Christopher Kaczmarek hosted a walkshop at WAC25 called Drawing Cartographies of Perception, exploring the personal and subjective nature of navigation and cartography and the diverse ways people perceive and move through space.
His work is shortlisted for the Marŝarto Awards 2025. Below, he reflects on the piece.

A map is never a place. It is a translation, an abstraction, a proposition, an attempt to render experience into a form that can be carried, shared, and followed. As María Emilia Fernández writes in A Map Is Not a Place, maps do not simply describe space; they reveal the conditions, priorities, and subjectivities of those who make them. What is included, what is omitted, what is emphasized or flattened, these choices speak as much about the mapmaker as about the terrain itself.

Drawing Cartographies of Perception emerges from this understanding of mapping as a subjective and relational act. Conceived within a walking art practice, the work uses walking and drawing as intertwined methods for attending to place, perception, and difference. It was realized as a walkshop in the summer of 2025 in Psarades, a small lakeside town in northern Greece at the edge of Lake Prespa. The site, quiet, luminous, and layered with histories both visible and latent, offered an ideal context for a practice concerned with how individuals navigate shared space while inhabiting distinct perceptual worlds.

The walkshop took place on a bright, clear summer day, the kind that seems almost archetypal of the region. Participants gathered at the small pagoda in town, which functioned as the starting point, exchange point, and eventual reconvening site. From there, the work unfolded through a simple but carefully structured sequence of walks and exchanges, designed to foreground navigation as an interpretive act rather than an efficient one.

Participants were first asked to walk alone, departing from the pagoda and moving through Psarades toward a destination of personal significance. Something noticed, discovered, or felt along the way. As they walked, they drew hand-made maps of their journeys. These maps were not intended to be accurate in a conventional cartographic sense. Written language was intentionally excluded. Instead, participants relied on symbols, marks, landmarks, and impressions to record their movement and attention. Each map was created with a specific intention: it would later be given to another person, who would attempt to follow it to the mapmakers’ destination of significance.

This initial walk emphasized looking through drawing. The act of drawing slowed perception and sharpened attention, encouraging participants to notice not only where they were going, but how they were perceiving. Within walking art practice, such slowness is not a withdrawal from movement, but a recalibration of it, a shift from transit to engagement.

Upon returning to the pagoda, participants exchanged maps and set out again, this time following the drawn cartography of another. This second walk introduced ambiguity and negotiation. What appeared self-evident to the mapmaker might become uncertain to the follower; what one person marked as significant might shift, dissolve, or re-emerge differently when encountered by another body, at another moment. Participants were asked not simply to arrive at a correct location, but to move in good faith toward understanding another person’s perceptual logic.

In doing so, intimacy emerged. Attempting to follow another’s map created a quiet relational connection, one rooted not in direct interaction, but in trust, attention, and care. The map functioned less as an instruction and more as a gift, an offering of perception that asked to be received, interpreted, and honored. Upon reaching what they believed to be the destination, participants were prompted to draw again, this time recording what they themselves found significant at that place, layering their own perception onto the path traced by another.

While the structure of the walkshop was carefully considered, its execution in Psarades introduced a condition that meaningfully reshaped the experience: far more participants arrived than anticipated. What had been designed for a small, intimate group expanded organically to include more than twice the expected number of people. This shift altered the social dynamics of the concluding phase, which had initially been imagined as a collective verbal reflection.

Rather than gathering in a single conversational circle, the group responded intuitively to the increased scale. Maps were laid out on the ground near a nearby building, forming a field of drawings. Routes, symbols, and gestures accumulating into a shared visual terrain. Participants moved among the maps, encountering fragments of one another’s walks through looking and sharing spontaneous discussion. The exchange became spatial and visual, emphasizing presence and proximity over collective narration.

This adjustment did not diminish the work so much as it revealed another of its capacities. The emphasis shifted from dialogue to plurality, from individual exchange to collective coexistence. Seen together, the maps made visible the many diverse ways the terrain had been perceived and traversed within a single afternoon. What emerged was a tangible manifestation of multiplicity, a shared place held by many perceptual worlds at once.

In walking art, responsiveness to site, circumstance, and scale is not a deviation from the work but a condition of it. The experience in Psarades underscored the central premise of Drawing Cartographies of Perception: that shared spaces are never singular, and that meaning often emerges through difference, misreading, overlap, and adaptation.

What remains from the walkshop is an expanded sense of what the work can hold. The experience affirmed that maps do not fix place; they open it. They reveal how each of us carries a personal cartography, shaped by attention, memory, and value, while moving through landscapes we share. Through walking, drawing, and attempting to follow one another, participants enacted a quiet but profound practice of relational orientation: not toward certainty, but toward curiosity, care, and an embodied recognition of the pluriverse beneath our feet.

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