Expedition to K2

Expedition to K2




A couple of weeks ago, when I definitely realized that I would be staying my summer holidays here in Rome or nearby, I bought this book. Experimental Travel has lots of correlations with psychogeography and Situationists’s dérivé, in other words nothing really new under the blue sky, but interesting anyway. Since ET is more about how you approach travelling and not the location you actually visit, I thought the book would have been helpful cause I’d not have seen new places but my old lovely town.



This leads to the expedition to K2, for which my personal interpretation consisted in finding the exact location on my town map of the coordinates K2 and go there to see falling stars on the San Lorenzo night (August, 10), that here in Italy is traditionally connected with seeing the sky to this purpose. I thought it would be funny if all of us carried each an item we’d be carrying going on a real expedition on mount K2. Here you can see G. admiring his choice, and S. holding firmly her selected (mysterious) object. Mine, pictured below, was rather another participant to the expediton than a real object, haha (actually, I chose her because of another ET practice that I involuntarily practiced before knowing…but that’s another story).



K2 in Rome is a zone almost unknown to the three of us, at the opposite of the city from where we live and partially surrounded by a pit. We walked around the silent streets (the silence was unreal, we started to worry at some point) searching for a good location to see the stars. Unfortunately, all the streets were efficiently illuminated, we weren’t on a high place and the pit was unaccessible, so we finally surrendered to the fact we’d not see any stars during the expedition. It follows our disheartenment and affliction. One of us even fell off position and almost lost herself.

On another point of view, we enjoed a place we’d not have been visiting otherwise (that is full of ?perrons/stairs? we found out) and we had good time anyway. That’s the hollywoodian happy ending.



I’m planning to make more experiments and am working right now to set up a site/blog to take trace of them. Meanwhile: Experimental Tourism on Wikipedia, official site of Latourex (Laboratoire de Tourisme Experimental), index of ET experiments (as listed in the book), the Thorn Tree (ET forum).



In italiano: psicogeografia, Luther Blissett e la psicogeografia, sintesi dell’ET.