Perception workshop by Myriam Lefkowitz

“Walk, Hands, Eyes (Noisy-le-Sec): a succession of details”

By exiting the white walls and windows of La Galerie, the public programme of “Les Limbes” tackles the urban space of Noisy le Sec, and tries to inhabit and see the world outside, paying attention to its details. The town becomes a surface to discover, a porous skin full of surprising images and suspended moments. An environment both foreign and familiar to the public, which sharpens the senses and needs to be navigated by the body as well as the mind.

“To begin with I am gonna ask you to close your eyes.”

This is the sentence spoken by Myriam Lefkowitz and her close collaborators at the beginning of the experience of Walk, Hands, Eyes, the project she has brought to many cities in the past ten years and that she is now transmitting to Noisy-le-Sec in the expanded context of the exhibition “Les Limbes”.
This collaborative exercise will pivot on the creation of a private space in a shared and public form. Capitalist notions of purpose, function and intention will be sidelined in favour of attention, trust, and the negotiation of emotions and relations, in time and space, with others. Hierarchies will be levelled in favour of mutual dependency, in the moment participants will both guide and be guided. Perceptive dynamics will put things in motion, enacting change and transformation both at a personal and a political level.

We seem to have internalised that public space and the decisions enforced by urban planning and necessities of social control are fixed and unchangeable. What happens when people from different walks of life make use of space together? How can they share what they saw or felt? Can an honest dialogue be possible? Can it create new awarenesses?

Caterina Riva