Declan Long: City Fabric in: Fire Stations’ International visual art event, 22. – 30. September 2001. The most obviously high profile of the 'City Fabric' projects was Christian Hasucha’s 'Mr. Individual Walking', a head-turning public art intervention which has already been seen in a number of European cities. Involving one man walking for several hours on top of an eight-foot treadmill (which resembles, but according to the artist is most certainly not, a sculptural plinth) the work serves to defamiliarise the activity of urban walking and the space in which it is presented. 'Mr. Individual', who was in this instance the Berlin-based curator Marcel Hagar, is nevertheless, dressed in a way which suggests a generic quality rather than personality and individuality, the walker coming across as a somewhat down-at-heel urban everyman. On the other hand, this is not designed to be as universally 'representative' a work as (for instance) Mark Wallinger's 'Ecce Homo' – 'Mr. Individual Walking' is, according to Hasucha, not something that should appear as a centre-piece, but rather it is incidental to the proceedings of city life. While reactions to the work have varied considerably throughout Europe (in Berlin there was even some anger about the work's presence in the city) the response of Dubliners was for the most part one of delighted bewilderment – in some ways a concentration on walking is entirely appropriate to Dublin, given the lasting profile of Joyce's flaneurs in our cultural landscape. The repeating peregrinations of characters such as Bloom in Ulysses or the 'Two Gallants' of Dubliners create a vision of city life which involves both entrapment and perpetual transition, endless movement while endlessly going nowhere. Unlike Quinn in Paul Auster's 'City of Glass', "who on his best walks ... was able to feel that he was nowhere", 'Mr. Individual' goes nowhere by being rooted to the same spot. Ironically, Hasucha’s dramatically mundane work depends on our own relative freedom of movement within the city in order for the work to have any effect. Declan Long, Dublin 2001 Cf. Project documentation Nr. 8 Mister Individual, walking