Les Flâneurs in the Super City

The Auckland team met up to discuss our ideas over coffee one afternoon and after looking at each other blankly, we decided to conduct a dérive.

The following Saturday we met at midnight in Aotea Square and sauntered down through the CBD. We spent most of our time outside an infamous club, “featuring New Zealand’s most beautiful dancers for your entertainment”, and in and around a lane that provides access to a number of clubs. Both locales were heavily populated, with a spectrum of society. The path of our dérive, was closely aligned with perhaps the highest concentration of intoxication in the city. But hey, it is a long documented fact that New Zealand has drinking issues. ‘It's not the drinking; it's how we're drinking’. Couple that with a reasonably conservative society and you get what we encountered that Saturday night.

We saw/photographed/heard and documented an array of responses to our questions around Sex in the Super City. On viewing the heaving mass in our vicinity, Jonathan quite accurately noted, ‘clearly, anything goes!’ Our insights were many and various that night, and on sex, it seems there is a vast discrepancy between truth and reality, intention and outcome. All wildly amusing, nonetheless. A classic line a friend once used in order to bring a sense of reality to a situation when she was pursued by someone she had no interest in, played over in my mind again and again that night:

‘Look at me – and now, look at you’.

So, is it a prudish city? After hours, it seems it isn’t at all, particularly where we ended up. But-is it sexy? That is quite another issue! On my way home I couldn’t work out if I should never go out drinking again, or never go out sober again.


/// Ri Williamson ///