Line breaks: Remapping hostile cities— Dérive walk with literary readings, led by Henry Broome

Join writer and critic Henry Broome and special guests on an unplanned, improvised walk through the streets of Lisbon, inspired by the Situationalist theory of the dérive [French: drifting].

With no pre-set route, starting 6.30pm at Well Read, we’ll walk and read, letting ourselves be led by psychogeographic impulses and literary texts.

We will read poetry as manifesto; theory as yearning invocation; fiction as the truest escape. Together, we’ll recite and discuss texts written by Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman, Mahmoud Darwish, CAConrad and Cecilia Vicuña.

Following desire lines, finding gaps cut into fences, we’ll search for the line breaks in prescribed spatial zones and explore the possibility of creating an alternative, liberated map of the city, free from coercion and exclusion, without hostile architecture, police discrimination and property speculation.

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Henry Broome is a writer and critic from London with a research focus on public art and urban spatial exclusion. He has bylines in Art Monthly, Flash Art and BOMB Magazine.