Description
Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts
Cloth-bound Hardcover | 13.2 x 2 x 18.2 cm | 216 pp
Coracle Press | 2025 | 9780906630648
Edition of 300
Walking the Portesis the latest offering from Coracle Press. Written and compiled by Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, it documents time spent in Paris while house-sitting for friends who had departed for warmer climes. Erica and Simon were left to water their hosts’ plants and to explore Paris from theirbase in the Marais.
The portes are the old city gates of Paris (39 access points encircling the city), but you won’t find the walks in any tourist guidebook. Simon & Erica used this historic topography as a template for setting their walk agenda – each walk would start with a Mtroride to a porte from where they would make their way across the city back to the apartment, each walk forming a spoke on a wheel-like map.
And of course, they walked the city in the steps of a particular ancestry, the Walter Benjamin of the Arcades, the Guy Debord drive or drift, and the ambiguity of place past and present that Georges Perec encounters in his Lieux. Thus Walking the Portes offers a delightfully personal view of Paris, each walk bringing it’s own particularities, placing our walkers into an array of contexts where they find themselves ruminating upon everything from manifestations of late capitalism to the minutiae of daily existence.
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