Naked Cities -> Living Atlas

From Weegee to Debord to Zorn to Nabuurs&VanDoorn and back.

The threads connecting Weegee, Guy Debord, John Zorn, and artist duo Nabuurs&VanDoorn weave a fascinating lineage of urban observation, artistic improvisation, and performative mapping. Each approach interrogates how we navigate, perceive, and reimagine the city.

1945 – Weegee’s Naked City

The story begins in post-war New York. Photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) published Naked City in 1945, a stark visual chronicle of urban life and crime scenes. His images capture the city in all its raw immediacy, exposing both the spectacle and the invisible flows of human behavior. The book’s title, evocative and unflinching, would reverberate across disciplines for decades.

1961 – Guy Debord’s Psychogeographical Maps

Fast-forward to the early 1960s: the Situationist Internationale, led by Guy Debord, began producing psychogeographical maps of Paris. Debord’s maps, such as those collected in Naked City (1961), were not about streets and addresses in the conventional sense, they were instruments for exploring the emotional and social topography of the urban landscape. Debord’s radical experiments sought to reveal the underlying currents of everyday life, turning the city into a playground for dérive, drift, and collective imagination.

1988 – John Zorn’s Band Naked City

In 1988, avant-garde musician John Zorn formed the band Naked City, naming it after

Weegee’s iconic book. The band, known for its fast-paced, genre-blurring compositions, was deeply inspired by structured improvisation, game pieces, and the radical unpredictability of urban life. Zorn’s Cobra (1984) and collaborations with the experimental filmmaker Xu Feng introduced rule-based improvisation into musical practice, an approach that resonates with the open-ended explorations of psychogeography.

2025–2026 – Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s Living Atlas

Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s Living Atlas picks up this lineage and brings it into contemporary

practice. Their project is a performative cartography where reality and fiction co-produce new ways of navigating public space. Drawing inspiration from Debord’s

psychogeographical explorations, they combine digital overlays, color-coded maps, and

participatory instructions to create urban experiences that resist full comprehension, much like Zorn’s improvisational scores or Weegee’s unflinching photographic sequences. The duo’s work treats the city as a dynamic, relational system, where each encounter or action contributes to a continuously evolving atlas.

Connecting the Dots

From Weegee’s crime scenes to Debord’s dérives, Zorn’s rule-based improvisation, and

Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s performative mapping, there is a continuous fascination with the city as a site of unpredictability, improvisation, and layered narratives. In all these works,

“grasping” the city in its entirety is impossible; the point is to navigate, respond, and engage with what emerges, turning maps, images, and scores into living, evolving experiences. In this way, Living Atlas is less a literal atlas and more an ongoing conversation with these precedents: it embraces the unknowable, the improvised, and the performative, extending a lineage that stretches from 1945 New York to today’s global urban explorations