From a strict physical, corporeal point of view, ubiquity is an ontological impossibility. For as much as one would like, being in two places at the same time, for instance, the city of New York and the city of Baghdad, is not possible to accomplish. Only electrons, netart and god have the uncanny ability to present themselves in several places in one given moment.

You Are Not Here departs from and builds itself from this inability. Developed by Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Andrew Schneider, Ran Tao and Mushon Zer-Aviv and inviting people to “explore Baghdad through the streets of New York”, YANH presents itself as an urban tourism mash-up. Not only you can be in two places at the same time (the ubiquity concept we departed from), but also both those two places get interconnected in a psychological enactment of a meta-city. The underlying mechanism is pretty simple: users (the so-called meta-tourists) are invited to download and print on one side of a sheet of paper a map of New York and on the other side a reversed map of Baghdad. As soon as that task is accomplished the exotic sightseeing can begin. Scattered around New York are YANH street-signs that provide warned explorers (those who printed the map) as well as random passers-by the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, where audio-guided tours of contemporary Baghdad destinations in NYC can be listened.

New Yorkers get the opportunity to know Baghdad like their own city. This sentence is everything but a random consequence of YAHN. The idea behind such a phrase isn’t without a purpose. But let’s leave the more immediate, political (some would even say critical) agenda of this project for later. Let us first think of psychogeography not only as theoretical concept but also, and in this case, as a tool. A tool that allows people to appropriate their own cities and break the coded urban space imposed by the established power. Resistance is a key word in this project and the authors are the first reclaim that as a main aspect of it. Mushon Zer-Aviv stated in an interview to We Make Money Not Art that “we were generally dissatisfied with the way mainstream media communicates terms like ‘Baghdad’ and ‘Iraqis’, we were feeling these terms have lost their human scale. YANH attempts to allow a one-to-one scaled experience of Baghdad”?.
So what does YANH allow? What does it do for the average New Yorker willing to take the proposed tour? It allows for a new layer of meaning to be added to the way New York is perceived. The similarities with Shiftspace, another project by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, are to be noticed, but now, instead of adding layer after layer to online space, it is a physical space, that of New York City that is enhanced with additional layers. But what is enhancing the glamorous city that never sleeps? And while asking this question the critical discourse mentioned earlier arises. It is not Paris or London the cities being overlapped and that we are exploring while going from one touristy spot to the other. It is a destroyed and plundered city. It is a rundown city. It is Baghdad. And in this lies the strength of the project. A New Yorker visiting Baghdad as a regular tourist, with a map in his or her hand and audio information of all the must-see monuments while walking around New York. Due to the contemporary tensions and conflicts existing in Iraq, and their connection to the USA, one cannot stop thinking of the irony stemming from the implicit dialectics between western tourism and (western) colonialism in a postcolonial world. More than overlapping two existing cities in order to create a subjective, psychologically driven experience of a meta-city, YAHN attempts to raise a politically engaged, irony driven portrait of the tensions of the conflict in Iraq by tying together in the same emotional web both capitals of the two empires. The one who is colonizing and the one being colonized.

Visits of Gaza through the streets of Tel-Aviv and of P’yongyang through the streets of Seoul will be available in a near future.