a Dérive, French for "drift", is an unplanned adventure through your local environment
Your task is to find a collection of small blue peace sign stickers hidden throughout Burlington's parks and public areas.
There is at least one sticker in each location, but many have two or three. There are hints to help you find each sticker! Every hint is a poem with the final rhyme missing. Once you find the sticker, fill in the missing rhyming word on the hint sheet to prove you've found it. Bring a friend with you! A dérive is better with friends.
While you are wandering around town, think about how both the natural landscape and the manufactured environments make you feel. What would you change about Burlington? What would this city look like if it was constructed entirely to suit your desires? What would a Burlington built for adventure look like? There are additional reflections and questions on this website for each location to help you consider these things
Download the full hint sheet below as a fillable PDF. You can also access this website for all the hints at any time
Who knows? If you find every sticker, complete the hint sheet, and either bring it to the Peace & Justice Center or email it to office@pjcvt.org, you might just win a prize.
The Dérive and the Situationists
If the pure spontaneity of this task hasn't already sent you galavanting through Burlington hunting for stickers, then let me at least explain a bit futher. The Peace & Justice Center has a Radical History discussion series where we talk about the various movements, ideas, and people that inspire us. We try to take our favorite bits from the past, imagine a better world, and help create it here and now. We recently held a talk about the Situationist International as part of this series.
The Situationist International was a radical avant-garde art movement prominent in Europe during the mid 20th century, particularly in France. Ideologically driven by folks like Guy Debord, the Situationists developed a theory expamining the ills of contemporary society they called the "society of the spectacle." One of the strategies they developed to break people out of the spectacle was the dérive, an unstructured ramble through your environment where the goal is to go on a playful adventure rather than work or consume. This scavenger hunt idea was our best attempt to encourage people to go on a little dérive themselves.
If you would like to read further about the Situationists, check out one of these texts. We also have hard copies of all three of them at the Peace & Justice Center Library.
Hints & Locations
Map
A dérive is meant to be planned by you! Wander in and out of the city's ambiances yourself and see what maps you come up with in your head. You are of course supposed to complete the journey on foot, but remember that you can split this up into dozens of different small dérives. You could split it by neighborhood, or by path, or by whatever you desire. Perhaps an example map would be helpful for some. You can find that linked below. Starting at Oakledge Park, you can complete nearly half of the journey following close to the Burlington Bike Path. Remember also that you can get into the Old North End from the New North End entirely on foot, separated from traffic by following the Route 127 Bike Path from Ethan Allen Park. Think about the routes you come up with on your journey, and how you would map them. Have you ever dug into the Burlington map archives at the Fletcher Free Library? Perhaps that would be a good pre or post dérive activity.
This project brought to you by the Peace & Justice Center
