermore, according to Chevalier and Gheerbrant's Dictionnaire des symboles , card VI represents affectivity and card XVII hope, and these two cards are the pivot around which gravitate all the cards of the tarot. [START_REF]Bonnett bases his discussion on a reading of Colin Ward's The child in the city[END_REF] I am reminded of my discussion about sidereal geography 33 and astrology with Marie-Dominique Massoni, a member of the surrealist group in Paris, and I recognize that for the individuals who drew cards VI and XVII Á/ and arguably for all the participants to the intervention Á/ the north Á/south axis of these cards, signified by alchemical and astrological symbols, is one of sacred orientation. [START_REF]Massoni suggests that the area on the map of Paris on which this line is situated is important in terms of wellbeing, happiness and affinity to the cosmos[END_REF] How in the future this sacred orientation will manifest itself is unknown.

After a two-hour lunch break, en route to the location of the 5th hour, we decide to revisit 69 rue Mouffetard, where we observe that the six cards we placed there earlier are undisturbed. Perhaps passers-by are in awe of them or, more likely, they are passed unnoticed in this impersonal quarter of the 5th arrondissement, one dominated by commodity tourism and, as Pinder suggests, 'marked by the loss of an outside to capitalism'. 35 In this respect Le Goff's intervention produces an alternative narrative of space that is subversive and countercultural; it is completely outside of capitalism and of that commodity culture which appears to hypnotize most the tourists and shoppers frequenting the centre of Paris. This resistant element of the intervention seemingly entangles it with relations of power. However, in constructing his interventions, Le Goff is not impelled by social or political concerns but by curiosity of place and creativity. Le Goff acquaints capitalism with a sense of the real that, he comments, 'is not to be rejected even if it hurts. I like to be in the real, not in a materialistic sense, but because I believe that dream is utterly linked to reality. I don't submit to reality but I try to model or moderate it'. [START_REF] Interview | [END_REF] He is oblivious to the fact that his intervention challenges dominant models, perceiving it as offering a way of being in the world that is poetic and engages with virtual 'as if' worlds, thus evoking an other city which, as Andy Merrifield suggests, gives central place to passion, striving, dreaming . . . a social and psychological space in which the possibilities for adventure and intrigue could intensify, and where our senses Á/ seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting, wanting, acting and loving Á/ could blossom. [START_REF] Merrifield | Dialectical urbanism: social struggles in the capitalist city[END_REF] This disentangling of Le Goff's intervention from relations of domination arguably suggests that it falls into a middle ground between two perspectives: 38 . . . like awakening from a dream. All around are the structures of corporate and financial power . . . Yet, while still in their shadows, thoughts turn to other map-makers and tale-tellers with their own stories to relate, with their own narratives and interventions that insinuate different meanings into, or directly contest, dominant scriptings of urban space. 39 The 5th hour: the rotting enchanter At the Jardin des Plantes we draw five cards and Le Goff places these on an antiquated stone table, la Table de Plaisanterie, that stands on a lawn littered with rotting autumnal leaves. We notice that one of the cards is XIII, a card that in the tarot is without name and depicts death. We recall that in 1947, when surrealists were assigning titles to the major arcane of the tarot, they named this card 'The rotting enchanter', the title of a work by Apollinaire 40 in which he states: 'When the fruit is ripe, it drops and doesn't wait for the gardener to come and pick it up. Let man, that fruit ripening freely on the tree of light, do the same'. [START_REF] Apollinaire | translated as The rotting enchanter[END_REF] The symbolism of this card is not about death but connected to change, transformation and passage from lower to higher. We realize that this analogy is also evoked in the origins of la Table de Plaisanterie. For many years a circular stone hidden underground in the forest of Chantilly, it was discovered, taken to the Jardin des Plantes and placed overground, where it has since been understood to represent a table. [START_REF] Caradec | Guide de Paris myste´rieux[END_REF] Jane Bennett suggests: 'To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday. . . . enchantment entails a state of wonder. . . . to be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound'. [START_REF] Bennett | The enchantment of modern life , p. 5. Bennett is invoking Philip Fisher's description of a 'moment of pure presence[END_REF] The connections between card XIII, Apollinaire's poem, the rotting leaves and the table in the Jardin des Plantes hold us in an ephemeral time during which we are both immobilized and enchanted, while aware of the dialectical nature of our journey that transports us between overground and a mythical underground. In the Jardin des Plantes we are moved by this 'alter-tale' and its inclination to resist disenchantment, its enabling of spaces to 'live' or to be 'aroused' while we 'live' and are 'aroused' both by these spaces and within them. As Jacques Re ´da suggests, we are absorbed into the city 'like one of the leaves on a tree shivering in the breeze, or . . . ''reflective antenna'', becoming a small part of spaces . . . to provide a kind of imaginative resonance.' [START_REF] Thrift | With child to see any strange thing: everyday life in the city[END_REF] As we explore hours on the geographical clock, we are actively immersed in the evolving of new spatial identities that are enchanting because of their dreamlike, theatrical, dark and inventive characteristics. 45 The 4th hour: The Best of Times

We have walked for several hours in the pouring rain, and our enthusiasm to continue in such conditions begins to fall away. In a moment of reverie we imagine drying out and enjoying a glass of hot wine, but we have three more destinations on the geographical clock before returning to the 12th hour. We draw four cards and place them on the step of the lock-keeper's house at the Pont Morland, then, walking along the banks of the canal, we catch sight of a boat moored in the lock and named The Best of Times . We are seized by an interval of recognition and sudden insight that is beyond the merely empirical routine of the walk. [START_REF] Shields | love and struggle: spatial dialectics[END_REF] Our simple pleasure in perceiving the magic of a name contrasts with the luxurious representations of pleasure that are moored in the canal. We are held in a moment that, as David Harvey suggests, is 'revelatory of the totality of possibilities contained in daily existence'. [START_REF] Harvey | Afterword[END_REF] We return to the right bank, cross the place de la Bastille and enter rue Jacques-Coeur, where we stop at the location of the 3rd hour, a boutique for changing money signified by the words Change Or Achat , 'Exchange Gold Purchase'. Recalling Andre Breton's description of surrealism as 'the gold of time', we contemplate this sign. In the everyday it symbolizes merchandise, during the intervention it evokes a poetic alchemy of name and place. We turn into rue du Poitou en route to the location for placing the final card, and we enter a street where all around us are signs of time and measurement: an anvil and two pairs of iron pliers permanently set in a metal grill that protects the window of an ironmongers shop; nailed to a wall, a translucent, rectangular plastic container, reminiscent of a casket, in which are packed numerous small plastic toys that appear frozen in time; on another wall, a cabinet containing three instruments Á/ thermometer, hygrometer and barometer Á/ each apparently signifying changes in the elements, though at this moment their hands are static, as if caught in time. Joe ¨l Gayraud, a participant in the walk, refers to moments like this as 'making life more interesting, more intense, another use not only of space but of relation between people that escapes the moments of alienation we are obliged to have in the present society'. [START_REF] ¨l | The enchantment of modern life[END_REF] These are moments of pure presence in which there is a sense of difference and uniqueness, so striking that it is not reminiscent of anything else: 'Thoughts, but also limbs . . . are brought to rest, even as the senses continue to operate . . . You notice new colours, discern details previously ignored, hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify'. 49 Within such moments the world comes alive; there is exhilaration and the feeling of being 'both caught up and carried away'. 50 Utopian yearnings emerge that glimpse other possibilities while, as Pinder suggests, they 'maintain a creative game with current conditions in order to figure alternatives'. [START_REF] Pinder | Utopian transfiguration: the other spaces of New Babylon[END_REF] The 2nd hour: secret histories As we walk away after placing two of the remaining three cards at the entrance of a large door in rue Villehardouin in the 3rd arrondissement, we notice a woman approaching the cards, removing one of them and advancing speedily past us towards the church of Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement in rue de Turenne, to which she enters. She appears to be in a kind of delirium, oblivious to our gaze and engrossed in what we imagine is a vital mission. We are curious as to why she took only one card. Perhaps it has a personal significance. Momentarily, we fantasize that with the flame of a church candle she sets light to this emanation of magic. Instances like these are part of the city's hidden fabric; only we explorers on Le Goff's intervention pay attention to this woman; she is seemingly invisible to the rest of the world, while contributing her layer to the city's secret history. She too is an explorer, but of a different kind. According to Borden, Kerr, Rendell and Pivaro, it is by noting the dialectical relation between the mundane and the significant in the urban landscape that it is possible to evoke its 'secret history'. [START_REF] Borden | The unknown city, p. 19. 53 Pile[END_REF] Le Goff's interventions are attentive to such histories, geographies and mythologies and how they layer ambience over the city's mood. 53 Existing outside modern urban processes, such ambience is located in poetic signs and latent spaces that form part of the city's palimpsest. In the process of deciphering these signs, Le Goff and his fellow explorers become the immediate archive of the intervention, unearthing other signs that are new markers of time and space. As Pile suggests, they are like free association that leads to other trains of thought, and are the clues for future exploration. 54 Descending into the gaps or cracks in the urban landscape, Le Goff's interventions evoke a crisis of mood that embraces the dreamlike quality of space. They dig deep beneath surfaces and layers in order to excavate its spectral traces, and the poetry and magic of place.

Invariably, Le Goff's interventions encompass the discovery and leaving of objects as signs in their own right, and these become traces of what has taken place. Frequently, because they are subjected to the elements or are taken as found objects by passers-by or collectors, such objects have a transient life. Sometimes they remain, evoking another kind of visible/invisible layer on the city. I recall during the year following this intervention attending another in the 20th arrondissement, and several months after that observing the traces of scotch tape remaining on the door. To passers-by these traces have no significance, but for me and the other participants and onlookers of that intervention, each time we see them they recall a happening that is retained in memory. Le Goff's interventions weave in and around such tokens, unearthing the poetry that lingers within the shadows and is revealed in signs that, like ghosts, are both visible and invisible.

The 1st hour: an other axis?

We arrive at rue Pastourelle, the location of the 1st hour of the geographical clock, and Le Goff enters a telephone box, where he slips the final card into the entry point for credit and telephone cards (Figure 5). On the opposite side of the road there is a shop that sells weather-vanes. We notice that there are two weather-vanes displayed in the shop window, and that one of them is pointing in an easterly direction, the other in a westerly direction. They disclose an axis that is opposite to that in which we travel, and we contemplate whether they are signalling to Le Goff another geographical clock and a possible further intervention of subterranean time. The intervention's interrogation of city space has initiated possible new spatial meanings that contrast with the repeated, unimaginative journeys located in tourist guide books. Arguably, such emerging spatializations offer alternative perspectives to both historicist voices that allude to restructuring and postmodern decay in the city and to urban theory that highlights diminishing privacy in public space and increased technological surveillance of contemporary urban life. [START_REF] Rossiter | Walking and performing, ''the city'': a Melbourne chronicle[END_REF] Le Goff's intervention represents, as Pile and Pinder emphasize, a formulation of urban space that disrupts the visual order by attending to the fragments or tiniest details, the repressed elements and ghosts. 56 The intervention evokes a vision of city space as the site of potential and unselfish narratives, while Le Goff's indifference to this fact illustrates the capacity of the intervention to slide around hegemonic processes.

The 12th hour: a wine of rekindled youth

The final part of our walk around the geographical clock returns us to our point of origin, the 12th hour in rue Tiquetonne. Here we discover that only 7 cards remain of the 12 that were placed, seemingly confirming connections between people and place, between ourselves and passers-by. We speculate on the significance to passers-by of the cards that have been removed and we question why other cards remain, especially card VI, l'Amoureux, that we suppose might strike a personal chord, perhaps through the desire to give the card to a lover or to keep it as a positive signification. We discuss the possible impact of our intervention on passers-by and on each of the spaces we have frequented that day, and we conclude that in many respects this is a mystery.

Before going our separate ways we decide to stop at a cafe ´, but all the cafe ´s are closing, except a bar, le Rocher de Cancale, in which there is only one available table that is positioned directly opposite an old station clock whose hands are obstinately stopped at the 5th hour. We observe that the time on our watches is 4.10 p.m.; for six hours we have journeyed through time in reverse, so that the time for us is 4.10 a.m. The hot wine that we drink together is therefore one of rekindled youth.

Conclusion

This paper proposes that Le Goff's intervention of walking backwards through the hours in Paris is an engagement with subterranean temporalities , of ordinary people practicing de Certeau's description of 'the long poem of walking' that illustrates a spatial narrative revealing and confusing of all that urban theory conceals and clarifies. 57 Barthes suggests that the city can only be known ethnographically Á/ by walking, sight, habit, experience; by intense and fragile discovery that is repeatable or recoverable solely by memory of the traces that it leaves; by the feel of the pavement and orientation of objects in space, smells and tastes Á/ and, as Rossiter and Gibson comment, the city's 'writing on/in you'. 58 Le Goff's intervention embraces these ethnographic engagements that evoke the characteristics of play and are revealing of new spatial identities and ways of experiencing the city. Similarly, the intervention's exploration of space and time arouses objective chance and the uncanny both within the surfaces of the city and in participants who journey in a psychic landscape in which stories that sleep are awakened.

The intervention responds to the call for new spatial practices, rewriting conventional maps, and uncovering in secret histories and geographies. It reveals a counterculture that destabilizes fantasies of commodity and opens the way to pleasures that are unfamiliar. The intervention evokes the lived moment as revealing of possibilities within the present; its enchanting nature is a challenge to theory that places emphasis on crushing systems of power and dominance and their impact on 'everydayness'. Nigel Thrift comments, 'Of course, there are some awful things afoot in the world. But, if you are sensitive to them, there are other things too'. 59 Le Goff's walk around the geographical clock is illustrative of these other things that re-enchant the present and offer potential for thinking about alternative spatial futures.

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Le Goff's map on which he has plotted the centre of Paris and the hours of the geographic clock.

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Twelve cards at the location of the 12th hour beneath the roots of the cork oak tree.

FIGURE 3

 3 FIGURE 3The vertical axis of the tarot and cards VI and XVII.

FIGURE 4

 4 FIGURE 4 Six tarot cards at the location of the 6th hour beneath the roots of the old oak tree.

FIGURE 5

 5 FIGURE 5 Le Goff placing the final card at the location of the 1st hour, rue Pastourelle.

Space, chance, time . . .

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Catherine Nash, Sarah Cant, Christopher Shippen and Joe ¨l Gayraud for reading earlier versions of this work. I am indebted to three referees and the editor for their close readings, comments and encouragement. I sincerely thank Jean-Pierre Le Goff for the endless discussions we have shared together, and for welcoming my presence at his interventions.