PhotoDerive Card KitPhotoDérive was founded in 2013 by visual artist Andrea Figari in Berlin. PhotoDérive explores walking and photographing as art practices, uniting urban exploration, mindfulness and political critique with story telling. As a companion to PhotoDérive, Andrea designed and developed a companion card kit for the urban explorations, to help spark creativity and add random situational clues and prompts to support the photographic interpretation of the spaces visited during the Dérive.

Psychogeography explores the effect that spaces have on how you feel and how you think. Spaces are defined by what is there (or what isn´t there) and how we use them. Through psychogeography we seek to redefine and transform these spaces. Psychogeography poses a challenge to the established use of spaces: shopping, entertainment, work, leisure, living. If not for these uses, how could we approach these spaces? How would we feel if we did different things there? or if they were different?

Dérive also translates as “drifting”, to move slowly without control or direction. A Dérive is one way to live the psychogeographical experience: you will walk through, search, reflect on and photograph the spaces. You will go on a dérive by walking and purposefully giving up control to allow random explorations. In doing so, you will see the spaces in a new light, understand them differently while you learning about yourself through how you think or feel about them. Your photographs will tell your story and express how you felt during your PhotoDérive.

PhotoDérive is the first step towards the establishment of the Berlin Psychogeographical Kollektiv, an aspirational space where those with an interest in psychogeography can come together.

An integral part of PhotoDérive is the organisation of photo walks, photo exhibitions, shared sketching or drawing events as well as having and conversations with urban explorers.