For Friction Atlas, Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame compile laws of assembly which affect the ways individuals navigate public spaces. Composed largely of regulations on freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and rights to protest, Friction Atlas also includes more esoteric subjects related to decorum, conduct, or morality such as laws on dancing, parties, and children’s behaviours in public. The artists subsequently translate their Atlas of laws into diagrams, and create a large-scale floor installation in public using coloured tape.

Each iteration of Friction Atlas includes the addition of a new local law from where the artwork is exhibited. For this version as part of The Art Gallery Problem, the artists added City of Mississauga By-law 0125-2027: Nuisance Weed and Tall Grass Control. A public installation of Friction Atlas, including the new bylaw, will take place in the CCT Atrium on UTM campus for the exhibition’s final week (February 28 – March 5).

For previous iterations of the project, Patelli and Vendrame have enlivened their installation using performance instructions dubbed “The Agency of Walking.” In so doing, they highlight the double meaning of “agency” as a sense of free will associated with human expression, and as an organizational form. On the latter point, by adopting the guise of a pseudo-bureaucratic “agency,” they mirror the opaque legalistic language which composes much of the source material for Friction Atlas. Both senses of agency pervade the project:

Here, agency is framed by the ways it might be constrained through law, and the law’s enforcement wing, policing. Friction Atlas aims to nudge at the often-invisible regulations that pervade everyday life by giving them visual form, and by embodying them through collective choreography.

Patelli and Vendrame ultimately compile rules to highlight the vagaries of law,22“Legislation can be full of absurdities. Pieces of regulation can get left over, seldom properly enforced but still occasionally exercised, remnants of moral and social judgments of previous eras.” Excerpt from the forthcoming anthology of Friction Atlas. Courtesy the artists. to make laws visible in the very spaces where they might be invoked, and to recognize and reclaim spatial agency. As they outline in “The Agency of Walking,” the best way to understand civil liberties is to enact them, alone and with others. After all, everyday rules and behaviours rarely come into view until they are prodded: