In Encounterism, performance artist Andy Field sets out to make our everyday activities – a taxi ride, a trip to the cinema, a visit to the hairdresser, going out for a meal, or a walk in the park – strange again. He does so to highlight the neglected role that public spaces play in allowing us to meet people different from ourselves, and how such encounters are vital for enriching our lives and knitting together the social fabric of our societies.
Field works with children across the world, inviting them to imagine how their cities could be better. Again and again, they tell him the same things. There is too much traffic. Too much noise. Too much violence and too much drinking. They say they don’t have enough space, that there is not enough room to play. That there is not enough nature and not enough animals. They wish people were friendlier. They wish there was more to do. They wish for something better than this.
It is not just poor urban planning that is to blame. Encounterism relates how technologies reduce the possibilities for random encounters – by allowing us to remain barricaded inside our SUVs, by using our smartphones or headphones to shut others out, or by avoiding going outside at all and staying home to binge on Netflix or shop online.
Encounterism is also a reflection on us – of our desire to be alone, and of our quest to live in our own private bubbles undisturbed by what we increasingly see as a threatening and unpleasant world outside. In one telling anecdote, Field recounts how invitations to passengers on the London Underground to chat to each other were responded to with horror, with many passengers describing the prospect as “a living hell”. For many of us, it seems, the “joys of being in person” of the book’s subtitle are outweighed by the unpleasantness of many of our everyday encounters.
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Encounterism is simultaneously a lament of the unexploited potential of our public spaces, visions glimpsed of what might be and a warning of the consequences of where we are heading. It exhorts us to reach for moments of connection – despite ourselves – in a world designed to make it easy for us to stay apart.
Ian Hughes is a senior research fellow at the MaREI Centre, Environmental Research Institute, at University College Cork
