Walking Library for a Wild City

Abstract

‘The Walking Library’ is an ongoing practice-as-research project which explores the relationship between literature, environment and walking through a site-specific and peripatetic form of reading as performance. First commissioned in 2012 for the Sideways Festival of walking art (Belgium), the project has generated a number of subsequent commissioned events each original in conception and findings, including "The Walking Library for Women Walking” (2016) and “The Walking Library for a Wild City" (2018), the latter documented in the Artist Pages of this issue. The project asks how reading while walking through the landscape with others activates both the environment as well as the sociable, mobile and spatial endowments of the book that make it such a pliable media for the possibility of journeys and stories and places to converge.For each subsequent event this question is re-framed in response to the specific context of the new work and for the audiences who participate. Their responses are gathered through their suggestions for books, selections of readings and written experiences on the walks. ‘The Walking Library for a Wild City’ was commissioned as part of a collaboration with artist Alec Finlay by Glasgow Life/European Championship Festival Glasgow 2018 and involved a programme of eight walks across Glasgow, an exhibition at The Hidden Gardens and publication of a book documenting the walks. This edition of “The Walking Library” seeks to explore the natural environment in urban settings through reading together while walking. https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/