We speak of the meaning of life, of the non-utility of art. [1]

Walking is a process through which one repetitively ‘aligns’ one’s body with the environment in the present moment. It uncovers and re-orders the ‘creative tension of self and world’ (Wylie, 2013: 62). As an outdoor performance deviser from Athens, Greece, I have been wandering through sites of calamity, anger and despair. The changes in the social and cultural fabric of this specific geographical place have caused shock and emotional pain disclosing different kinds of collective wounds in situ.

Blake Morris walking Lizzie Philps’ 'Maternity Leaves' an artistic walk included in Ways to Wander (2015),
a book of walking instructions written by members of the Walking Artist Network, 2018

Introduction

 I  - A Walk

I. In his 2014 book A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros looks to ancient Greece to outline two distinct forms of walking: contemplative and cynical. Contemplative walking, he claims, evolved from Aristotle’s Lyceum and the Peripatetic School of Philosophy [1]. Peripatetic roughly translates to “of walking” and, as art historian Lexi Lee Sulivan has pointed out, this early interest in walking while thinking gave rise to “rich philosophical and literary traditions” [2].

SHARING PERAMA is an ongoing project in Greece that aims to convey art to the people of Perama, in the public space, with the background consideration that if the arts’ goals and potential are not to change the world, art does have the potential to open and change our gaze, to modulate our feelings about the world and render it more viable for all of us.

Tracing the line of the aqueduct. Photo: Matteo Guidi

Placed in between a decaying nomadic culture and its exploitation as the ultimate tourist destination, the Saharan desert continues to be a space heavily connoted with stereotypical imaginary.

Introduction:

Walking and thinking; ancestors.

Homo Sapiens are by definition, vertical and bipedal.  As a species, we have evolved to move slowly, consistentlyand in a sustained manner over the surface of the planet — and as we move we observe, we map, we remember and we think.

Abstract:

The Walking Library is a library that carries books by foot. Inaugurated in 2012, it is an ongoing art project created by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers that aims to bring together people, walking, books, and reading. For each edition of The Walking Library a collection of books is gathered, taken on a walk and read with members of the public.

1

In the context of the first ‘I love science festival’ that took place at BOZAR (Centre for Fine Arts) and Tour & Taxis, in Brussels, Belgium (27-29th April 2018); BOZAR Lab presented ‘When art meets science programme’ held at BOZAR. The series of sensory walks explored the consciousness of human senses in particular sound and smell in relation to the cityscapes and pedagogical techniques for schools and adults.

Introduction: Changing Realities

The current research essay forms a critical reflection on walking praxis and its aesthetic implications; bringing together artistic, performative, philosophical and technological threads. In this short textual account, thinking resembles walking; revealing emerging rhythmicities and I hope new vistas; shaped by a continuous oscillation between my art practice and theoretical reflection.

Honorata Martin, Going out into Poland (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.

Road, landfill, waste disposal – the new English landscape?

This essay deals with my own experience of walking as art.  ‘My Walking Life’, as I term this,  in a sense began in 2011.  In that year I undertook a series of walks in my then home city of Dundee, Scotland.  Since that time I have been involved or authored a number of walking projects, as artworks.  For the purpose of this piece I will however, stick with this first walk/work, which was entitled ‘Boundary’.

Boundary

Andy Goldsworthy – Untitled, 1992. Centre International de l’Art et du Paysage de l’Île de Vassivière, France.

Nauzenac and Ubaye were two French villages that were submerged by the artificial lakes created by water dams in the Dordogne Valley, and in the Alps of Haute Provence. From Nauzenac to Ubaye is a 611km walking performance project between the two submerged villages while listening to Armelle Faure’s oral archive The Dordogne River and Dams Project: 100 Witnesses Speak (Armelle Faure 2011-2015).

WALKING: an ordinary activity, a simple means of transport, of recreation, of performing a pilgrimage, of demonstrating..

For me, WALKING was the choice to practice a physical activity that crossed over with dance. Then, it became an artistic action in itself. The voyage taken in the year 2000 was a question of testing myself through several ways of walking, vagabonding, tracking and tracing. I was able to observe the effects of walking in various environments, the effects of landscape on my body and my thoughts as well as establish a relationship with studio-based dance research (symmetry, relation movement and space, anatomy, endurance, improvisation, relaxation in being in action, gathering images, rythms, appearing and disappearing)..)

Italian

Metropolitan drifts is an aesthetic and existential experience that was born several years ago.[1]