Ways of Rerouting
Ways of Rerouting
Notes on Deviation for the Institutionally Wayward
Clementine Butler-Gallie
A route seems planned, until it isn’t.
A door closes in your face, a potential path floods with impossibilities, a crossing is denied, a conversation or new connection pulls you elsewhere.
Each deviation traces a new line, another path. There is no single route—artistic, curatorial, or otherwise—and if someone tells you there is, they are probably standing too close to the door. When pathfinding within cultural, social, or political landscapes, one is sure to face gatekeepers: those who, whether knowingly or not, uphold unsustainable systems through their wealth, politics, or desire for control. So if you reach that closed door, don’t give them the satisfaction of knocking. Turn around and reroute.
These ways of rerouting are intended to be read as part abstracted directions, part curatorial score, and part manifesto in the making. Choose one at random, a few, all of them, or none at all. At the least, they may lead you off track for a moment. At best, they might reveal that other systems are possible through our shared capacity to refuse, resist, and dissent.
Yet walking solo is also a method.
Walking-with can be understood beyond the idea of a figure alongside to include the figure no longer there, the unknown passerby, the more-than-human, our traumas, desires, dreams …
Sometimes we require a reminder that we never truly walk alone.
As Walt Whitman shares, he is one who “often walks lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers.”
Walking-with is both a gesture of solidarity and an act of attunement.
A way of moving in rhythm with others, seen and unseen.
Collective movement can be a form of quiet resistance,
shaping new paths towards shared futures.
Around, through, within the everyday.
It is here that unruly encounters can happen.
Some may stop us in our tracks, opening doors to conversation, interpretation, surprise.
Others may throw shadows across a route,
adding friction that shifts perspective.
In rerouting, tension is not failure.
It is a line to follow.
There is always the option to keep altering course.
Walking is only one word, and not for everyone.
New vocabularies can open other routes.
Berlin’s Dekoloniale Stadtführung (decolonial city tours) continue to share how renaming streets can reframe the ways bodies inhabit and traverse them.
A walk becomes an act of listening, a way to trace the weight of words beneath our feet.
Touch the street sign. Say the name aloud.
Notice what lingers, what surfaces in collective memory.
Renaming gestures towards rewriting routes together.
The question repeats—in assessments, in casual conversations, in funding reports. Numbers, always numbers.
Counting bodies, counting steps, counting reach.
Yet what is depth, if only measured in numbers?
With rerouting, not always, but often, less is more.
Walking together requires intimacy.
Staying-with requires care.
Sometimes, the smallest audience holds the deepest encounter.
Step off the treadmill.
It’s not only about speed, but about the logic of metrics, quotas, value systems.
Refuse the metric that makes presence measurable.
Stop. Move. Share the ground.
Centrality has long exerted a magnetic pull:
urban over rural, city center over periphery, mainstream over marginal.
This gravitational force can result in repetition, oversaturation, exclusion.
Walter Mignolo’s exploration of delinking offers a parallel; a conscious act of rerouting away from dominant Western knowledge systems, opening paths in other directions, other ways of knowing.
Step aside from dominant lines.
Tilt your compass.
Look towards other centers.
Which dominant direction will you leave behind?
And off you go.
It asks for togetherness in space, for motion.
This demands some degree of presence.
Our worlds are becoming increasingly online, digitalized, documented.
Keep some measure of distance.
Find a different rhythm of attention.
Slow down.
Step aside from constant demands to be visible, productive.
Seek spaces that are not driven by image or data,
but by the shared effort of moving and creating with and for others.
Space for being together in real time.
A rethinking of how resources move.
Too often, budgets anchor themselves in objects;
material-heavy, production-bound,
while artists remain underpaid.
Center the immaterial.
Reconsider what is necessary.
Lighten the load.
Measure the weight of excess.
Let funds sustain people, ideas, not things.
Refigure economies of visibility.
Reroute value itself.
Repetition reveals change.
Must we always think of something new?
To return is to keep learning from the same ground.
Return somewhere.
Notice what alters,
what endures.
A walk walked again is already different.
The line becomes a circle, the circle a slow archive.
The guide grows more attuned.
Knowledge layers and is quietly carried forward.
Pausing creates room
for reflection,
for recalibration,
for catching one’s breath.
Pausing resists the pull of the linear;
what Homi K. Bhabha describes as a time-lag:
something that unsettles progress,
makes space for other tempos,
and for other meanings to emerge.
It is not failure or interruption,
but an integral part of any journey.
To pause makes space for listening,
for noticing what otherwise slips past,
for allowing new directions to surface.
With hope, there are many routes into these reroutes, and many ways for them to continue onwards. They might be read from different street corners, each offering a new view beyond this book’s cover. That view ahead is already a space to activate; to reroute within or from. The project of rerouting has no fixed destination, perhaps no end at all. To close this text is an invitation to pause and then to continue on, reading, listening, walking, moving—with, in whatever direction, always keeping space for deviation.
Desta – Dekoloniale Stadtführung. “Entdecke das Afrikanische Viertel (Tour).” Accessed October 29, 2025. https://www.dekolonialestadtfuehrung.de/produkt/entdecke-das-afrikanisch....
Mignolo, Walter. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 451–454.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1997). “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity.” In Postcolonial Criticism, edited by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 166–183.
This essay was written as a new commission for the book Walk Notations published by nGbK Verlag.
The book was published as a trace of the project Dissident Paths (2025-26) curated by ReRouting and Cruising Curators for nGbK, Berlin.
A door closes in your face, a potential path floods with impossibilities, a crossing is denied, a conversation or new connection pulls you elsewhere.
Each deviation traces a new line, another path. There is no single route—artistic, curatorial, or otherwise—and if someone tells you there is, they are probably standing too close to the door. When pathfinding within cultural, social, or political landscapes, one is sure to face gatekeepers: those who, whether knowingly or not, uphold unsustainable systems through their wealth, politics, or desire for control. So if you reach that closed door, don’t give them the satisfaction of knocking. Turn around and reroute.
These ways of rerouting are intended to be read as part abstracted directions, part curatorial score, and part manifesto in the making. Choose one at random, a few, all of them, or none at all. At the least, they may lead you off track for a moment. At best, they might reveal that other systems are possible through our shared capacity to refuse, resist, and dissent.
Reroute: Walking-With
Together is a key to rerouting.Yet walking solo is also a method.
Walking-with can be understood beyond the idea of a figure alongside to include the figure no longer there, the unknown passerby, the more-than-human, our traumas, desires, dreams …
Sometimes we require a reminder that we never truly walk alone.
As Walt Whitman shares, he is one who “often walks lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers.”
Walking-with is both a gesture of solidarity and an act of attunement.
A way of moving in rhythm with others, seen and unseen.
Collective movement can be a form of quiet resistance,
shaping new paths towards shared futures.
Reroute: Encounters
In motion, in public space, life spills into every step.Around, through, within the everyday.
It is here that unruly encounters can happen.
Some may stop us in our tracks, opening doors to conversation, interpretation, surprise.
Others may throw shadows across a route,
adding friction that shifts perspective.
In rerouting, tension is not failure.
It is a line to follow.
There is always the option to keep altering course.
Reroute: Renaming
To walk, roll, drift, trespass, sway, to be carried, to be slowed.Walking is only one word, and not for everyone.
New vocabularies can open other routes.
Berlin’s Dekoloniale Stadtführung (decolonial city tours) continue to share how renaming streets can reframe the ways bodies inhabit and traverse them.
A walk becomes an act of listening, a way to trace the weight of words beneath our feet.
Touch the street sign. Say the name aloud.
Notice what lingers, what surfaces in collective memory.
Renaming gestures towards rewriting routes together.
Reroute: Intimacy
How many have joined?The question repeats—in assessments, in casual conversations, in funding reports. Numbers, always numbers.
Counting bodies, counting steps, counting reach.
Yet what is depth, if only measured in numbers?
With rerouting, not always, but often, less is more.
Walking together requires intimacy.
Staying-with requires care.
Sometimes, the smallest audience holds the deepest encounter.
Step off the treadmill.
It’s not only about speed, but about the logic of metrics, quotas, value systems.
Refuse the metric that makes presence measurable.
Stop. Move. Share the ground.
Reroute: Towards Other Centers
Rerouting is about changing direction.Centrality has long exerted a magnetic pull:
urban over rural, city center over periphery, mainstream over marginal.
This gravitational force can result in repetition, oversaturation, exclusion.
Walter Mignolo’s exploration of delinking offers a parallel; a conscious act of rerouting away from dominant Western knowledge systems, opening paths in other directions, other ways of knowing.
Step aside from dominant lines.
Tilt your compass.
Look towards other centers.
Which dominant direction will you leave behind?
And off you go.
Reroute: Offline
Rerouting is an embodied practice.It asks for togetherness in space, for motion.
This demands some degree of presence.
Our worlds are becoming increasingly online, digitalized, documented.
Keep some measure of distance.
Find a different rhythm of attention.
Slow down.
Step aside from constant demands to be visible, productive.
Seek spaces that are not driven by image or data,
but by the shared effort of moving and creating with and for others.
Space for being together in real time.
Reroute: Refigure
Refiguring calls for redirection.A rethinking of how resources move.
Too often, budgets anchor themselves in objects;
material-heavy, production-bound,
while artists remain underpaid.
Center the immaterial.
Reconsider what is necessary.
Lighten the load.
Measure the weight of excess.
Let funds sustain people, ideas, not things.
Refigure economies of visibility.
Reroute value itself.
Reroute: Return-Repeat
A route revisited is never the same.Repetition reveals change.
Must we always think of something new?
To return is to keep learning from the same ground.
Return somewhere.
Notice what alters,
what endures.
A walk walked again is already different.
The line becomes a circle, the circle a slow archive.
The guide grows more attuned.
Knowledge layers and is quietly carried forward.
Reroute: Pause
Stopping is as vital as moving.Pausing creates room
for reflection,
for recalibration,
for catching one’s breath.
Pausing resists the pull of the linear;
what Homi K. Bhabha describes as a time-lag:
something that unsettles progress,
makes space for other tempos,
and for other meanings to emerge.
It is not failure or interruption,
but an integral part of any journey.
To pause makes space for listening,
for noticing what otherwise slips past,
for allowing new directions to surface.
With hope, there are many routes into these reroutes, and many ways for them to continue onwards. They might be read from different street corners, each offering a new view beyond this book’s cover. That view ahead is already a space to activate; to reroute within or from. The project of rerouting has no fixed destination, perhaps no end at all. To close this text is an invitation to pause and then to continue on, reading, listening, walking, moving—with, in whatever direction, always keeping space for deviation.
References
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2001, p. 189.Desta – Dekoloniale Stadtführung. “Entdecke das Afrikanische Viertel (Tour).” Accessed October 29, 2025. https://www.dekolonialestadtfuehrung.de/produkt/entdecke-das-afrikanisch....
Mignolo, Walter. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 451–454.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1997). “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity.” In Postcolonial Criticism, edited by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 166–183.
This essay was written as a new commission for the book Walk Notations published by nGbK Verlag.
The book was published as a trace of the project Dissident Paths (2025-26) curated by ReRouting and Cruising Curators for nGbK, Berlin.