How can performance enable people to perceive and collectively reimagine overlooked urban spaces?
The Fantasy-Architects’ Guide to the Gaps of the City was a site-specific performance and research project staged within a single block of Dongsoong-dong, Seoul. It explored how performance could help people notice overlooked urban spaces and collectively reimagine their possibilities.
The project unfolded through three walks along the same route. Non-verbal movement, FM radio, textual prompts and participatory mapping shaped each journey. Audiences moved from observation to participation and finally to independent exploration. The performance gradually shifted their role from following someone else’s reading of the city to forming their own.
In this project, a gap refers to an interstitial part of the city whose use or meaning remains unsettled. It may appear between buildings, at the edge of a property, along a threshold, or in a place that changes according to time and use.
A gap was understood as a space that could support more than one interpretation. Different people could notice different qualities in the same place and imagine different ways of inhabiting it.
The performance took place within a single block of Dongsoong-dong. Residential streets, shops, vacant spaces, building edges and changes in level created different spatial conditions along the route.
The site was studied by walking through the block and recording how these conditions changed along the way. Openings, walls, slopes, stairs and overlooked spaces were mapped as a spatial sequence. This notation helped identify potential gaps and trace how they appeared and disappeared through movement.
The performance was structured around three walks through the same block.
Each round offered a different way of encountering the same route. In the first, audiences followed the performers and observed the gaps they encountered. In the second, they entered and occupied these spaces with the performers. In the final round, they explored the route independently and identified gaps for themselves.
Across the three rounds, the audience took a more active role in reading and experiencing the site.
In the first round, audiences followed the performers through the site.
Through gaze, movement and pauses, the performers drew attention to gaps along the route. Audiences followed their actions and noticed spaces they might otherwise have passed by.
In the second round, audiences entered the gaps with the performers.
They were invited to sit, lean, hide, cross, pause and play within the spaces encountered during the first round. These actions offered different ways of using and experiencing each gap.
In the final round, audiences explored the route independently.
Each participant received a DIY kit containing a map, transparent OHP film and drawing tools. They chose where to stop, identified their own gaps and recorded what they discovered on the map.
Each participant produced their own reading of the block through this final walk.
The project used the term fantasy-architect to describe someone who discovers possibilities within existing spaces through observation, imagination and action.
Across the three rounds, audiences moved from following the performers’ reading of the site to making their own. By the final round, each participant chose what to notice, where to stop and what to recognise as a gap.
Becoming a fantasy-architect meant finding one’s own way of reading and imagining the city.
At the end of the final walk, participants returned to the playground and overlaid their transparent maps.
The resulting map brought their individual readings of the block together. Some gaps appeared across several maps, while others were identified by only one participant. Layering the maps made it possible to see where these readings met and where they differed.
Returning to the same route changed what audiences noticed. Spaces passed by in the first walk could take on new significance when encountered again through different actions and perspectives.
Sitting at an edge, crossing a boundary or spending time in an overlooked space opened up uses that were not immediately apparent. The physical setting remained the same, but the way it was occupied could change.
The audience maps showed how differently the same block could be read. Some gaps appeared repeatedly, while others were unique to individual maps. When layered together, the maps made these shared and individual readings visible.
