ABSTRACT
The workshops provided a context for reflecting upon, discussing, and experiencing Zurich that adopted imaginative, transgressive, and poetic constructs. The aim was to build alternative and personal positions from which to experience a place so as to question its ‘taken-for-grantedness’. This removal from the quotidian through prescribed experiences is quite different from the defamiliarization of the urban everyday that we wanted to cultivate through our workshops. It was much easier to engage people who were already familiar with participating in artistic and cultural initiatives in this form of exploratory engagement. The workshops facilitated several moments when the participants had to transgress social and physical boundaries in order to find the envelopes and carry out the tasks within them. French sociologist Laurent Thevenot describes this moral covenant as a form of ‘governing through standards’, which is based on a generalizing process that relies on conventional and coordinative forms of equivalence and qualification, such as classifications, standards, and rules.
