With FROM DUST TO STARDUST, Ienke Kastelein, Beatrice Khoumeri, and Peter Schreuder created a a sensorial walk in deep time, at this year’s Walking Art and Relational Geographies Conference in Catalunya.

The trio’s curated walk is one of the shortlisted pieces for the 2024 Marŝarto Awards. Below, Peter, Beatrice, and Ienke discuss the work.

Ienke:

When Béatrice Khoumeri proposed Peter Schreuder and me to collaborate with her on a walking project based on the concept of “Deep Time” for the Walking Art and Relational Geographies Conference in Girona and Banyoles in the summer of 2024 I felt an instantaneous resonance.

Walking Art to me is a practice-based exploration of bodies in time and place, relational by nature, bridging the space between thinking and sensing, cognition and wisdom, head and feet. Walkers are as it were embodying space and time, participating in a shared experience of moving bodies while floating in time and drifting in space.

Encounters like The Walking Art and Relational Geographies in Girona and Banyoles with its experienced community of walkers offer the perfect opportunity to explore walking practices and the possibilities of collaboration from different perspectives, combining (un)learning practices and poetic approaches of sharing knowledge and engagement.

Joining forces in our case meant working from the field of science (Béatrice) and art (Peter and Ienke). Peter and Béatrice met before during the conference of 2022 and so they were somewhat familiar with the territory and considered this area to be specifically relevant for the setting of a deep time experience.

Peter and I met in Prespa in 2019, so we already shared a physical walk together (my project Crossing borders, walking lines, a performative walking practice in Psarades). Béatrice and I worked previously on the hybrid walking performance WAVELENGTH for the Walking Arts Encounters/Conference in Prespa in 2023 along with Sophie Cabot. (Béatrice, Sophie and I shared real-time walks in separate spaces, guided by the general notion of drifting in the presence of water.)

Beatrice:

For the Girona Conference, I wanted to propose a walk dealing with the concept of deep time; to tell the story of our Planet Earth evolving over 4.6 billion years. To find a way to share our concerns and the urge to care. Before I turned to the concept of a walk I wanted to do this in the form of an animated climate mural; while searching the internet for ideas I found Dr. Stephan Harding‘s application Atlas of the Future / Deep Time Walk.

Inspired by this approach of connecting time and space in a walk I proceeded to work on this concept as a scientist, in close association with artists Peter Schreuder and Ienke Kastelein with whom I previously met in walking projects in 2022 and 2023. With their ideas in the form of texts, drawings, sounds, movements and so on we generated a collective project.

As we live in different countries we prepared the project from a distance, eventually fine-tuning it walking the actual time-space of Banyoles.

Peter:

I have been creating collective walks since 2018, where I invite people to join a creative process as part of a shared experience. One of my objectives is to propose trips into given spaces and highlight aspects that attract my attention. When Beatrice invited me to collaborate on the Deep Time Walk, I saw an opportunity to give an audience the feeling of travelling through time.

The fact that the walk speaks about our Mother Earth was also an important motivation for me to join the project as ever since childhood I am concerned with and engaged in an advocacy of caring for the home that we share with all other living beings. I thought it made sense to have Ienke Kastelein propose a sensorial approach to establish a deeper union between the participants as I remembered feeling the power of being in a group by attending her walk in Psarade in 2019.

Ienke:

Our challenge for the deep time walk lay in connecting concepts of time and space: connecting 4.6 billion years to a walking distance of 4.6 kilometers and also finding the right duration and space for the actual walk, narrating the story of the evolution of Planet Earth and Human Kind while entering a creative process within a shared experience.

The walk resonated our concerns with the fragility of our planet, along with a feeling of awe in the actual landscape next to the Lake of Banyoles with its deeply rooted waterlilies and the cracks in the earth’s crust allowing us to enter its depths, sensing an intense drop of temperature, finally returning to the lake in the dying light of the sun. As we were walking together we were shaped by a multitude of notions: words, concepts of time, the path, and the presence of others.

We acknowledged that we are dust; but nothing less than stardust.

The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2024 will be announced in early 2025.