Art Of Walking Research Articles

Entangling with the landscape: a methodological walking art experiment

This paper presents a walking art experiment called ‘Line Walk’ aimed at attuning to more-than-human landscapes. The researchers wanted to expand the methodological repertoires for engaging with contemporary semi-urban and urban living environments. A second goal was to increase attentiveness to multispecies relationality and thus challenge uncritically normative notions of nature in environmental educational research. The experiment demonstrates how a walking art protocol has the potential to work as a catalyst to expose walking human bodies to the material, affective, and sensory relationalities of the landscapes. Additionally, it can generate encounters with ghostly, atmospheric presences of past histories and hints of more-than-human world-making projects and their temporal scales. We suggest that the value of such an experiment lies in its capacity to take researchers from comfort zones to multispecies and multitemporal contact zones and to help them trace back and out the material entanglements of humans with the planet.

Walking With/In Place: The Walking Turn In Socially Engaged Public Art From Aotearoa New Zealand

This article first suggests that there has been a “Walking Turn” in contemporary socially engaged public art and then considers critically how these practices might be best framed and understood in the context of Aotearoa. There has been a multitude of walking-based artworks in Aotearoa since the second half of the 2010s to the present. In the wake of the global pandemic and natural flooding and cyclone disasters in Aotearoa that soon followed, “going out for a walk” has been repeatedly problematized and reframed for most citizens. This article seeks to establish a theoretical framework that is responsive to Indigenous as well as posthumanist discourse, through which we might best consider walking art practices in Aotearoa. To do this, the concept of walking “with/in” place is employed as an entry point. Drawing on research interviews, a number of culturally informed concepts related to walking are examined alongside notions of countermapping and countermonument. The artwork analysis considers the decolonial, counterneoliberal, and regenerative principles underlining these practices. The artworks discussed engage in histories and contemporary politics of place and can be characterized by quietude, humility, and hyperlocality.

Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem

Abstract From 2014 to 2017 I guided half a dozen public walks in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods. The walks were conducted during the research and production of the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here, which digitally reinscribes Palestinians into the neighborhoods from which they were expelled by the 1948 war, or the nakba. The walks were performative and participatory and joined a long tradition of walking as art. They offered an alternative to mainstream Israeli guided tours that manufacture linear and simplistic narratives about the politically contested space of Jerusalem. This article examines the guided walks within critical discourse about the place of art, and specifically the art of walking, as a political practice that unsettles colonial frameworks, or as decolonial gestures. I examine the ways in which the physical walks—primarily for Israeli participants—intervened in a nationalist paradigm and offered Israelis a (rare) emotional and ideological space from which to consider the communities whose dispossession enables Israel to exist. I review the strategies I used to disrupt Israeli denial and encourage accountability within relevant theoretical paradigms, using anecdotes and my own records for analysis. No qualitative data were collected during or after the walking tours. My conclusion is that walking tours can effectively “unsettle” nationalist narratives, encourage settler reckoning, and enable a different kind of seeing or restorying, one of the preconditions for decolonization.

Walking, the body, and the pandemic: the public value of walking art in China

ABSTRACT In December 2022, the dynamic zero-COVID control policy came to an end, marking the conclusion of a three-year pandemic that affected 1.4 billion Chinese people. The pandemic and related policies created a unique, temporary, and historic social ecosystem where walking became more crucial than ever before. The pandemic not only severely restricted people’s movement in public spaces but also exposed the longstanding contradictions between human bodies, modern mobility, and urban space. Over the three years of the pandemic, walking became an aesthetic survival attempt by Chinese people to cope with their limited freedoms under the pandemic. As the pandemic stagnated and worsened over time, walking-dominant activities gradually became a widespread social phenomenon that encouraged urban residents to participate in rebuilding society across various fields such as politics, art, nature, etc. The development of walking as an artistic form during this period represents a new aesthetic strategy and political awakening while reflecting humans’ need to reconnect with land, social space, and their own bodies. This paper reviews how walking art has evolved historically through three periods – before, during, and after the pandemic – aiming to highlight both the public value of walking art and challenges within China’s social ecosystem.

Deep Canine Topography: Captive-Zombies or Free-Flowing Relational Bodies?

For the last three years I have been making walks with my canine companion as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded fine art practice-based PhD at Nottingham Trent University, UK, which considers walking art as a shared human–canine practice. In this paper I reflect upon the doings of deep canine topography as a practice, with particular attention to the ethical questions raised. In the short meditation on the ethics of human animal artistic collaboration that follows, I will wander through the complex web of human–canine kinship, explored through art practice. Joining us on our walk through this tricky landscape are Rosi Braidotti, Jack Halberstam, Dona Haraway, Ron Broglio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and a host of other actors whose concepts and theories provide a rich source of ethical discussion, which fellow artists might find helpful.

The forgotten art of walking. Toward intra-active geography of an urban landscape

ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose to redefine the classical studies of urban trails and wanderings by giving greater consideration to the affective and intra-active aspects of the performance of gait. Hence, the idea is to deepen our knowledge of landscape as a sphere of movement. The need to conduct research on urban walking emerges from the mechanics of so-called “sensory motor amnesia”, an unaware process of memory loss of how certain groups of muscles feel and how to control them. It seems that, apart from such casual matters as small injuries and bad postural habits, the process can be also deepened due to cultural factors, as a result of adapting bodies to modern urban life patterns. The phenomenon of re-fixing specific, human, physiological affordances is manifested by the development and preference of certain techniques and strategies of embodied acting in space, among which some may result in enhancing the sphere of discomfort and others lead to somatic improvement. This article presents walking, as one of the body technologies constituting the quality of spatial experience. Walking is presented as an exploratory, and adaptive form of the art of living, which can improve the quality of human urban life. The proposed treatment of the topic within the framework of an affective, intra-active, urban landscape theory may facilitate a better understanding of the mechanics of unperceived (hidden) affordances, pertaining to the processes involved in the developing performatics of different kinds of walking in different kinds of urban landscapes.

The transgressive art of walking: entanglements of urban activism and tourism in South Tel Aviv

ABSTRACT This article studies the entanglement of urban activism and educational tourism, considering its constraints and potential for political agency, as manifested in guided walking tours of south Tel Aviv. Through an analysis of the historical and geographical context of south Tel Aviv, the article emphasises the necessity of a spatial analysis for unpacking the politics of racial fear and the reception of asylum seekers. In parallel, the article emphasises the connections between seemingly distinct conflicts, cultures, and geographies, which need to be better understood in urban studies. It further stresses the need for innovative methodologies to unpack strategies of political participation, belonging, and agency in cities shaped by the exchange and flow between multiple geographies and by the looming presence of the past.

Lines made by walking—On the aesthetic experience of landscape

Landscape is often seen as a predominantly visual aesthetic phenomenon, which is closely connected to painting. Georg Simmel calls landscape “a work of art in statu nascendi.” Yet from a phenomenological point of view, landscape can also be seen as something we do not only view but also experience bodily, as something we walk through and live in. In this respect, there are many connections between landscape and the experience of space and place. For Edward Casey, it is important to recognize that a landscape consists of places, which thus function as “its main modules, its prime numbers.” Consequently, the aesthetic experience of landscapes will have to take its located and situated character into account. In my contribution, I will draw on this line of thought and try to point out some key aspects of a phenomenological critique of reductive accounts of landscape and consider its relevance for the arts. As landscape and nature have become a prominent theme in artistic practices since the 1960s and 1970s, this paper will relate the philosophical discussion to artistic projects such as Richard Long’s art of walking. In his practice, the status of the work of art as well as a solely pictorial idea of landscape is questioned.

Locative Media Walks

In this paper, I attempt to express the connection between (i) audio walks—that is, movement-based geo-locative or technologically-mediated sound interventions in public spaces— and (ii) the Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts of nomadism and the rhizome. On the one hand, I seek to illustrate how site-specific, interactive artistic works that draw on geo-locative media technology produce an environment of augmented aurality within public space. On the other, I aim to describe how nomad- and Minor-art theories can find expression in artistic practices that focus on walking and listening (in) to the city as a smooth space, including narratives, stories, soundscapes, and minor historiographies, using recent GPS technologies. Finally, I draw on a combination of several theories on art, space, embodiment, walking, and technology to explore new aesthetic directions in public space geo-locative walking art.

The Waves of Time Revisited: Glimpses of life

This study could perhaps be characterized as the art of walking in time, verbally, pictorially and abstractly, i.e. using words, images and thoughts. Of course, the ideal of essayism also includes a scientific dimension. Equally the aim is to make multi-level use of the idea of dialogue. At the same time, the writer is also carrying on a monologue (with himself), an aspect that is called dialogic monologue. After all, the respondent, too, is himself the questioner. Architecture and the essay are reminiscent of each other. The created building and the created word are close relatives. An essayistic study signifies a hermetic state of language. A text’s inner verbal room is constructed from a circle of ideas. Roundness means enclosure: then there is an end at the beginning and a beginning at the end. Yet space is not circumscribed and confined. The actual beginning and end are always located outside the respective verbal room. The spiral of deduction forms a linguistic wisp and whirl that begins and ends as a chronological sequence. The past points forward to the future, and the future looks back to the bygone. The deepening of ideas means passing through several verbal rooms and, during that journey, conclusions will be refined. The Waves of Time, just as the Aaltos of their time, are surges of masterfulness. Glimpses of life mean flashes of Finnishness. They are collective snapshots: excerpts from a shared national story.

The Influences of Books of Manners and Dedekind's Grobianus on John Gay's Trivia

ABSTRACT For decades critics have categorised John Gay's Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London as a mock Georgic deriving its main characteristics and themes from Juvenal's Third Satire and Virgil's Georgics. Many readers have been perplexed by the ambiguities and dissonance between the Walker's/Author's observations, advice, and actions and the characteristics of those classical genres. This article discusses the additional influences of civility books, especially Dedekind's German satiric civility book, Grobianus, on Trivia. Those literary lineages place in context the Walker's inconsistently ironic advice and explain how Gay uses the distinction between the Walker's advice and his contrary behaviour to describe the psychological and pragmatic complexities of a shift from rural to urban lifestyles.

Tracktivism: Eco-activist walking art as expanded choreography in rural landscape

Abstract This article offers a reflexive account of my journey from dance into walking art through a methodological examination of tracktivism: the rural, eco-activist, pedestrian performance practice I have developed over the past eight years. My dancer's perception of walking art in the sculptural tradition had always been as choreography on an expanded scale: bringing attention to spatial patterns in landscape through the 'stylus' of the walking body. Here I examine the ways in which the growing oeuvre of tracktivist works have employed this choreographic device to (re)frame walking art as eco-activist performance. I consider how an art walk may be shaped in such a way as to foreground the spatial nature of ecological dis/connection in working agricultural landscapes, giving examples from my practice. I also propose that as patterns or routes expressly designed to be walked, the performer's material body becomes a 'measurant' to calibrate human scale against planetary scale. Thus the practice might be perceived to function as emancipated eco-activist choreography that offers a means of revealing and embracing our ecological enmeshment with/in complex more-than-human flows.

Self-tracking cycling data as representations of landscape

ABSTRACTThe representation of landscape has changed considerably in the arts since the nineteenth century. From the grand and sometimes fantastical paintings of the apocalyptic sublime, to the more topographically correct contemplative sublime; from the concern for light over form in impressionism, to the intensity of colour saturation in post-impressionism; from emotive expressionism to the fractured abstraction of cubism; from its evaporation in abstract expressionism and dematerialisation in conceptual art to its reclamation in walking art; from photographs taken on journeys, to objects found along the way; from words that capture a sense of place, to films that immerse us in those places; from room sized panoramas to virtual reality CAVEs. This paper aims to map out a contemporary typology of landscape representation. Specifically, it attempts to locate self-tracking data art as a new form of landscape representation, one that traverses a spectrum of imagery, from isomorphic representations of real places, through objective mapping of experience and on into the realm of abstracted subjectivity. In doing so it positions the author’s own work within this wider context along side other artists that are engaged is similar practices.

Retracing My Steps: A 10-YEAR Journey To Walking-Based Transdisciplinary Research

Engaging in a chronological retrospection of my professional and personal transdisciplinary practice of walking-based research over the past decade, and embedding some elements of arts-based writing into the article itself, I articulate the influence of walking art, transect walks by urban researchers, and especially of Sarah Pink’s sensory ethnography on his own use of walking-based method-elements for sustainability research. I discuss how these approaches bear relevance to urban sustainability research and suggest a queer-ecological direction for walking-based transdisciplinary research.

Walking Library for a Wild City

‘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/

Transforming Cities

What is the continuing significance of Situationist dérive for urbanism, spatial politics and performance? What might still be learned from reconsidering this practice that was developed more than sixty years ago as part of a revolutionary project, where critically drifting on foot was presented as a means of exploring how urban spaces are socially constituted, and how they might be lived and constituted differently? References to Situationist dérive have burgeoned in recent years not only within the expanding field of walking art and performance, but also within contemporary culture more widely. As the term has become increasingly familiar, however, it has often been reduced to an innocuous diversion, to a pursuit of novelty and unpredictability in the face of urban conditions dulled by routine.Against the widespread banalization of dérive, this article returns to aspects of its theorization and practice by the Lettrists and Situationists during the 1950s and 1960s, and draws out their resonances for contemporary urban performance. Emphasizing the need to situate those earlier practices within changing urban conditions of their times, my aim is neither to advocate for a ‘pure’ original form, nor to tether a field of walking arts that continues to proliferate, with or without reference to Situationist precedents. But in taking specific cuts into dérive, I highlight in particular its transformative and strategic dimensions, and its orientation to revolutionizing everyday spaces. If those aspects seem most distant now, I argue for the value of reengaging with them when addressing the potentialities of urban drifting, and for considering how cities can be performed and transformed beyond the existing order of things.

Such Means of Locomotion: Transits of Voices in Gay’s Trivia

All current accounts of John Gay’s poem Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) assume that it is narrated by a single figure, the ‘Walker/Poet’. This essay treats it instead as a medley of voices and values shared mainly among the Poet, the straightforward and everyday Walker, and the Author, who writes the poem’s Index and the preliminary Advertisement, and whose tones and attitudes infiltrate the poem. The Poet’s culture is classical and upmarket, the Author’s modern and brash. These presences are partly personae or aspects of Gay himself – a voice identifiable as ‘John Gay’ narrates one of the poem’s paragraphs – but they are also voices in a dramatization of the clash of different kinds of literature and readership. Stressing the flexibility of the poem’s rhetorical address brings forward the ‘lower’ range of discourse occupied in Gay’s other works by ballads, songs and fables, and apparently missing from Trivia. This allows Gay’s poem to appear more modern, and more fun.

The Walking Institute: a reflexive approach to tourism

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss Deveron Project’s (DP) Walking Institute, the only programme in the UK dedicated to commissioning artists to create walks. The author argues that the Walking Institute offers a model for tourism practices that engage local and international stakeholders in the creation of new global relationships. His research expands current critical discourse around the intersection between walking, tourism and art, and argues for DP’s approach as a way to create community-based, critically reflexive modes of tourism.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on research completed for his doctoral thesis and combines practice-based and qualitative methods. The author has visited Huntly on two separate occasions, and have had conversations with project stakeholders, spent time visiting local attractions, and participated in local events and artists’ walks. The analysis draws on theories from performance studies and those being developed within cultural geography and the mobilities paradigm.FindingsThe Walking Institute provides a model for a community based approach to global tourism that calls on the artistic medium of walking to create a critical, reflexive mode of engagement. Through this model, the Walking Institute provides an innovative approach to tourism that offers potential tourists with a mode of local engagement beyond the consumption of the picturesque.Originality/valueThere is very little research into DP’s model, or the intersection between tourism and the burgeoning artistic medium of walking. This paper offers original insight into DP’s model and its relationship to a new field: walking art. Additionally, it informs current understandings of tourism through a demonstration of how a rural arts organisation is engaging with the global tourism industry.

El arte de andar en la naturaleza

El arte de andar en la naturaleza gira alrededor de la cuestión ética y política de, ¿cómo los hombres nos relacionamos con la naturaleza cuando recorremos caminos? La respuesta se nutre de la filosofía ecofeminista espiritual de Vandana Shiva, la cual considera, junto con comunidades indígenas, a la tierra como un ser vivo, con el cual el hombre tiene una conexión espiritual y no es solamente garante de su existencia mediante la explotación ilimitada. Se amplía la reflexión en torno a los modos de relacionarse el hombre con la comunidad de los seres vivos mediante la propuesta de la ética de la tierra elaborada por Carlos Alfredo Vargas. Como práctica artística y proyecto de investigación, el arte de andar es una experiencia vivencial cotidiana consciente en el caminar diferentes recorridos, durante la cual se establecen relaciones de diversos órdenes, explorando los procesos creativos a partir de sensaciones corporales gracias a la apertura del caminante a las fuerzas intempestivas que atraviesan y modifican su cuerpo, tomado como referencia el “cuerpo sin órganos”, categoría desarrollada por Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari. El andar diferentes territorios permite la resignificación simbólica de los lugares, no necesitando expresarse en materialidades; por el contrario, esta práctica es tan respetuosa que solamente deja huellas móviles y evanescentes.

Before Infrastructure: The Poetics of Paving in John Gay's Trivia

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.