Good For One Fare

A homage to the heroes, tragedy and psychogeography of Philadelphia

The term psychogeography was invented by Guy Debord in 1955. Inspired by the concept of the flâneur–an urban wanderer–Debord suggested new and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.

I took the idea of wandering and how the environment directly influences experience to heart when I wrote the short stories in Good For One Fare. I drew inspiration from conversations that I overheard on the subway, comments on Instagram and Facebook, and my own personal experience and the experiences of close friends. I took a free-roaming, collage-like and artistic approach to combining the true and imaginary adventures of citizens from different neighborhoods in Philadelphia into a new narrative that is able to reveal deeper truths about the city than a strict documentary retelling would be able to.

The stories are at times dire and other times humorous. They explore the effects of the opioid epidemic, long-entrenched ethnic, racial and economic class alliances and conflicts, rampant gentrification, and poverty. Despite the heavy nature of the tales, I hope that they reveal the humanity of each of the characters, and inspire people to think a bit harder about the lives of people in other neighborhoods of their own city.

As part of my participation in the Radical Cut-Up program at the Sandberg Institute, I had the chance to take the writing in the book and transform it into an installation at the Looiersgracht 60 Gallery in Amsterdam. Building on the idea of wandering through a city via public transit, I created a set of oversize Septa tokens. Despite the advent of contact-less payment systems that many public transit systems throughout the world utilized, Philadelphia held on to its archaic token and transfer system until 2017.

I chose the token because it alluded to the inherent dysfunction and game of catch up that many of Philadelphia’s institutions play, and also because I liked the idea that a token allowed you entry into a system, and afforded a way to travel through a city. In this case, the system or city that you are granted entry to is my book of stories.

Each token has a citation from the book written on in, creating a talismanic link to the people and places in Good For One Fare. The set of tokens was placed throughout the gallery, and accompanied by a release and reading of the book itself.