Imprint: Triarchy Press  ~  Published: April 2014

Paperback
List Price: £10
Extent: 98pp.  
Size: 11.1 x 17.8 cm
ISBN: 978-1-909470-35-4
Tags: fanged noumena, walking, signs, symbols, simulacra, drift, dérive, mythogeography, wrights & sites, mis-guide, psychogeography,  phil smith

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Review
"I have met many such pavement people since I began my graffiti project way back in 1999.... A desire to revisit them has been prompted by some of the photographs in a new little book by Phil Smith ...

In this photo-essay Phil, an ambulant academic at Plymouth University, UK, urges us to undertake an ‘experimental pilgrimage without destinations’ where disfigured pedestrian figures are just a small sample of the absurd, ironic and accidental artworks in the urban landscape that, if we take the trouble to notice them, will rearrange our attitude to the world.

Enchanted Things
Signposts to a New Nomadism  
Phil Smith

“The world is on the move; seas rise, villages are emptied, coastlines are redrawn, deserts spread to the suburbs, snowfall increases and lost battlefields re-emerge. Only soap operas give any impression of permanence. Traditional fortresses like home, dwelling and nation are increasingly exposed as porous, fabricated and expensive things. The ways are opening for a pervasive and benevolent nomadism, a new art of living, on both grand and individuated scales.”

In this lovely photo-essay, Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist (Wrights & Sites and Crabman) and author (Mis-Guides, Mythogeography, On Walking and Counter-Tourism) draws our attention to a “chorus of surprises” “yelling from the sides of the road like particularly unruly spectators at a parade”.

Focusing on signs, simulacra, objects and places that prove to be more, less or other than what they seem (all illustrated throughout the book) the author encourages us to look afresh at our quotidian urban and rural surroundings to see what lies just beneath the surface.

Once identified, these absurd, empty, recalcitrant enchantments can transform the way we live and think and occupy our inner and outer landscapes.

Urging us to “hypersensitize ourselves to the full blast of contemporary landscape’s intensity”, Phil Smith explains how to “let our tentacles unfurl” in order to explore and see the world around us in all its glory.

Readership

Enchanted Things is a photo essay for anyone with an enquiring mind and an interest in exploring the ways in which they move through the world. 
Review (at Corse Present)
"Phil Smith’s Enchanted Things is a fascinating illustrated pamphlet that signposts a number of different ways in which we might engage with, or orient ourselves within, the landscape. And the landscape here is interpreted in the widest possible sense. This is neither a pastoral paeon nor an urban dérive, although it dips toes in both ends of the spectrum.

Smith’s primary concern is a project for re-enchanting the landscape. This ambition is not tied to some sort of regeneration of the landscape, nor of seeking out special or numinous places. Instead it consists of noticing and bringing into sharper focus those wyrd juxtapositions that might most usually be glimpsed in contemporary art exhibitions. Smith’s point, I think, is that we now no longer need any particular skill in drawing out special objects that might link together in some higher conceptual sense; that might be suggestive of something subversive beyond the overt function for which they were designed. Instead, the increasing circulation and proliferation of these objects is causing them to flood our environments and so the possibilities for unique messages to communicate themselves to us is increasing at a similar rate. We would benefit from readjusting our perceptual apparatus to see these poetic moments unfolding all around us.

Smith’s approach is compelling. He recognises that the division between rural and urban has disappeared; furthermore, he also disparages any meaningful sense in which edgelands can be identified as a unique and definable territory. The edgelands have bled out in both directions, infecting both the rural and the urban with the unstoppable detritus of capital."
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“Walking with Phil is like having my very own Doctor Who”  
(Siobhan Mckeown, film maker and dj Shibby Shitegeist)

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 The essay starts...
"I stop for a moment. I look about me. Something slightly ‘off’ catches my eye: an incomplete sign that teeters toward the absurd, a rusted doorway that triggers a rare feeling of conviction, a tree shaped like a pinball machine, the remains of a windscreen glittering like emeralds, a fence just a little too bright for a barrier, a toy bigger than it ought to be. Such combinations of things and feelings have been the objects of my explorations and collections for some time now. In my experience, the more ordinary the place the more likely it is that discordance and its accompanying ‘fanged noumena’ will pop up; and the more deeply will the anxieties that falteringly accompany them burrow."