Walking is still honest*: about being and moving together

Un/freedom on the Streets: Walking with Garnette Cadogan and Frantz Fanon

This talk starts from the premise that, in the 21st century, the walker is an “indicator species.” This is a term biologists use to designate an organism whose health reveals the qualitative conditions of life that obtain in a particular environment. I contend that the relative freedom of those who travel the streets of a city on foot – their freedom from repressive policing, from corporate or state surveillance, from private incursions into public space, from casual forms of physical and verbal abuse, and from congestion and pollution on the roads – offers a useful sense of the health of society itself. As a species, the pedestrian is a bioindicator. Or, better, a sort of ‘socio-indicator’. Are we free, whatever our social identity, to walk safely but also creatively, alone and with others, in the streets of the city? Whatever our social identity…

For people of colour in particular walking the streets of a city is an intensely contested and politicized activity. This talk explores the politics of walking to be found both in a recent article by the Jamaican journalist Garnette Cadogan and in the writings of the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon from the 1950s. Cadogan and Fanon are in their different contexts – respectively, the contemporary US and colonial Algeria – highly attuned to the racialization of walking. By walking with them, we can ascertain the qualitative conditions of life in a particular environment and hence the relative state of crisis of the cities we inhabit. But walking with them can also point to the redemptive possibilities of this everyday activity.

Matthew Beaumont is a Professor of English Literature at University College London and the author of several books about walking, including Nightwalking (2015), The Walker (2020) and How We Walk (forthcoming, 2024). He is a Co-Director of UCL’s Urban Lab.

Walking from Scores

Walking from Scores is a collection of non-site-specific text and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and soundmaking by visual artists, composers, performers, choreographers, writers, and activists. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores. The title is a variation on Working from Scores, a text originally published in 1990 where Ken Friedman discussed his notion of “musicality” in visual art and intermedia, interrogating ideas of “authenticity”, “intention” and “meaning” and understanding the artwork as a set of instructions that allows a constellation of different interpretations. Embracing this open approach, the project is based on the reproduction and redistribution of the collection and on its reactivation in specific forms according to each context. After many iterations in different cities in the form of pop-up exhibitions, flyering, workshops, anonymous interventions and collective performances, the project is now also a book (Les presses du réel, 2022).

The workshop is open to artists, musicians, performers, dancers, students, and anyone wishing to explore the relationships between sound, listening and the everyday, the potential of walking in urban space, as well as an expanded notion of notation. The program is organized in two practical sessions focused on walking, listening on the move and on itinerant performances. No musical or performative skill is required, but a collaborative and explorative attitude is necessary.

With scores and instructions by: Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti, Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jiří Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Jez riley French, Pheobe riley Law, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Ben Vautier, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, La Monte Young.

Elena Biserna is a researcher and curator based in Marseille, France. She works as artistic director of the cultural association Lab GAMERZ, Aix-en-Provence. She writes, talks, facilitates workshops or collective projects, curates events and sometimes performs. Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, time-based art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes, the public and political sphere. Recent books: Walking from Scores (2022) and Going Out. Walking, Listening, Soundmaking (2022). She co-edits the podcast wi watt'heure of Revue & Corrigée with Carole Rieussec. As a curator and/or author she has collaborated with different venues/organisations, such as ar/ge kunst (Bolzano), B’sarya for Arts (Alexandria), Errant Sound (Berlin), LUFF (Lausanne), Onassis Fondation (Athens), Sonic Protest (Paris), Festival Plataforma (Santiago de Compostela); Manifesta 13 and many others. She has a PhD in Audiovisual Studies (University of Udine) and taught at ESAAix-École Supérieure d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence, Aix-Marseille University, the Academy of fine art of Bologna and Paris 8 University.

OpenCity Vilnius

My conference paper draws upon my recent PhD in which I explore the potential of soundwalking as a means of investigating contested space, proposing it to be both creative medium and artistic research methodology. As an exemplar I offer my soundwalk OpenCity Nine Elms, a critique of the hubristic developments at Nine Elms on London’s South Bank that fly in the face of climate change and predictions of catastrophic flooding.
I shall also be leading a freshly composed soundwalk OpenCity Vilnius in response to the local context, interlacing speculative impressions of the locality with live contemporaneous sounds in a collective reconsideration of place, entangling participants in past, present and latent soundscapes. Earphones and iPods pre-loaded with the soundtrack will be loaned to up to 15 fellow conference attendees on a sign-up basis. Immediately after the soundwalk there will be an opportunity to discuss the experience and its implications.

Andrew Brown is best known for the soundwalks that he performs under the name OpenCity, an artistic research project that he founded in 2006, and through which he explores contested space, and aesthetic, ecological and socio-political concerns. Andrew has extensive experience within education and sound design, having worked with diverse organisations in a wide variety of settings, including dance and live art. He is a creative and critical writer, co-founding small press Tak Tak Tak in 1985. He also continues to compose music as part of the percussion-based ensemble Left Hand Right Hand.

Flâneuse. Women Walking the City

In her contribution, Lucile Bouvard tackles her own passion for flânerie — the art of getting to know a city through attentive urban wandering — by exploring the book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London published by Franco-American writer Lauren Elkin in 2016.

Flâneuse offers alternative narratives to the celebrated figure of the flâneur: a masculine figure of privilege and leisure who wanders in cities and was born in the early nineteenth century. At the crossroads of literary criticism, urban topography and memoir, the book elaborates upon Elkin’s own personal wanderings through cities by weaving her own experience with those of the great female figures, from nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to filmmaker Agnes Varda, just to name a few. All in all, Flâneuse explores the liberating and creative potential for women to walk freely through the streets and what it meant for these great figures to practise this kind of streetwalking.

Download: Lucile-Bouvard_Flaneuse-Women-Walk-the-City.pdf

Lucile Bouvard, based in Berlin since 2008, is an urban inventory taker, photographer, contemporary art curator and artist studio manager. As a passionate flâneuse, she began to document her walks through the city of Berlin a few months after her arrival in 2009. This practice has been manifested, among other works, in the ongoing series of photographs, Berlin Balconies, which documents the varied and often quirky uses of balconies in the capital. Since 2021, Bouvard has also been the editor of the Instagram account Berlin Banners, which showcases the collection of images dedicated to the tradition of protest banners hung up on Berlin’s facades.

Since 2013, she has curated several publications, group exhibitions and solo projects — the latest of which, Working. Not Working by Polish artist Wera Bet, is currently on view at SOX, one of Berlin’s oldest off-spaces. Her articles have been published in 02, Berlin Art Link, and on the Jeunes Commisaires’ website of the French Institute of Berlin. She has also collaborated as an author with several French and international institutions.

Her current projects comprise a collection of short texts portraying Berlin, based upon her experience as a flâneuse, and further exploring the cinematic nature and potential of the German capital.

Embodied Explorations: Reading the Landscape, Walking the Text

The presentation explores the relationship between walking and written language, highlighting the insufficiently examined connection between the physiology and cognitive mechanisms underlying language and its representation in textual form. Drawing upon the fields of neurolinguistics, literary science, and evolutionary biology, the contribution investigates how the act of walking, ingrained in human evolution, influences the medium of text. The inherent metaphors within language, where motifs associated with walking often serve as orientational metaphors, further accentuate this relationship. The author’s practice-based experience as a writer informs the exploration, revealing the parallelisms between walking and mental processes in textual creation. The paper will be kicked off with a brief collaborative workshop titled Exploring Asemic Landscape with the aim of enhancing sensitivity to the subject matter and making it literally “tangible.”

Ondřej Buddeus (b. 1984) is a writer, editor, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He specializes in poetry theory, experimental literature, and the intersection of literature with the visual arts. He earned his PhD on the topic of fictionality in poetry from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Among his works, he co-authored the monograph Sorting Words: Literature and Conceptual Tendencies 1949–2015. As a writer, he works across genres and media, often collaborating with contemporary artists, most recently with sculptor Pavla Scerankova on the War Veterans Memorial in Ostrava. He is a member and former board member of the Czech Writers Association.

Routes as Spaces – The ReRouting Project

There are many ways to walk; to stroll, to ramble, to trespass, to head somewhere specific or without direction, to meander, to get lost, to find one’s way again. Whatever way one walks, the action of moving from one place to another creates a temporary link between two points; a wall of sorts. As the route of a walk gathers more points, these walls connect and a space is formed.
ReRouting, a curatorial research project and platform, proposes that it is possible to construct a whole new architecture of cultural spaces through the act of walking. Taking Lucius Burckhardt’s theory of Strollology as a starting point, this presentation explores what it would take to change our perception of what curatorial space can be alongside various elements of the ReRouting project. (www.thereroutingproject.org)

Clementine Butler-Gallie is a curator, editor, and artistic researcher based in Berlin. She holds a diploma in Art History from Glasgow University and is a current Masters student of Art in Context at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Her work focuses on future spaces for and past stories of cultural exchange and encounter, with her current research initiative titled ReRouting exploring walking as a curatorial space with a specific focus on collective action on sites of division.
She is a curator at Arts Cabinet, a pluri-disciplinary research platform that functions as a space to experiment with different forms of artistic knowledge production, she co-organises the curatorial network Continued Conversations, and is an editor at JAWS Journal. She has curated and participated in projects with HKW, Berlin; HALLE 14, Leipzig; CAP, Kuwait; Mansion, Beirut; Ashkal Alwan; Beirut, among others. She is co-editor of the upcoming publication They:Live – Manual for Social Art Practices that will be published by nGbK in February 2024.

Francesco Careri is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre University. In 1995 he founded the urban art laboratory Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade, and in 2009 Laboratorio Arti Civiche, interdisciplinary research group which searches for a creative interaction between citizens and the built environment they live in. His main focus is now on informal urban settlements, exploring critically new possibilities of transformation in such contexts, especially through studies and proposals on the living conditions of the Roma People in Italy and Europe. Since 2006 in the Faculty of Architecture he runs the module Civic Arts, a peripatetic laboratory grounded in the walking exploration of neglected urban areas. He is the director of the Master Programme Studi del Territorio / Environmental Humanities at the University of Roma Tre. His main publications are the books Constant. New Babylon, una Città Nomade (2001) and Walkscapes. Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2002).

Learning to Walk on Christo’s Floating Piers

In 2016, after 9 months of trekking around the world, I had the chance to walk Christo’s Floating Piers, which I blogged about here: https://walkinghome.lmc.gatech.edu/pointless-essays/walking-christos-floating-piers/. For this presentation I would like to discuss the actual walking on this remarkable installation— the phenomenological experience—and then expand to a discussion of three issues raised by Christo’s work: surfaces (often ignored element in walking texts), social etiquette (the blank surface gave little guidance to the crowd about how to walk on it), and playfulness (the walkers were often giddy and childlike). The goal is not simply to examine how such issues manifest on Lake Iseo, but how such questions can give insight into walking more generally.

T. Hugh Crawford is a professor of literature and philosophy at Georgia Institute of Technology and a long-distance trekker. He has walked all over the world, published articles on walking and literature and philosophy, as well as taught numerous seminars on walking in literature, culture, and the arts. Currently writing a travelogue on hiking the Pennine Way with comparisons to the Appalachian Trail (the first chapters can be found here: https://thughcrawford.substack.com), he also has an extensive blog on his worldwide walking: https://walkinghome.lmc.gatech.edu.

Still/City

Human stillness offers a counterpoint to the rush of contemporary life, a way of being in the present moment that draws attention to the life in and around us: from momentary flickerings to patterns of change that occur on large scales and over long periods of time. Remaining deliberately still, one may feel part of a bigger whole, part of the environment. One might experience a kind of objectivity, and perceive more clearly the mechanism of city: traffic, commuting, and the constant ongoingness of human activity.
The artist, James Cunningham uses deliberate stillness as a precursor to, and integrated frequently into, his conscious walking practise. Still/City is an opportunity for participants to remain deliberately still, with others, for 20 minutes, and to experience the location in this alternative way. Still/City is a project initiated by James Cunningham who also partakes in the stillness.
Guidelines for Participation:
1. keep as still and quiet for as long as you can during the 20 minutes
2. begin, stop, or restart whenever
3. avoid any direct communication, including eye-contact, with others

James Cunningham is an artist working in performance, video, and photo-media. Since 2007, he engages in durational stillness and conscious walking, in built and unbuilt environments, with and without audience, and with and without the participation of others. With these elements he has created participatory performances, video and photo-media artworks for festivals, symposia, and galleries, including Exist Festivals (Brisbane), SEAM (Sydney), OVERFLOW (Munich), and Stalker’s Circonstanza #8 (Brussels). Cunningham is co-Artistic Director (with Suzon Fuks) of Igneous Inc. since 1997. With Igneous, he has co-choreographed and performed in stage shows, performance-installations, video-dance works and networked/online performances in festivals and cities around the world, including Nuit Blanche Toronto (Mirage), BIAM Paris (Body in Question), and Theater Der Welt Stuttgart (Liquid Skin). He graduated in Performance (Dance) from the Centre for the Performing Arts, Adelaide.

Genius Loci

The main protagonist of this 16 mm short film is the author himself, as in his previous films. Disguised as a street repair worker, he hides in a trailer at the construction fleet owned by the city. At the dawn of a new working day, he begins his journey, the end point of which is unknown to him. The search for this place becomes a psychogeographical haiku and a pretext for the journey, the meaning of which is understood by repeating the action from the beginning – coming back to the starting point in the film.

In the introduction to the film Dubauskas will talk about his ten-year-long exploration of the southwestern part of Vilnius and links with previous and ongoing walking artworks and artefacts of the industrial legacy.
All films have been digitised in cooperation with the Lithuanian Central State Archives.

Kipras Dubauskas (b. 1988) lives and works in Vilnius. He studied installation art at the Royal Academy of Ghent and sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. His artworks have been presented in solo exhibitions in Fondazione Innovazione Urbana in Bologna, Italy (2022), Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (2020), Post Gallery in Kaunas (2019), and Ex Elletrofonica Gallery in Rome (2016). He regularly participates in experimental film festivals, self-organised events in (semi) public spaces and collective exhibitions. Kipras Dubauskas is the founder of Spongė, an analogue film laboratory and artists collective.

Challenging Walking? Towards Playwalking, Dwelling and Occupying our Cities Together

It is a performative presentation and discussion that explores the challenges and political agency of walking together through our cities: in sharing experiences of new forms of co-existence, collective action, citizen driven initiatives that use walking as an active tool for action-research/resistance. Can we sustain and encourage other ways of walking or moving through our cities, of being and walking together? But also, how inclusive can we make this walking practice, how efficacious and experimental, how in bodied together? It shares a way of working together creatively as a practical thinking that follows Tim Ingold’s “wayfaring”: “An ecology of life, must be one of threads and traces, …of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life” (Ingold 2007). A provocation to walk together in contested urban landscapes; walking as a way of building community and/or our collective resilience in the face of climate change; in forging common embodied experiences.

Charlie Fox is a co-director of InspiralLondon trail and has been walking performatively, participating in walking art and co-creating social art projects for more than 30 years. While supporting the work of Inspiral in London he continues to develop interdisciplinary art projects as counter-productions, in facilitating collaborative projects that generate new artistic culture through experimental social art, ritual and performance practice – art activities and interventions that offers the potential of an art for all. Currently living and working in North Marseille, Charlie contributes to collective and citizen-led projects, including Gammares Collectif, Hotel du Nord and Made in the River.

Steps and The City | The Walking Budapest (1873–1914)

Walking is not a phenomenon by itself yet by being deeply embedded in the fabric of society. Urban spaces and walking have been inseparably intertwined for centuries. Budapest became a metropolis relatively late but at a rather rapid pace, thus the city and walking developed together. How did citizens perceive Budapest in terms of walking? How did they evaluate the city’s spaces and possibilities from this perspective? What types of pedestrians could be distinguished? What rules existed, what problems did walkers face, and how did they make fun of these? In my lecture I will move along these themes and questions – going deep into some while only slightly touching the others in order to show different aspects of walking in Budapest between 1873 and 1914.

Balázs Gáspár: I was born in 1989, and I have been walking since 1990. I have been writing articles about urban topics, photography, and exhibitions since 2014. I have been also researching Budapest’s lesser-known sides and topics, and wrote essays related to the city, e.g., about unknown photographers and photo albums of the city; about suicides on the Danube; and about different buildings. I also give a unique so-called Anti-Sightseeing walking tour, during which I present critiques about famous buildings and places in Budapest written in the past. I am living, walking, and working as a journalist (mostly) in Budapest.

walk | degrowth – a live distributed research experience

Walking as an artistic and/or research practice has been attracting attention for several decades (Ingold and Vergunst 2008, Pink et al. 2010, Heddon & Turner 2010, O’Neil & Hubbard 2010, Springway & Truman 2017 and 2019, Weslien 2020, etc.). Rebecca Solnit (2001) in her History of Walking offers a broad picture of walking and its relations to the exercise of thought, nature and the wild, urban environments or contemporary life and its frantic pace. This last dimension is echoed in Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration (2013) where time acceleration is allowed by technological advances, as well as a (pervasive Western) culture of accumulation and of ever-growing efficacy. The degrowth movement originating in the 1970’s gathers a bunch of heterodox scholars in economics (Meadows et al. 1972, Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Latouche 2006, Flipo, Schneider, Bayon 2012, Kallis & March 2015, Parrique 2019, etc.). They develop alternative views of social organizing and political economy. For instance, and more specifically, recent economic research clearly establishes the societal and individual costs of different mobility modalities (driving versus cycling versus walking, Gossling et al., 2019). Considering that the practice of walking and degrowth foundations share profound affinities, I propose a live distributed research experience aimed at exploring collectively the relationships between walkart and what can be called degrowth art (Barbanti, 2016, Gauzente, 2018).

This collective research experience comprises four steps :
- step 1 : sharing a few theoretical landmarks as pertains to degrowth in general and its possible prolongations in art practice (10 min.)
- step 2 : walking/thinking experience in pairs (with different roles in walking, inspired by the writer C. Barreau) (20 min., flexible)
- step 3 : writing/sketching (10 min.)
- step 4 : pinning, sharing and open-discussing, observing (15 min.)
The overall research process should last around 50–55mn. Participants-collaborators should be aware that I will collect the findings and share them, as well as the walking research protocol, under FAL (free art licence, compatible with CC-BY-SA).
Note: a limited number of participants (up to 20) is desirable in order to respect the schedule.

Claire Gauzente is a postdisciplinary researcher working at the university of Nantes. Her research and art interests pertain to degrowth and book arts (writing, printing, calligraphy), and their crossings with economic & management sciences are also a line of reflection.

Walking with Zoom: Digital and Bodily Drift

Our contribution involves a participatory recorded Zoom-walk, followed by a screening and discussion of the resulting collaborative “film”. A Zoom-walk is a method of creating a film by hacking the intended use of Zoom’s “speaker view” option, designed to cut between full-frame views of participants according to the software’s ability to detect whoever is speaking or producing significant sounds. As we walk, individually logged into our collective Zoom call, we will be pointing our computers’ cameras not at ourselves, but rather outwards, towards our surroundings; this will allow us to capture the sounds and images of our physical “drift” through the urban environment of Vilnius. This exercise builds on a series of art/anthropology experiments that we have been developing with digital media to explore phenomenologies of screen-mediated communication. By walking around different locations in the same city through the mediated platform of Zoom, we hope to lay new digital trails and generate unexpected spatial relationships between ourselves and our environment.

General Assn. is the art/anthropology duo Alyssa Grossman and Selena Kimball. Our work explores contemporary cultural narratives, site-based histories, and their everyday material traces through film, writing and experimental research, drawing inspiration from empirical science and absurd play, sustained scholarly reflection and the intuitive twists and pulls of our long-standing friendship. Our films and installations have been screened internationally at museums and film festivals, and we have published articles in a range of academic journals including Anthropology in Action (2021) and Anthropology and Art (forthcoming, 2023).

Footsteps of Identity: Kurdish Films and the Crisis of Cinematic Self-image

The paper investigates the politics of walking/mobility in Kurdish movies in relation to the geography, power, and identification of Kurds. The restless mobility of the characters in rural locations constructs the life of the Kurds in the movies of Bahman Ghobadi, Iranian Kurd filmmaker. These on-screen menacing journeys are commonly interpreted as representation of systematic discrimination and impoverishment which Kurds have been through for many decades, therefore they have been discussed as cine-political statements against the power. However, this paper tends to examine walking in the geography of Kurdistan in Ghobadi’s movies to unfold a cine-identification of Kurds by Kurd filmmakers that is not opposed but aligned/within the meta-narrative of the power.

Hemen Heidari is a lecturer in the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He
received his Ph.D. in Media Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland, studying absence in Iranian cinema. Entangled in his practical background in film and photography, Hemen’s main academic interest is the material agency of cinema in transformations of culture and collective memory.

From Building to Road, from Road to Square, from Square to Park, from Park to Sky, and Sky to Road We Went

It is a performative and participatory walk conducted by and with Hillside Projects. The act of walking is and continues to be an important element of Hillside Projects’ practice. It serves as a tool to move through place and is instrumental in the blossoming of ideas. With the aid of sun, movement, string, a speaker, our bodies and fabric, ephemeral works will be made and removed as we move together through a place. When you walk with Hillside Projects, you walk slowly, fast, in silence, in conversation, as meditation, with closed eyes, in action, as art, backwards, forwards, and as a manifestation with eyes wide open.
The walk is open for all and lasts approx. 90 minutes

Hillside Projects are artists Emily Berry Mennerdahl and Jonas Böttern, based in Stockholm, Sweden. Through performance, video and text, their work explores tales of disappearances in the natural world and the interrelated socio-political narratives that arise through these tales. Recent exhibitions include PhotoKTM5, Kathmandu, Nepal, Species, Soil and Successors at Oyoun, Berlin, dhak dhak ho-hum ah eekff iii ie, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Memorial for the Lost at Bonniers konsthall. In 2023–2024, Hillside Projects are artists in residence at IASPIS – International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts, Stockholm. Hillside Projects are chairpersons at The Nordic Art Association (NKF).

Walking with Permafrost

Walking with Permafrost investigates barefoot walking on permafrost lands and possible co-living with the micro-organisms released from the thawed permafrost due to climate breakdown and ecological polycrisis. Barefoot walking is investigated as a method to study the experience of permafrost condition and soil relations trough sensorial and corporeal encounter. It juxtaposes the vulnerability of the permafrost with the vulnerability of the human body: what is the liminal microcosmos in between the barefoot sole and the more-than-human underneath it. The more-than-human of walking methodologies, in this case with the micro-organisms, can be considered by engaging with feminist new materialism and posthumanism⁠. Walking with Permafrost investigates the movements of the micro-organisms of the permafrost and focuses on the repetitive moving patterns they have. The patterns and possible relations with the micro-organisms are explained in a sound recording that the walker can listen trough headphones while walking barefoot.

Tips for Walking with Permafrost:
For the walk, choose an open location (e.g., a park) where you can drift around. Prepare to have your phone and headphones to listen the ca. 20 min audio from the link provided by the symposium organisers. You will be guided to walk barefoot but take care of your wellbeing. Be careful not to step on anything sharp and if your feet get too cold, put your shoes back on regardless how the audio guides you. Also, be aware that as your feet get cold, it hurts more to step on stones etc.

Mari Keski-Korsu is a post-disciplinary artist and doctoral researcher who explores macro-level manifestations of the ecological polycrisis. Her work is based on multispecies collaborations and her medium of expression is a hybrid combination of participatory performance, visual and live art. Her practice involves intuitive interspecies communication, hydrobodily care and walking methodology to possibly enable empathy towards whole ecosystems. She is a practice based doctoral researcher in the Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Art and Media. Her research focuses on multispecies ritualisations in relation to the change in the (sub)Arctic and she is an artist member of the interdisciplinary research group working in Abisko Scientific Research Station in Access Abisko program.

The Impossibility of Seeing the Face of a Person Walking Ahead in the Window Reflections

The Impossibility of [...] Reflections is a walking structure that offers an almost uncountable number of possibilities for walking paths within the selected area. Preselected by the artist subjectively, the “places of interest” in the area are marked on an online map in code names. The encoding leaves the area open to interpretation and asks for participant’s attentiveness to their surroundings. Through active participation each walker has the possibility to perceive and experience the area from their own unique point of view within the boundaries created by the artist. The walking can be carried out: alone, starting with the online questionnaire which would offer each participant their individual path based on their individual perception, fields of knowledge and interest or moral values; or with a group of people, without the questionnaire but with a complete map of “places of interest” in the area.

Link to the questionnaire: https://impossibilityof.000webhostapp.com/reflections

Gustė Kripaitė is a student of contemporary sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, currently in her last year of BA. In her artistic practice, she mostly explores naturality and its paradoxes through material, conceptual and ideological studies, and experiments. Constant searching for ways to come to terms with her own pollutiveness in this current era is an important motive in her artistic research. Gustė’s attempts to view nature both through archaic and post-humanistic perspectives often results in creation of semi-fictive myths and realization of ecological concepts.

The Guided Walk as an Opportunity for an Unfulfilled Reconciliation of Perception and Knowledge

This contribution will address the possibilities of giving a guided walk without having first-hand experience and knowledge of a place. It will be performed during a group walk to and around the Sporto Rūmai, the abandoned, Soviet-era Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports. The participants will be invited to discuss their perception of this ruin and to negotiate their associations with it. Discussion points may include how monuments are remarked and perceived in the urban landscape, the potentials, and pitfalls for nostalgic romanticising of modernist artefacts, remembering and forgetting political and cultural histories, and the sharing of personal associations with contested sites. The aim of this activity is to engage a variety of knowledges into the discussion, opening the inquiry up to a conversation about place, history, and the resonances of these.

Paul Landon completed a Doctorate in Fine Arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2016. He lives and works in Montréal, where he is a professor of Media Arts at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of UQAM. In his research and visual art practice, Paul Landon explores the neglected and overlooked spaces of modernity. His explorations are transcribed through individual processes of mediatisation: of recording, editing, archiving and reconstruction. Landon’s work is structured through the uncompromising physicality of modern architecture and landscape, positing these as sites inscribed with forgotten promise and effaced monumentality.

Walk-Come to the Stor(e)y!

Walking around foreign cities during my recent travels, I have been engaging in a form of knowledge acquisition that engenders literary insights through the amalgamation of language knowledge and creative thought. I call this mode of inquiry ‘embodied linguistic serendipity.’ An example of such a train of thought in motion will be described in the first meeting of the workshop. Between the two parts of the workshop, the participants are invited to walk around Vilnius on their own using the proposed methods. In the second session of the workshop, we will gather the examples of linguistic serendipity encountered by the participants. Live recounting may be complemented by recorded visual documentation. Together we will analyse the material, adding interlingual associations where applicable. A final step consists in creating writing prompts from the most fruitful examples. The participants will choose one of these for a short free writing exercise.

Elina Mikkilä, Dr., is a Marie Curie Individual Fellow in Creative-Critical Writing at Lancaster University. She studied Comparative Literature and Romance studies as well as Slavic and Scandinavian / English studies in Vienna, Paris, and Saint Petersburg. Graduated as the first person in practice-led Literary Writing at a German-language art university. Alongside the PhD studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she was a research fellow at the Swiss Literature Institute and the Free University of Berlin. Conference speaker throughout Europe, writer in-residence at Intercultural Authors’ Camp, city columns for taz.de, Berlin. Research interests: Literature of translingual authors and questions of post-postmodern (minority) identities.

Time to Walk

Time has displaced place in our perception of distance. We no longer think in terms of miles or kilometres, but hours and minutes. “Time-space compression” designates “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time,” writes David Harvey, “that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves.”

Using various examples drawn from Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Raja Shehadeh’s books Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2007) and Going Home: A Walk through Fifty Years of Occupation (2019) among others, this talk will reflect on the time-space created by walking.

Karen O’Rourke is an artist, writer, and emeritus professor of art at the University of Saint-Etienne. Her book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers was published by the MIT Press in 2013.

Slow Walking: Embodied Reflections on the Time and Rhythm of Movement during and after the Pandemic

“The hill belongs to its tortoises” reads a written slogan. What is a tortoise, in human imagination, if not an idle way of moving, of walking ASLSP (“as slow as possible”) as John Cage would have put it? Walking became the kernel of everyday life for many of us during the successive pandemic quarantines. Thoroughly creating our own itineraries in urban or country space, we looked for bodily and mental exercise, a relaxed view on things, the natural, the calm, or the awesome. The pandemic worked as a time-decelerator at most times, and a time-accelerator in others. Starting from a collective walking workshop that took place in Athens in the context of the Erasmus+ Project Encounters between Anthropology, Art and Pedagogy, this talk will unravel further reflections on time and rhythm of humans and animals during and after the pandemic.

Panayotis Panopoulos is Associate Professor in Anthropology of Music and Dance in the Department of Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece. His research interests concern music, sound, deafness, performance and anthropology and art correlations. He has been a Research Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2002–2003; 2012) and the University of California, Berkeley (2009). He has also taught as invited lecturer at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2012) and at the University of Cologne (2018). Voice-o-graph, a collaborative project of arts-based ethnography with visual artist Panos Charalambous, was presented at documenta 14, Athens/Kassel in 2017.

La Randonnée, or Becoming-Space-With. Weaving the Practices of Walking and Writing

The concept of “la randonnée” (the ramble) by French philosopher Michel Serres describes and, especially, performs a methodology for multidisciplinary theory production as well as an exploratory mode of experiencing space. Often declared as an “anti-method” by Serres’ peers due to its renunciation of predetermined research strategies, it becomes, in many senses, an “endeavour that responds to what it finds along the way” (Christopher Watkin). As a mode of walking, “la randonnée” is one of writing as well. “On écrit avec les pieds”, proclaims Serres and situates the origins of text in the body – in its movements and rhythm(s).
The unpredictability and uncertainty of this knowledge production practice and its performative use of turbulences and irritations make it particularly applicable for multidisciplinary and site-sensitive artistic research projects. The proposed practice of “Skinspace” reactivates Serres’ “randonnée”, weaving textures of procedural, discursive and experimental spatio-textual production.

Elena Peytchinska is Vienna-based visual artist, performance designer and musician. She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she is currently a lecturer at the Department of Stage and Film Design and holds a doctoral degree in Language Arts/ Creative Writing. Current research interests include spatial practices for multispecies collaborations, potential scenography and entanglements of text and space in the context of digital and post-digital concretism.

Out in High Heels

Embracing femininity and walking on the streets today is layered, urgent, and complex. There needs to be a safe space for reflection and discussion today. What are the movements, encounters, feelings, and experiences when walking in high heels in public space during the day and night? This project archives a series of walks in high heels alone and with friends from January to August 2023. This work dives into the joys, dreams, pains and discomforts of being feminine and walking in high heels and opens those experiences to an audience during Dutch Design Week. The goal with this work is to create a platform and space where women and feminine people can freely walk on the streets no matter the time of day.

Marina Menéndez-Pidal is a graphic designer currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She is Spanish American who was born in Madrid, Spain in 1993 and raised in California, USA. She received her MA in Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2022. Previously, she has worked as a designer at Dubberly Design Office and PIN–UP. During her studies, she explored the movement of walking, learning about what it means to walk alone at night as a woman and feminine person. She expanded the work since graduating to walk during the day and night alone and with friends, and plans to show new work for this upcoming Dutch Design Week.

When I Don’t Walk in Mexico City

There is a specific feeling I get when I walk the streets of Mexico City, especially those where I have been before, the ones where I dreamt of the past poets and rebels and dreamers. Walking in another city, amid a somewhat elected diaspora, does not have the same effect. The air is not as concentrated, the light reflects differently, the sounds – of course – are other. The ghost of one city can never be transferred to another. Walking the streets of Mexico City is so particular, so connected to my cells, that I cannot replace it by walking any other city or town or mountain. This is a lecture performance on the connection between memory, walking and exile.

Frida Robles Ponce is an artist, researcher, and curator. Her practice focuses on street-based knowledge, interconnectivity, and the subversive power of imagination. She has been a resident artist at Neubauer Collegium (USA); Q21 (Austria); Botkyrka Residency (Sweden); transeuropa performing arts festival (Germany); Residency 108 (USA) and De Liceiras 18 (Portugal), and a curator in residency at Clark House Initiative (India). Fellow at the first two sessions of the Raw Academy in Dakar, Senegal. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with support from the JUMEX Contemporary Art Foundation and the Marietta Blau.

Out of the woods A literary journey from the past to the present

These sixteen-kilometre/four-hour walk links the lives of ghetto fighter and archivist Rachel Margolis with diarist and resistance fighter Kazimir Sakowicz. It starts in the Holocaust memorial at Ponary Forest where Sakowicz recorded the first moments of the Holocaust. We will walk back to Vilnius. Along the way we visit the cemetery where Sakowicz lies. We pass the Margolis stolpersteine in the ghetto area and end at the Green House Museum which was founded by Rachel Margolis. Participants will be given texts from the diaries which will be read alongside their own texts along the way as we document our progress from the outer to the inner, from the past to the present, from trauma to healing.
A presentation will be made at the symposium on Saturday to report the results of the walk.

Ivan Pope is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, artist, and long-distance cyclist. He graduated from Goldsmiths College with Fine Art BA along with the YBA generation. As an entrepreneur he invented the cybercafe and founded the world’s first web magazine. He has taught at art colleges in London, Newport, and Brighton. He has an MA in creative non-fiction from UEA and a PhD in creative non-fiction from Plymouth University. He is an Associate of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and History at Brighton University and his current interdisciplinary research examines the landscape as archive.

Caminata Nocturna (Walking in the Night)

Karl Ingar Røys’ film Caminata Nocturna documents both the flight and pursuit of illegal economic migrants across the Mexico-US border. Or at least that’s what it initially appears to document. In actuality, the film depicts a reenactment of such events, put on by the inhabitants of the town of Alberto 2000 km from the border. Røys uses the very falseness of the tourist Caminata as a critical tool. Rather than attempting the impossible task of representing the reality of repressive migratory politics Røys twists an already given facsimile into something more disruptive. Røys constructs a narrative of chase and capture in Caminata Nocturna that in presenting itself as cinema verité documentary plays with its own status as the fiction of a fiction. Thus, the supposed truthfulness of the documentary, and by extension much media coverage, is collapsed back into its status as being an assemblage of available materials.

Karl Ingar Røys is an artist/filmmaker from Volda, Western Norway. His practice consists of creating different platforms for speculation, knowledge building and exchange. Karl Ingar Røys studied Law at the Arctic University of Tromsø, Critical Fine Art Practice at St. Martins College of Art & Design in London and Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen where he was researching the role of cultural activism in transitional societies.

1 in 2

While walking can inspire a vital sense of freedom, for many women around the world it also evokes a sense of fear. According to cross-cultural research conducted by United Nations Women, “1 in 2 women feel unsafe walking alone at night.” Working to both acknowledge the intensity of that statistic and transform this experience from fear to friendship, the performance 1 in 2 engages walking as an act of solidarity. Beginning with a solo female figure, the performance progresses to invite audience members to join the procession. Through the gentle power of meditative artistic activism, our bodies will engage in this effort together while the slow pace of movement gives our minds time to contemplate the reason for walking side-by-side with one another in sets of two. Any audience members who do not wish to walk can still enjoy the performance, forming an important community of witnesses to the event.

Candice Salyers is a dancer and professor at The University of Southern Mississippi (US). Her performances have been presented in the US, UK, Estonia, Spain, Morocco, Bulgaria, Italy, Armenia, and the Czech Republic. Her work explores intersections of dance performance, feminist theories, and environmental philosophy, proposing that site-specific dance can contribute to unique ways of embodying ethical citizenship. Dr. Salyers’s work has been honoured with an Alma Bucovaz Award for Urban Service, Choreographic & Performance Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Mississippi Arts Commission, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her forthcoming book.

Walking and AI: Data-Driven Approach for Mapping Cities on Foot

During this talk, first Sepa Sama presents his PhD work on walking, Notes on Walking, and Jumana Hamdani follows up to discuss their collaborative projects using AI as a mapping tool for analyzing different cities.

Sepa Sama is an artist, architect, researcher, and educator. His journey has started in Asia, continued to America and Europe. His transdisciplinary work focuses on architecture, art, and urbanism and their relationships. He collaborates with different professionals to experiment and formulate new possibilities. He is a fellow Sci-arc (2008) and UCLA graduate (2011) and finishes his PhD at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw, focusing on the topic of walking as artistic research (2022). https://www.jsworks.eu

Jumana Hamdani is an interdisciplinary architect focusing on design and research in between architecture, art, and urban planning. For the past two decades she has worked on various projects and competitions in numerous cities in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. She is a lecturer at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, teaching different courses, including ones on architecture and public spaces. She is a fellow of the Swedish Architecture Association and the German Architectural Association of Baden-Württemberg, AKBW. Jumana holds a professional degree in Architecture from Baghdad University and is currently admitted in a Master’s program of advanced computation in Architecture and Design at IAAC in Barcelona.

This Walk is a Pause

What: audio walk & conversation
Duration: +- 150 min in total
Participants: min. 5, max. 15.
Registration needed.
Start & return location: Project Space Entity
Needed: smartphone, (good) headphones, SoundCloud app, or 4G connection

This Walk is a Pause is a poetic sound piece in which the narrator invites the listener to walk along with her through both actual and mental landscapes – Finnish pine forests, fields of exhaustion, tingling brain gums, the neighbourhood, experiences of disorientation and comforting darkness – eventually arriving in a surrounding where walking offers a form of pausing.

Exploring walking as a pausing practice, this piece asks which potential space might open if one steps aside from given pathways for a shorter or longer while: If pausing would be what you most need, what would you need it to be?

This walk is a pause.
This pause is a walk.

For the gathering in Vilnius, walking as pausing is explored in a group setting, moving collectively while simultaneously following individual paths through surrounding and internal landscapes. After the walk, once everyone has returned at their own pace, the group is invited to engage in an open mode of sharing thoughts and experiences.

Introduction – walk – return: 80–90 min
Conversation – sharing: 45–60 min

Nienke Scholts practices/d dramaturgy in collaboration with (inter)national performance artists (since 2007); Veem House for Performance (2013–2019); through her research as fellow of THIRD/ DASresearch at AHK (2018–2022), and as ARIAS’ programme coordinator (since 2019). Her research on dramaturgies of work in artistic practice focuses on the generative potential of exhaustion, darkness, and pausing.

The Participatory Walk

Join Todd Shalom in this workshop on the participatory walk form. Todd will reveal the underbelly of an Elastic City walk, leading attendees through various ways to read and respond to their surroundings in a co-investigation of the everyday. Various techniques from photography, poetry, movement, and sound will be used to shape one’s lens. Additional concerns such as: encouraging participation; forming a compelling narrative and designing a walk route will also be covered. No previous experience necessary.
The Participatory Walk holds 12 participants and will be held in English.

Todd Shalom works in visual media and participatory performance. He is the founder/director of Elastic City, a non-profit organization that produced 200+ participatory walks and events between 2010 and 2016. In that time, he collaborated with over a hundred artists in a variety of disciplines to adapt their sensibilities to the participatory walk format, in addition to developing and leading numerous walks of his own. Todd has taught participatory art at Pratt Institute. His work has been presented by organizations such as Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University, MoMA, and The New Museum. An LMSW, Todd is also certified Gestalt psychotherapist.

Walking as a Collaborative Research Interface Among Heterogeneous Practices

Within the artistic research project Simultaneous Arrivals (simularr), we develop a toolset for collaborative processes by assuming and practising Walking as an interface that different artists-researchers can connect to irrespective of their diverging primary media. What happens when we walk by ourselves, when we walk together, as a mode of movement without the prerogative of the temporal, instead movement and circulation within (endomation) a given or agreed upon time-space? Where physical and mental movement are in alignment?
Various prior practices related to walking went into simularr and established initial awareness of this modality. It proved to be suitable to establish a place of arrival for collaborative work. For the symposium, we propose a multi-perspective walking / talking activity, where we combine practical examples of the project’s first interval with a round of questions-walks in which small group of people form to engage with this type of exercise.

simularr is a group, represented by Nayarí Castillo, Daniele Pozzi, Charlotta Ruth, and Hanns Holger Rutz.
Nayarí Castillo (VE/AT) specialises in installation art and art in public space, her often site-specific interventions engage with history, time, and space, emphasising perceptual experiments and engagement.
Daniele Pozzi’s (IT/AT) work includes live performances and improvisations, sound installations and electroacoustic music, often involving the design of computer programs and interfaces addressing compositional or performative issues.
Charlotta Ruth (SE/AT) plays with time and perception inside choreography and ludic systems, investigating asynchronous communication, participatory sense-making, and liveness in online to offline situations.
Hanns Holger Rutz (DE/AT) works in sound installation, improvisation, and electronic music, extending to other digital and non-digital media, with interests in materiality and reciprocation of artistic work processes.

Buckwheat’s Territory: From Borderland to Ocean – The Chinese Yi Diaspora in Australia

The practice-led research project aims to explore my identity in the context of a broader discussion of the situation for the Yi people, with the goal of repositioning and identifying ourselves in a global and dynamic era. Buckwheat serves as both a cultural metaphor and one of the essential staple foods in the Yi community. The presentation will showcase journeys in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, other spots in Southwest China, and Parkes, New South Wales (Australia), to review the process of retracing the intercontinental propagation of buckwheat. Its purpose is to discuss my current dilemma with cultural identity and explore potential forms of future identity. This tracing, guided by the distribution of buckwheat seeds, is supported by visual and literary archives. Through physical mobility that transcends space, time, and boundaries, the project initiates a conversation about the phenomena of historical and emotional absence and the cultural shocks attending contemporary society.

Meihuizi (Anita) She, an emerging contemporary artist straddling Australia and China also as a member of a diaspora from a minority community in Southwest China, blends diverse cultural influences into her journey. Her foundation in Theatre Art (Directing) led to a Master’s in Curating and Cultural Leadership at the University of New South Wales, shaping her dynamic insights. Currently, a PhD candidate in Fine Art at RMIT University in Melbourne, Anita’s interdisciplinary research explores performance art, sociology, and anthropology. Focusing on auto-ethnography and micro-history, she delves into the intricate nexus of human experience and cultural identity.

Opening

Opening is a lecture performance that returns to a one-evening event, also titled Opening, that I conceived and organized at the Playhouse Theatre in Houston in 2018, furthering my ongoing exploration of decentralization, labour practices, and the relation of artist and society. The event, which the lecture performance loops around, marked the theatre’s first use in fifteen years, despite its earlier acclaim as the world’s first “theatre-in-the-round,” featuring a circular stage surrounded by the audience when it was constructed in 1951. The event needed to be created for a story to be told. Furthermore, Opening is also a digressive and wide-ranging lecture performance that uses the documentation of the 2018 event alongside never-before-seen archive and research material in order to take the audience on an exploration of the theatre, its surroundings, and the many layers of modern life hidden within this seemingly abandoned edifice.

Felipe Steinberg is an artist, researcher and cultural producer interested in the meanings created around events – in how the act of re-telling shapes past events as much as how the creation of events forges new ways of telling. Steinberg was a participant at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and The Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston. His work has been presented in venues such as Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center and Visual Arts Center – University of Texas. Recently he was a lumbung Program Coordinator (Public Program) at documenta fifteen.

Dance-walk for better mental health

“I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” (Soren Kierkegaard). Both walking and dancing are scientifically proven to have numerous benefits for mental health. Both reduce stress, improve mood, and increase energy and sleep quality.

Participants are invited to dance-walk through Vilnius city and have a profound experience of a journey within (through body awareness and listening to natural inner impulses) while at the same time being aware of the surroundings and connecting to other people participating in the same process as well as just passing by.

The dance-walk will start with a brief lecture on the scientific evidence regarding the benefits of dancing and walking for mental health and a short body stretch/warm-up (up to 15 min.). The playlist for dance-walking will be provided. The 30-minute dance-walking will be closed with an up to 15-minute sharing/self-reflection circle.

Soundcloud: http://bit.ly/dance-walk

Download: https://easyupload.io/s8hqgf

Inga Truskauskaitė, PhD, is a psychologist and researcher from Vilnius University (Lithuania), whose primary interests are the effects of stress and trauma as well as mental health promotion through embodied practices. Inga has been working as a dance and movement therapist for several years. She is currently involved in developing and applying body-based methods to alleviate the negative effects of daily and post-traumatic stress on mental health. Her work is grounded in the Body-mind unity theory and Polyvagal theory.

Walking With Speculative Artefacts in Public Space of Vilnius

It will be an exploration of walking as a research practice in the urban public landscapes with intention of mediation with other beings than humans. The investigation is conducted thought the collective drifts between the vision and the reality of life lost as broken artefacts* in the city, from a general look at the body of the city to discovering its details and dirt from the cracks. Aiming to look through an imaginary magnifying glass held by a participant who regulates the zoom for their curiosity. For saving those moments of expedition we use clay as a transmitter of communication between found matter and humans. This drift asks for the creative potentiality of an ex-centric public space and for the power to “co-create communication” with other-than-humans.
*Artefacts are broken or defragmented elements of artificial items made/given shape by humans and left in public space.

Kamila Wolszczak is a Netherlands-based Polish visual artist, educator, and researcher. She works with materials that are socially perceived as dirt. She creates installations, text-based performances, and walkshops exploring the relations between urban spaces, artefacts, and human traces. She enjoys collaborative projects and co-creation, blending fact with speculation. Kamila received MA in Art Education in Poland, and MA in Performing Public Space Artistic Research in the Netherlands.