DERIVA en Santiago

Participatory urban intervention, 2005

Deriva en Santiago explored the sensory and spatial experience of the city without relying on navigation technologies. Drawing on the Situationist practice of the dérive, the project disrupted habitual ways of orienting oneself within Santiago and invited participants to encounter the city through uncertainty, attention, and embodied perception.

Across three sessions, approximately eighty participants assumed one of two roles: guide or drifter. Drifters were blindfolded and wore headphones playing recorded urban noise, temporarily separating them from the visual and auditory cues normally used to navigate the city. Each guide accompanied a drifter to a randomly selected location on the outskirts of Santiago and left them there. After several minutes, the drifter removed the blindfold and headphones and attempted to return alone to the original meeting point.

The return journey lasted between two and five hours. Participants were asked to navigate without using technological devices, consulting maps, or asking for directions. On reaching the meeting point, each drifter reconstructed their route on a large-format map of Santiago, adding observations, memories, and reflections generated by the experience.

The project approached navigation not as the efficient calculation of a route, but as a subjective process shaped by perception, memory, uncertainty, and encounters with the urban environment.

Netzfunk.org collective project
Team: Iván Atencio Abarca, David Boardman, Pablo Cottet, Diego Mometti, Enrique Morales, Bárbara Palomino, and Melissa Trojani.