About Drift The Map

Drift the Map is a series of free artist-led walks to explore Atlanta neighborhoods and talk about urbanism, ecology, history, architecture, public art and foodways.  Every session will have an experimental format, and no two walks will be alike. We’ll always begin in a different neighborhood and then explore arbitrary routes guided by our conversations or participants' personal connections to the place. The walks are co-facilitated by a father-daughter team, artists Joel Silverman and Mira Silverman, along with stakeholders from the community along as invited special guests.

Walking

aimlessly

in

a

goal-centered

and

car-oriented

world

is

kind of

a subversive act.

The 1921 Map of the City of Atlanta, overlaid on a current 3D model of Atlanta.

(interactive with click/drag/zoom)

Drift the Map walks are unplanned journeys through urban landscapes, urging participants to drop their everyday routine from time to time and let themselves be drawn by the surprises of the city, a concept theorized by avant-garde artist Guy Debord in his 1956 "Theory of the Dérive". La Dérive is “the drift”. Group scrutiny of the city by drifting through it together leads to new collaborations and relationships formed and the thrill of discovery that always occurs when curiosity leads you to pull on a loose thread to see how it unravels.

This series seeks to explore the mythogeography of Atlanta, by exploring the way the city defines itself through urban legends, the official histories enshrined in street and neighborhood names and monuments, and the ways Jim Crow was encoded into the city grid through redlining policies, street names, and allocation of resources.  We’ll talk a lot about names and renaming.  Why do so many street names change when they cross from north to south across Ponce de Leon? Why was Grady High School renamed in the reassessment of Henry Grady’s legacy, but not Grady Hospital?  Why have the Atlanta Braves kept that name even as the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins abandoned their names? Will anyone really start calling Bobby Dodd Stadium “Hyundai Field”?  What gifts and burdens were bestowed by the Candler in Candler Park, the Inman in Inman Park, the Grant in Grant Park?

These aren’t guided tours. They are walks led by artists, although they are not necessarily art walks. They’re intended to inject an artists’ sense of the city into the public debate: Hungry for more detail, sensitive to the aesthetic beauty of the landscape, curious about culture, critical about doublespeak, impatient for justice, interested in photographing and sketching and recording and smelling and eating our way through the city. Above all, willing to get lost and trusting in each other to find our way back home.