33 x 33 DEGREES

A Drive into the Natal Midlands

July 1994

The situationist concept of the dérive, or ‘drift’ described by Debord as a “transient passage through varied ambiences…” and covered earlier in the section on the Internotional (p. 204) was applied by us in this action. The idea of drifting through urban geography was to experience new things by chance interaction rather than by set conditions, thereby disrupting normal social patterns. Horsburgh, Levi, Matoti, Barry and myself embarked on such a ‘drift’. We filled a car with petrol and headed into the Natal midlands, our only ‘goal’: to find the point represented by 33 degrees latitude and 33 degrees longitude on the map. We drove into unfamiliar towns and got lost. The point was never found, but then the goal had only been a veil for the ‘action’.
Though it refers specifically to a kind of ‘urban journey’ the concept can be applied to a more expanded notion of ‘drift’, that simply involves letting things happen without plan or intention. In conversation with Barry, he spoke about this action:

Barry:              Do you remember that drive we went on one day?
Allen:               Yes, in fact I was looking at some slides of that the other day. I wanted to talk about it in terms of dérives. Who came on that drive?
Barry:              Aliza, Samkelo, Jay, you, myself and maybe even Rhett.
Allen:               Why did we do it?
Barry:              We were looking for the physical point where 33 degrees latitude met with 33 degrees longitude on the map. I think that the point represented some kind of vortex or ‘energy’. It was somewhere near Durban, well it was actually closer to Ixopo in fact. And maybe because of that, we were unable to find it. We did come across a petrol-station in the middle of ‘nowhere’, where this attendant spoke French.
Allen:               Even though our aim was to find this point on the map, it was the journey itself that was significant. It was like looking for the Holy-Grail.
Barry:              Yes, and we got lost. Lost in the Natal Midlands. I remember us stopping and asking some locals for directions and Jay threw an angel covered in honey into the velt.[1]