On Thursday 23rd September students in The Traveller (as part of the Temporary Practices Minor at Auckland University of Technology) undertook a Dispersed Residency that took the conditions of an ongoing level 4 lockdown in Tāmaki Makaurau, with its associated rules and regulations, as a starting point to reimagine how a collective residency might occur as an in-situ, dispersed event that takes place simultaneously in the front rooms, bedrooms, gardens, driveways, berms and verge spaces of our individual residences. We are interested in the idea of local travel as a result of lockdown; driving to the supermarket, pharmacy, doctor or perhaps to a testing or vaccination station. For the main part, walking in our local area has become our primary form of travel and movement within and across suburbs.
Travellers were asked to imagine themselves in the place of a person who is walking past the place where they reside. What can a passer-by see from the street? Can they see into a garden? A lounge? A window way up high above street level? With these ideas in mind, participants individually staged an action/movement for a duration of three hours, all within the confines of their places of residence. The individual actions occurred simultaneously, and their documentation form a collective archive of this dispersed residency via a series of interval photographs of each action/movement.