Walking in Air

Abstract

In January 2021, Will Montgomery and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé began work on Walking in Air, an interdisciplinary project that encompasses walking, writing, thinking, music, performance and discussion. Drawing on Tim Ingold's suggestion that 'knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world', the project considers walking in air to be a model for speculative thinking, for creative activity and for reconsidering our place within the natural environment. The project encompassed an online event over a weekend in September 2021, details of which were documented by one of the project partners, the centre des livres d'artiste, a French collection of artists' books. Core walking events, several of which are planned for 2022, can be either collective or individual in nature. These give rise to performance, workshop discussion, texts, images, and audio recordings, much of which will be documented online. Participants are drawn from an international pool of composers, artists and poets. In this co-authored article, Montgomery and Waeckerlé narrate their first walking in air activity in a text that alternates between their voices. Montgomery describes a walk that took place in Battersea Park in south London and that was guided by reflection on the poets Wallace Stevens and Susan Howe. Waeckerlé writes of a simultaneous walk in Thornton Heath that was steered by the work of Pauline Oliveros, Luce Irigaray and Rebecca Solnit.