The Prespa International Walking Arts Encounters 2025 Walking Home – Walking in Transition is this year’s culmination of a process that started in 2007. In that year several artists, scholars, and academics walked from Florina to Prespa in a walking process named Visual March to Prespes of 50 km that aimed to initiation of a process of discovery of the place, the community, and of ourselves. Most of us were members of the, then, recently founded (2006) School of Fine Arts in Florina. For us, the conceptual question was: how are we dealing with an art/academic venue? Do we take for granted its realities, rules, premises, actual and non-visible walls? Or do we move beyond these, and we strive for the social and geographic environment and the complexity that surrounds it?

We chose the second option. Our aim was (and remains) plainly artistic, a process where artists are empowered with approaches that deal with the exchange of ideas, the understanding of landscape, and the initiation of creative approaches. We wanted to create a reality parallel to the one of the predominant art world and academic system. We initiated in Prespa a space where ideas still matter. This approach does not have a polemic character, but it is related to a process of self-knowledge and understanding of social conditions.

We have kept walking since then and we are inviting colleagues to join us in that creative quest. We have covered hundreds of kilometres in the area, but also in other cities of Greece and abroad, always returning and always pacing ourselves in a process of trying to understand where we are standing as artists, as individuals, as members of a community. In several cases the conditions were harsh, however, but this has never disrupted the effort of learning, understanding, initiating, and working together. 

In the Visual March to Prespes Manifesto of 2007 we asserted:

Visual March to Prespes initiates primary visual activities. It explores the approach that supports the argument that cultural experiences exist where people, places, ideas, and images meet. The March in the environment of Prespes is a communication process among those who participate. It is also a communication process with the environment that will be discovered along the itinerary. The process seems to be close to the approaches of the flâneurs of romanticism or of the landscape artists, however, it is different; the natural environment is a meeting place of contemporary people and not a paradise lost of a long-forgotten innocence or the place where the sublime is met.

Since then, Visual March to Prespes has initiated several projects, events, processes all of them implementing the approach that nothing is important in art unless it is characterised by the need to create, to understand, and to communicate. It has established in the area several artistic initiatives that are transforming the place, they are empowering all participating communities (locals, artists visitors, and any others involved (1, 2, 3)). The most important however is that we have created in Prespa a meta-community, a community where we have all become residents of one place, we all share the same locality.

In that long itinerary we initiated, along with Geert Vermeire, the Walking Art and Local Communities project (WALC) which is one more stage of our walking itinerary towards this effort that started in 2007. This stage started with the WAC Prespa International Encounters/Conferences of 2019, 2021, and 2023, and culminates since 2024 with WALC. We now share with our partners/colleagues of WALC the principles that were the reason for us putting together the WALC project. 

Several of us, the ones who started in 2007 the Visual March to Prespes were also there in the probably most crucial moment when, in December 2023, the artistic-centre guesthouse of Psarades burned down. In this building, for more than 10 years, we housed our dreams, our expectations, our hospitality. We had spent hundreds of hours fixing it, building the furniture, and painting the walls to give the community and ourselves a habitat of artistic and conceptual endeavours.  It was a great relief that none was hurt.

It was then, observing the cinders of the disaster, that we realised that what we have accomplished all these years in Prespa derives from human bonds and it is not related to actual premises, objects or organised events. Those who are sharing this approach realize that the Prespa effort is a socially involved art process, unique in its implementation.

Prespa is a place where a community-based experiential walking art project is implemented. It is not local; it is international because since its beginning hundreds (if not thousands) from all over the world have joined us in this effort. Most importantly Prespa is international because here we are dealing with global and universal ideas. 

First and foremost, Prespa is art: it has been initiated from the ontological need of us who are participating, almost twenty years now, to create a community as an art space. Second, Prespa is a meeting place of communities: humans, flora, and fauna meet there and initiate a momentum of care, exchange, and communication. Third, Prespa as a walking practice, as any other art form of practice, attains its maximum because, away from the misconceptions of technology, reconstitutes the body as the main medium of existence. Finally, and most importantly Prespa is an experiential process, we are shaping the artistic realities by initiating affinities with what exists.

This year the effort relates to a theme that was named Walking Home / Walking in Transition to combine ideas. However, can ideas be combined? Still, the title seems to imply that we are continuing the process of walking towards a place of artistic implementation and collaboration.

This summer is finding the world in a period of turmoil and transition.  The planet is experiencing the greatest shifts of people, places and territories of the last eighty years, and it seems that this condition will keep perpetuating itself for a long time. For some of us, this condition requires clear answers, even manifestos, that will address issues relating to artistic practices.  A manifesto is not an act of asserting; it is an act of provoking action. Feasts, meetings, gatherings, archives and recognition all play a role in sustaining walking art as a field. The concepts that initiated Visual March to Prespes in 2007 are present and timelier than ever, and they are defining our efforts: we are artists dealing with the most crucial aspects of art. All the rest are, if they ever need to exist, only complementary.

Prespa and the way it was shaped over the years from Visual March to Prespes, is a manifesto of that approach, and it has at least a dual meaning: on the one hand, there is the actuality of the place: the landscape, the communities, the environment, the stories. On the other it embodies the need for it to be a place where people meet, walk together, and contemplate issues related to the ontology of things and concepts, and make decisions beyond any public relation or any professional networking. The Prespa International Walking Arts Encounters 2025 Walking Home – Walking in Transition, as the WALC project in general, is an episode of the quest and we will have to wait and see if it realizes the reasons why WALC was introduced and the way Visual March to Prespes can be enhanced from these activities.

Any place is open to any interpretation; however, certain places are important as long as they keep a meaning different than the obvious and the given; Prespa is already one of them and will continue to be that beyond any organised events (such as WALC) that are realised for given periods and for fixed dates. Prespa is and will remain a manifesto.

The titles of things and their names are not important, and in many instances irrelevant. They are only the pretext for creativity based on actions and decisions. What is needed are places that allow the continuation of the discourse. At the point where this discourse is irrelevant or is transformed into a mere social activity, we should be honest enough to terminate it and migrate to another place, to a different location in the realms of ideas or concepts where these issues are still valid. 

For now, we look forward with great expectation joining Prespa colleagues from various departing places that have made Prespa International Walking Arts Encounters 2025 Walking Home – Walking in Transition a destination. We will all be there walking, discussing, enjoying a unique atmosphere of creativity and energy, and exploring the potential.