‘Walk with me, talk with me’1: the art of conversive wayfinding

Abstract

This article considers three guided walks that conduct participants' attention to landscapes through whispering voices in the ear or through the live voice of the performer: Graeme Miller's guided walk Linked; Platform's ‘operatic audio walk’ And While London Burns; and Tim Brennan's alternative tour of quotations, Luddite Manoeuvre. Each walk employs various strategies to conduct a convivial way of interacting with and knowing place: attunement through kinaesthetic, synesthetic and sonesthetic perception; sharing ‘earpoints’ and ‘viewpoints’ with another through intimate or conversational conviviality; use of present tense and the tension between the real-time present and a past present; and the use of particular rhythmic structures of narrative paces and paths to encourage experiential, creative and critical states of witness appropriate to the content and context of the walks. This form of performance is explored for its convivial potentiality as a way of knowing and expressing people's perceptions and experiences of places through a sociable, conversational or dialogic mode of interaction and a particular mode and methodology of guided walking is defined as conversive wayfinding.