FRANKSTON’s entry into the 2021 Australian Street Art Awards won a top prize. The Frankston street art walking tours were named the best street art tours in the country. The gold award was handed out on the eve of this year’s Big Picture Fest, which takes place this week. In their justification for the award,
Walking Arts Encounters "Walking Arts and Relational Geographies". During 5 days in July the encounters moves nomadically through Catalonia, with a walking caravan, between and in the cities of Girona, Vic and Olot, parallel to an academical conference in these cities. Send us your proposals for walks, walkshops, projects, sound walks, audio papers and papers. Applications are open now, till May 10th!
In his famous essay, “Walking,” American poet, philosopher, and environmentalist Henry David Thoreau presents the simple act of walking as an art to be mastered. The type of walking Thoreau describes doesn’t serve the practical purpose of getting somewhere; rather, it enables one to engage in contemplation by taking refuge in the sacred space that wilderness represented for him.
Source: The art of walking – The Strand
pedestrian acts
By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.
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