Created by Wrights & Sites, working with the visual artist Tony Weaver (120 pages, ISBN-13: 9780954613013). Launched at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (UK) alongside 4 Mis-Guided Tours, 2006.
Funded by Arts Council England (Lottery Funded), with Proof of Concept funding from the Centre for Creative Enterprise & Participation at Dartington College of Arts.
Anywhere you can walk slowly down the street without being shot at by Western contractors. Anywhere you can reorganise buildings without permission. Anywhere you can stand still without being questioned. Anywhere you can find abandoned beds. Anywhere the movie you always wanted to see is playing. Anywhere you legged it. A Mis-Guide To Anywhere is a utopian project for the recasting of a bitter world by disrupted walking.
Mindful of at least a few of the ironies, impossibilities, contradictions and perils present in its title, A Mis-Guide To Anywhere provides a number of provocations for reader-walkers to make their own exploratory journeys in whatever environment they choose: metropolis, home town, countryside, holiday destination... anywhere. Three years in the making, and referencing walks undertaken in Shanghai, rural Zambia, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Manchester, Paris, the island of Herm, etc., A Mis-Guide To Anywhere provides an inspiration for destination-less travels.
The book has been used to teach across a range of disciplines, from Performance Studies at Tisch School of Arts (New York University) to Design Studies at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and Geography at the University of Manchester.
'You’ll never have to buy another guidebook again...' - The Times, 15 April 2006
'This wonderful little gem of a book is the latest from Wrights & Sites, who have taken theatre into everyday life, and breathed new life into theatre, with their site-specific performances, art-journeys and tourist mis-guides to Exeter and beyond. See it as a replacement for the I Ching or as a script for the play of your life. Buy it, tuck it into purse or pocket, and discover the theatre of life on and off the edge of the map.' - Total Theatre, Summer 2006
'My favourite methodology book on place is A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, which I think is fantastic and helps us to look at place in a new way.' - Professor Tim Edensor, at the launch of his co-edited book, The Routledge Handbook of Place, 2020
Images: Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, Cathy Turner, Tony Weaver, Art Circuit.
The book cover
Pages 88-89
Pages 42-43
Pages 16-17
Drifting with a TV camera crew in Milton Keynes
Pages 26-27
Pages 22-23
1 of 2 central fold-out pages
Wrights & Sites in front of Urbis, Manchester
Pages 80-81
Pages 14-15
Pages 6-7
1 of the '4 Mis-Guided Tours' hosted by ICA, London
Pages 32-33
Pages 4-5
Pages 110-111
Pages from the 'Walk On' exhibition catalogue
A barge chanced upon whilst walking
Associated Wrights & Sites outcomes
Mis-Guided tours and 'walkshops':
•4 Mis-Guided Tours, four interactive walks inspired by pages from the book, made to accompany its launch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, 2006);
•Soho Mis-Guided, three walks which explored filmic representations of Soho, made for Living Streets, the Pedestrians Association (London, 2006);
•Mis-guided in Zürich - mind the MAP, a mis-guided walk for an area of a city never visited before, made for 'WALK21: Everyday Walking Culture' (Zürich, 2005);
•Urbis Mis-Guided, a two-day walkshop made for Urbis, the museum of the city (Manchester, 2004).
Exhibitions and visual media:
•Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff, five selected double-pages from the book contributing to a major touring exhibition celebrating the history of walking art practices (London, Cardiff, Birmingham, Southport and Plymouth, 2013-2014). Other artists in the show included Marina Abramovic, Francis Alÿs, Tim Brennan, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, Alec Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Tim Knowles, Richard Long, Melanie Manchot, Bruce Nauman, Julian Opie, plan b, Ingrid Pollard, Simon Pope, walkwalkwalk, Richard Wentworth, Jeremy Wood and Catherine Yass;
•4 Screens #2: A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, a multi-media installation made for 'PSi#12: Performing Rights', hosted by Queen Mary University of London, in collaboration with East End Collaborations and the Live Art Development Agency (London, 2006);
•Subverting the City: A Mis-Guide to Milton Keynes, a short documentary focused on Wrights & Sites practice, made by Optimistic Productions for Channel 4's '3 Minute Wonder' slot (Milton Keynes, 2005);
•Mis-Guided To Anywhere, an exhibition of sample pages from the book, made for Urbis, the museum of the city (Manchester, 2004).
Article and papers:
•A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: dealing with the city, an article first published in Allsopp, Ric (ed.) (2006), Performance Research, Vol. 11, No. 2, Glasgow: Routledge, pp. 115-122. Subsequently published in Whybrow, Nicolas (ed.) (2010), Performance and the Contemporary City: An Interdisciplinary Reader, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 69-86.The text of the article was first presented at the sixth international conference organised by 'WALK21: Everyday Walking Culture' (Zürich, 2005), and subsequently presented at ICA, London; Exeter Phoenix; and 'PSi#12: Performing Rights', Queen Mary University of London;
•Simultaneous Drift (4 walks, 4 routes, 4 screens), a performance-lecture, accompanied by split-screen video documentation of a collective simultaneous drift, commissioned as part of the UWE/Situations' 'Material City' programme (Arnolfini, Bristol, 2006);
•Mis-Guiding the City Walker, a joint paper, presented at 'WALK 21:Cities for People' (Copenhagen, 2004).