Hidden Cities is a participatory urban performance that uses a binaural soundscape and material interventions to uncover the city as a place inhabited by unseen stories. Individual participants were led on a self-directed walk that used sound-scape, ambulation, and participatory enactments to involve the players in a reconsideration of the city through performance. Each participant was given a ‘performance kit’ that contained an mp3 player and several specially marked manila envelopes. As they walked, they listened to atmospheric binaural recordings and musings on memories and poetic associations relating to the sites they passed through.

The walk placed the fantastical, personal and temporal on par with the factual and historic narratives of the city. Unlike tourist practices that focus attention on the spectacles of the city’s significant historic and cultural attractions, this walk exposed the overlooked possibilities for ludic interaction that reside in the places we pass through daily – the marginal, overlooked, and forgotten.

When the participants returned to the shipping container after their walk, they were invited to add their experience to a map table. The map table, made in the shape of the Wellington harbor and laser-engraved with a map of the city, doubled as a self-contained project as well. Members of the public who had not taken part in the performance walk were also invited to make places of memory or significance with a flag.