Urban exploration, also referred to as vadding, is the covert investigation of prohibited manmade structures not meant for public use. These structures include steam tunnels, crawl spaces, elevator shafts, and other hidden or forbidden spots.
Over the past decade urban exploration has gained a fair amount of notoriety, spawning an international network of individual and group explorers.* This growth in popularity is largely due to the Toronto-based zine Infiltration**, which mainly documents the explorations of the editors, but also includes entries from hardcore urban explorers throughout the globe. Occasionally these documented adventures verge on the enigmatic, like the discovery of a hidden room in a church tower with “chairs arranged in a circle, and maps tacked to the walls,” while others recount life threatening quests for the Marvelous, as with a Minneapolis group who, when searching for a fabled natural cave, took a canoe down the city’s sewer system and nearly drowned. However, some explorations are simply exercises in subversion, such as the re-infiltration of Toronto ’s City Hall after the local security patriarch publicly claimed a million dollar security overhaul would keep the Toronto urban explorers out.
Like authentic poets, urban explorers leap past the banal settings of the modern world, and head straight for the undercurrent, momentarily freeing themselves from the monotony of consumer capitalism. A catalyst in this plot against boredom, Infiltration acts as a subtle gateway to the diverse tactics of spatial defiance.
*Recently I even discovered the existence of the Portland Vadding Collective.
**For a copy of Infiltration send $3 to PO Box 13 , Station E, Toronto , Ontario , M6H 4E1 , Canada .
