Carlos ‘Luca’ Idrobo produced Love Letters to Walking Art and Science, a cumulative piece that honours pivotal artistic and scientific works focused on walking as both motif and practice, combining photography, drawing, light-drawings, performance, and land art.
His work is shortlisted for the Marŝarto Awards 2025. Below, he reflects on the piece.

Walking a line has been standard practice in gait analysis since the Weber brothers’ seminal work Mechanik der menschlichen Gehwerkzeuge (1836). It helped them measure both the vertical oscillation and the lateral displacement of the walking body. In the 1880s, Hermann Vierordt and Gilles de la Tourette, each using distinctive imprint methods on paper, showed not only the remarkable variability in the gait patterns of healthy individuals in relation to a walking line but also how gait disorders displayed greater consistency despite their apparently irregular character. This reveals that walking is never truly linear. Walking a line is a kind of fiction, an abstraction we make to conform our bodies to a particular geometrical shape. This is because walking is fundamentally inefficient as we work against gravity with each step. Also because we need to deal with physical constraints and unknowingly perform minuscule deviations within an apparently stable rhythm and pattern.

Over the last few years, I have embraced walking art alongside my multidisciplinary research that encompasses psychology, philosophy, and art history, and my artistic practice, where photography, music, and creative writing are generally dominant. It became a welcomed link between my scientific and artistic aspirations, while also leading me to experimental drawing practices, as I thoroughly discussed in my most recent publication Walking Drawing Kinaesthetics Between Art and Science (2025, p. 107–125). Naturally, some of my scholarly interests and concerns around human gait spilled over into my artistic practice. This is why I wanted to create a piece that would somehow pursue and address them in newer ways. This led to Love Letters to Walking Art & Science (2024) – a cumulative piece that would honour key scientific and artistic works related to walking as motif and practice. It combines land art, performance, photography, experimental drawing, and creative writing. The premise was simple: to make a line by walking in the snow, a walking-drawing with a drawing box attached to my back, and a GPS recording, all at once during a morning session. The evening session was dedicated to make light drawings, walking over the same line.

The piece was first exhibited at DRAW Space (28 Nov – 22 Dec 2024, Sydney, Australia) in the show Walk with me, curated by Melinda Hunt – a fellow walking artist. The installation comprised five photographs, one original drawing, and a handmade book. The book featured the entire piece alongside texts: eighteen photographs, six original drawings (made on different occasions), and the GPS recording. It allowed visitors to immerse themselves in the textual and visual narrative of the creation and disappearance of my line. The video version of the book was not displayed — video reels can be watched on my website. In Autumn 2026, parts of this piece will be shown again at Jalan | On Foot – the first exhibition on walking in Finland (at Serlachius Museum) that I am currently co-curating and where I am also a contributing artist.

In what follows, I would like to briefly discuss three specific aspects of this piece that are also highlighted in the book.

On lines and limits

For years, I have been embracing the concept of limits as a way to challenge the enduring association of walking and freedom we inherited from Romanticism. The figure of the wanderer in nature – the theme of my PhD dissertation – embodied it perfectly. The association is still strong among contemporary scholars, artists, and practitioners. I understand this and I myself can attest to the physical and psychological benefits of walking, especially in a Finnish forest, where I have walked countless hours and created artistic work, like Grafía de un camino de bosque (2018). Yet walking equally concerns limits and constraints. These can be actual or imaginary and take different forms: biomechanical, cultural, social, legal, environmental. Some are (self-)imposed, others inevitable. In all this time, I have even come to disregard discussions that abstract the body from its bio-social constraints. Even the phenomenological distinction between Leib and Körper no longer serves my thinking and practical purposes.

A line is itself a limit. To make a line by walking is in itself a constraint, especially in deep snow almost up to your knees. The starting point of my piece, above, was a negative version of Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967). For this, I knew it had to be in the snow, for which I rehearsed a few times over that and the previous winter. It had to feature a radically different background: a man-made structure instead of trees. The wall separating the train tracks from the residential area where I live provided the most appealing location. The next constraint was to create the line aligned to a column of the wall. However, I failed at keeping it straight and aligned. It was only a coincidence that from the opposite vantage point, the line was indeed aligned to a lamppost in the distance, below.

The reason for my failure has to do with the variability of gait patterns that Vierordt discovered. As I walked back and forth, pushing the snow to the sides, compacting the ice, I was creating a kind of walking corridor shaped by the curvy lines that my legs were tracing, below. Once the ice got hardened, all my movements were constrained by the walls of the shallow corridor. It is as if the snow recorded a specific pattern and all my subsequent movements were obliged to follow it. I could not escape that shape. At least not during the morning session. Temperatures rose that day, flattening both the old and new snow that fell that day. When I went back in the evening to make light-drawings with carefully timed long-exposure shots, I had to redo the line but my feet no longer felt constrained by shallow walls. In the dark, the line looked surprisingly straighter.

On temporality and accretion

Since walking necessarily unfolds in space, spatiality has become the dominant dimension in walking art. Questions of place permeate contemporary reflections and practices around walking. It is so prevalent that in many pieces, the act of walking itself tends to disappear in the background. In my own research and art practice, temporality is a key concern, whereas space plays a kind of secondary role. I find I have less to contribute regarding spatial questions than many walking artists. Instead, my interest lies in space shaping how walking unfolds in time. Like the type of ground or surface we walk on. These factors ripple through muscles and ligaments, altering our posture and the speed, rhythm, tempo, and duration of our movements.

My fascination with time may come from my upbringing. People in my home city of Cali (Colombia) usually walk more in the afternoon, when winds from the Farallones (part of the Andes) descend to cool the city. At noon, when temperatures average 28 to 30 degrees Celsius (82.4 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit), the heat seems to reshape people’s sense of time and distance. If it is too hot, walking five to ten blocks feels too long and far. By contrast, I realised that walking in the snow and ice in Finland alters my perception of time while creating seasonal changes in my gait.

Like most of my artistic work, Love Letters to Walking Art and Science also took months of planning and, above all, waiting for the proper weather conditions. That day was 27 March 2024, when spring was finally coming and temperatures went from below -2 to more than +6 degrees Celsius (28.4 to 42.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Moreover, my walking back and forth generated heat, thus accelerating the melting of the snow. I was a matter of time reaching the grass under the snow. Yet I underestimated the difficulty of my task. Therefore, I ended up walking sideways like a crab to clear more snow more quickly. It took fifty minutes to finish the line — or rather, fifty minutes until I gave up.  Only a few dog-walkers saw me during that time. One dog was my most ardent spectator, staring at me with evident curiosity.

During those fifty minutes, I was also making a walking-drawing, above, with a drawing box that I designed based on a bigger model by my fellow walking artist Kalle Lampela. I am aware of other designs and devices used by many walking artists over the years. The device is essentially a box with a pen hanging over a piece of paper. It is incredibly portable. One can carry it in a backpack or tote bag, and nobody would know one is drawing while walking. It also remains hidden from the artist, thus the drawing process succeeds without intervention of hand and eye. This type of drawing can be made by no other means than by walking. It emerges through accumulation of traces over a certain period of time. A fifteen-minute drawing differs inevitably from one made over an hour. The type of pen (ink weight, thickness, design) and paper (weight and texture) fundamentally determine how bodily movements are recorded.

Two weeks later, after the snow had melted, I revisited the location of my performance. The line was still there, above, looking straighter and more akin to Long’s line. But it was my line. Every time I passed by, I felt a connection. How long would it remain, I asked myself. Two days later, it began to disappear. The last day in the life of my walking line was 2 May 2024. On the third day, there was nothing. The line now lives in memory and photographs. The experience of the ground where it was traced lives in a drawing.

On data and gait signatures

GPS tracking has been a common feature in walking art since the early 2000s. Nowadays, smartwatches and phone apps have made it easier, more accessible, and accurate. The recorded data can reveal interesting aspects of walking performances that do not appear in the pictures. While carving the line during the morning session, my smartwatch recorded 1847 steps, 633 kcal burned, a distance of 1.23 km, and a duration of 50 minutes. The resulting GPS image, below, revealed a thick network of traces that hardly resembled a straight line. From a cartographic perspective, the image not only fails to represent linearity. It is also rather useless. It does not represent a route that can be followed. I also combined it with a chart of the altitude variability and my heart rate. With a variability of 5 metres, my pacing back and forth was in reality an up-and-down walk on a gentle slope. My heart rate averaged 154 bpm, equivalent to my aerobic running in HR Zone 3.

I find it both fascinating and worrisome that the walking body is a producer of data and forms both in and from itself. I would argue that most scientific and artistic depictions of walking can be framed within these two groups: the shapes we see in the walking body, traced through lines and dots of physical, digital, or imaginary nature, and the shapes that the body projects or leaves on a surface, like footprints, splashes, and curvy traces. The key difference between science and art is that the former strives for clarity in the recording and depiction of movements in order to perform precise measurements, whereas the latter thrives in accretion, overlaps, and opacity. In science, the walking body becomes data; data generates forms. In art, the walking body becomes an instrument for expression and creation of forms predicated on their inefficiencies.

My greatest concern today is a key discovery of psychophysical experiments and gait analysis since the 1970s: the gait signature. A gait signature refers to each individual’s distinctive gait pattern. Like the iris or fingerprints, a gait signature allows identification of individuals by their gait. Consequently, it has biometric applications for recognition and authentication. It is how machines of today and tomorrow identify us. Self-driving cars, smart homes, as well as domestic, commercial and military robots and drones — all employ or will employ gait recognition technology, regardless of consent, regardless of facial or fingerprint concealment on public spaces. I am afraid that in the near future data centres will hold our gait signatures, and any one of us might end up in a database of suspicious walks. In the future, we may need to claim a new right to gait oblivion: a right to have our movement signatures forgotten by databases while remaining legible only to loved ones or in artistic work.

From this perspective, my Love Letters can be regarded as a kind of challenge and plea from art to science: to make gait signatures inefficient, useless for measurement and identification. Both my light-drawings and walking-drawings serve this purpose. My light-drawings, inspired by Vierordt’s method, explored the variability of my gait patterns in relation to key biomechanical aspects. One shot, above, involved walking with a small flashlight hanging below my belly, so as to record the projection of my centre of gravity, expanding like waves beyond the line. Another involved a fixed flashlight pointing at the ground to illuminate the entire line as I walked along it. I was pleasantly surprised that the light spilled over the line because the walking corridor was no longer raised. The final light-drawing, below left, was a composite of several shots of walking a straight line towards the camera, switching my flashlights from one key joint to another.

Finally, my walking-drawings also aim to create inefficient gait signatures albeit with an important addition: to increase awareness of the kind of signature that different parts of my body would create. In the accompanying handmade book, I presented drawings made by my left hip, right knee, and head, above right. The one created while carving the line is technically a recording of the specific movements of my spine. Its most salient feature is a kind of woven arch of traces above the porous circle. This resulted from my crabwalk, which required me to tilt the torso slightly forward to keep balance. What I did not expect was that the endpoints of the line, below, would resemble the traces of my walking-drawings, as if my feet were drawing with the blades of grass I was pulling up with my winter boots. This was, again, a messy accretion. It was my mark. Inefficient. Useless. But dear to me.

The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2025 will be announced in early 2026.