Engaging with Surrealism In order to begin the design study part of this project, I began to try some theories and practices that the Surrealists employed during the movement. I started with collaborative experiments, using people around me to try the cadvre exquis game in both writing and drawing. The results of such a collaboration, of between 8 and 10 people, are reflected in the photograph opposite. I asked for the volunteers to draw a single line in each segment of the paper without taking the pen off the page, and then to fold down the paper and pass it to the person sitting next to them, who was required to do the same. The result is like a series of small drawings, reflecting the diversity of each person. In a similar game, of my own invention, myself and four others wrote down many characters, locations and actions on individual slips of paper, separated them out into three cups and mixed up the slips. We then each selected one from each tumbler and then had five minutes in which to draw the particular event that the paper was describing. We had ‘God, free falling, between a rock and hard place’, ‘Salvador Dali, mud snorkelling, on the dark side of my brain’ and ‘three ninjas, flying a tractor, underneath the stars’, as examples of things to draw. The experiments were fun as well as showing how simple it is to engage with the practices of the Surrealists. Some of my initial thoughts are recorded on the following pages.
Surrealism in Landscape Architecture 93