A strong tension exists between the scripted and unscripted uses of the city and its architecture

Urban Exoticism is a photography workshop conducted by Michael Grieve, based on the theme 'urban exoticism‘, an alternative concept to experience and understand creatively the urban environment. This 4-day experience endeavours to help participating photographers find new ways of understanding the urban environment and spatial relations towards the realisation of subjective documentary projects that attempt to go beyond prevailing mechanised modes of thought. With a heightened awareness of strange juxtapositions, layering and hidden places that build up the uncanny fabric of the city. The workshop is an exploration of Berlin. Participants will re-map and find visual strategies to interpret a new experience of the city. From a dérive perspective, that is a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The emphasis of these series of Urban Exoticism workshops is an experiential one, to engage in the process of making photographic work with a conceptual edge. 'Urban Exoticism is an expression that circumscribes a perception of the metropolitan space that values fragments, unexpected juxtapositions and elements obscured by everyday experience. Revealing the mystery beneath the apparently banal surfaces of the modern city, it provokes the emergence of extraordinary realities drawn from the realms of the exotic, the erotic and the unconscious.‘ Alia Tsagkari, Athens, 2021.