Introduction

The Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) online course invites you from March to June 2026 into the artistic practice of walking arts. Designed for artists, creators, educators, cultural workers, and innovators, the course explores walking not simply as a theme, but as a method of learning, creating, and relating. This is not about learning about walking. It is about walking as learning.

At its core, WALC proposes walking as an artistic practice, a community tool, and an ecological medium. Through movement, creation, mapping, and shared inquiry, participants explore how walking can shape new forms of storytelling, participation, and care. Walking becomes a way to question inherited perspectives, to re-imagine relationships with landscapes, communities and our more than human world, and to experiment with collective ways of knowing.

The course is guided by international walking artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners, working across walking arts, visual arts and culture, humanities, locative media, participatory and community-based practices. Rather than transmitting fixed expertise, WALC creates a learning environment rooted in exchange, experimentation, and shared attention. You will learn with others — and with places.

One of the course’s strengths lies in its international and networked character. Participants join a vibrant community across Europe and beyond, engaging in shared exercises, workshops, and collaborative projects. Walking is approached as both a local and a global practice: deeply grounded in specific places, yet connected through trans-local dialogue and collective reflection.

WALC also offers access to exclusive resources and tools. Through curated modules, audio-visual materials, and a dedicated digital platform, participants are supported in developing their own walking practices over time. The platform enables documentation, exchange, and the building of a shared living archive — extending learning beyond the duration of the course.

Throughout the course, you will explore walking as research and practice, using embodied movement, sound-walks, mapping and storytelling as tools to investigate landscapes and social ecologies. You will engage with place-based knowledge, while connecting to wider conversations on walking arts, ecology, and future-making. Co-creation and the commons are central: participants share work, reflect together, and contribute to a growing ecology of walking practices.

The course also addresses the convergence of physical and digital space. Walking does not stop at the edge of the path. Through locative media, collaborative mapping, and hybrid formats, you will experiment with how walking practices extend into digital commons and networked environments.

The course is fully online, flexible, and self-paced, designed to adapt to your rhythm. Each module includes video presentations, readings and references, interactive prompts, peer-to-peer exchange, and invitations to walk, reflect, and create. Over time, you will develop a creative work or concept in response to the course, documenting not only outcomes, but processes.

In the intersecting Project Lab & Living Archive, everything comes together. You will map a walk, gather multisensory material, transform walking experiences into stories, and publish your contribution on the platform. The course culminates in a collective showcase, where participants share projects, exchange feedback, and weave their work into an expanding global constellation of walking arts.

Upon completion, participants receive a certificate of participation and entry into the WALC network, opening pathways to future residencies, workshops, and collaborations.

This course is for artists, cultural and community practitioners, educators, students, and all those who walk with curiosity and care. If you walk, question, create, and stay with places — this course is for you.

Join the course and walk your practice forward.
Your walk becomes part of something larger.

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Practical Information

• 13 weekly live sessions of 3 hours on Saturday, divided in 4 modules, starting Saturday March 7th until Saturday June 27th.
• It is possible to join after March 7, or to enroll in individual modules upon request and with a short motivation. If you are unable to participate in a session because of unforeseen circumstances, you can catch up by watching the recorded videos.
• It is also possible to participate only in the workshops (maximum 42 participants); however, participation in the module Walking in the Digital Age is mandatory. Priority will be given to participants who enroll in the full course.
• Each session is divided into an introduction into a specific topic and readings, often complemented with a talk by an invited guest and/or the introduction of a practice, concluded by a discussion and/or contribution by a WALC Node and assoc]ated partners.:  Walking as Practice/Bjorko Konstnod (Sweden) – https://walklistencreate.org/partner/walking-as-practice/  Creative Media for Social Change (Netherlands) https://walklistencreate.org/partner/creative-media-for-social-change-auas/  Colletivo Amigdala (Italy) https://walklistencreate.org/partner/collettivo-amigdala/  Rerouting project (Germany) https://walklistencreate.org/partner/the-rerouting-project/ Australian Walking Artists https://www.australianwalkingartists.org/ Anima Loci https://animaloci.org/ 
• The sessions are intersected by developing an own walking practice project, consolidated at the final session.
• The sessions go along and are continued with a Project Lab & Living Archive for the ones desiring to extend their own practice and the insights developed throughout the sessions beyond the course in four workshops and leading to a collective showcase.

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Conceptual Framework

This groundbreaking course is built upon the conceptual foundations of walking art and its transformative impact on local communities and fragile ecologies. Online seminars bring together the historical and theoretical roots of walking as an artistic practice and expand them through a rich exploration of social and activist perspectives. Participants will engage with key ideas such as field, place, landscape, memory, identity, and community, while gaining hands-on experience with development of projects, and the use locative media and emerging technologies.

Walking is a method of discovery — a creative and critical practice that mobilizes the whole body. Its revelatory power reshapes both ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. By shifting our perception of place, walking may well be humanity’s first artistic gesture: an embodied way of sensing, marking and understanding the world in a more than human perspective.

The online seminar series opens a dynamic exploration of walking as both a methodology and a creative practice within twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. We will retrace artistic footsteps across time — from the early Surrealist wanderers and the Situationist dérive, to ancient lineages of pilgrimage, indigenous cartography, and the strolling figure of the flâneur. Moving into the digital era, we discover how walking practices respond to the most urgent questions of our time: ecological change, forced migration, political tension, and shifting social dynamics—while engaging with the metamodern turn of the twenty-first century, in which contemporary art and society are increasingly polyphonic, relational, collective, and ecological, grounding walking arts as a form of future-making.

As an artistic form and mode of inquiry, walking has evolved into a vibrant discursive field — inspiring new artistic projects, curatorial strategies, and interdisciplinary research. Through lectures, dialogues, and hands-on creative exercises, participants will explore how walking can become a powerful lens for investigating themes central to their own artistic or academic work, while cultivating deeper sensitivity to the intricate social and ecological currents that shape their local environments.

This course is not only about knowledge, theory, and technique — it is also an invitation to awaken the senses, to understand the body as an instrument of perception. Through walking, the landscape becomes legible: images and narratives emerge, communities and territories reveal their stories. Walking sharpens perception and critical awareness, strengthens the capacity for collaboration, and opens space for collective imagination. It is an embodied practice that expands our ability to see, think, and create anew.

The program brings theory to life through rich, experiential learning. Online sessions are interwoven with hands-on workshops, artistic interventions, and lively group discussions that nurture collaborative creation and shared imagining of sustainable futures. Participants will experiment directly with methods of walking, mapping, storytelling, and collective observation, transforming concepts into embodied practice.

Invited guests — artists, curators, and researchers — will share their fieldwork from across the world. They will open windows onto diverse landscapes and communities, revealing how walking shapes their artistic and critical thinking. Through these encounters, participants gain inspiration, practical insight, and a deeper understanding of how walking can become a tool for research, creation, and social engagement.

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The course unfolds through four interconnected conceptual blocks, each approaching walking from a different, complementary angle. Together, they form a progressive journey—from foundations, through collectivity and critique, toward digital and future-oriented practices—while continuously grounding learning in embodied experience.

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Walking as Artistic and Social Practice

(Block 1: Foundations)

The course begins by grounding participants in the genealogies and foundations of walking as an artistic and social practice. Walking is approached as an everyday activity that has been transformed into an artistic gesture, a research method, and a form of cultural inquiry. Participants explore historical and contemporary lineages—from early avant-garde practices and ritual movement to socially engaged and place-based walking art—while reconnecting theory to embodied experience.

Here, walking is understood as a situated practice, shaped by context, habit, and attention. Participants begin developing their own walking practice by attuning to rhythm, perception, and the politics of movement through space.

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Walking as Shared World-Making

(Block 2: Global and Relational Practices)

Building on these foundations, the course moves toward walking as a global and relational practice. Walking is explored as a tool for shared world-making—one that brings together people, stories, memories, and places. Participants engage with practices that foreground community collaboration, collective memory, and participatory approaches to walking.

This block highlights walking as a social choreography: a way of moving together that opens spaces for dialogue, hospitality, and mutual learning. Walking becomes a method for cultivating relationships—between participants, local communities, and landscapes—while foregrounding questions of belonging, care, and shared authorship.

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Walking as Critical Spatial Practice

(Block 3: Power, Politics, and Place)

The third block turns toward walking as a critical and political practice. Participants explore how walking can reveal, challenge, and rework spatial power relations—addressing issues of gender, migration, borders, urban inequality, and ecological precarity.

Through mapping and counter-mapping, participants learn how walking can expose hidden narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and question dominant representations of space. Walking is framed as an act of situated critique: a way of engaging with landscapes not as neutral backdrops, but as contested and layered terrains shaped by history, ideology, and struggle.

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Walking in the Digital Age

(Block 4: Technology, Commons, and Networked Practice)

The course then expands into walking in the digital age, exploring the convergence of physical movement and digital space. Participants experiment with locative media, sound walks, collaborative mapping, and hybrid formats that extend walking practices into digital commons and networked environments.

Rather than opposing technology and embodiment, this block investigates how digital tools can deepen attention to place, support collective authorship, and enable new forms of trans-local collaboration. Walking becomes a living network, connecting people, technologies, and environments across distances—without losing its rootedness in situated experience.

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Learning with Others — and with Places

Throughout the course, learning unfolds through exchange rather than instruction. WALC is guided by international walking artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners working across walking arts, visual arts, humanities, locative media, participatory and community-based practices. Rather than transmitting fixed expertise, the course creates a learning environment rooted in experimentation, dialogue, and shared attention.

One of WALC’s core strengths lies in its international and networked character. Participants join a vibrant community across Europe and beyond, engaging with WALC Nodes and partner organizations. Walking is approached as both a local and a global practice: deeply grounded in specific places, yet connected through trans-local dialogue and collective reflection.

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Practice & Digital Platform

WALC offers access to curated resources and tools through a dedicated digital platform. Participants engage with audiovisual materials, readings, prompts, and peer exchange while documenting their own walking practice over time. The platform supports reflection, exchange, and the creation of a shared living archive, extending learning beyond the duration of the course.

Throughout the sessions, participants develop their own walking-based inquiry, using embodied movement, sound walks, mapping, and storytelling to investigate landscapes and social ecologies. Emphasis is placed on process as much as outcome, encouraging attentive, reflective, and ethical engagement with place.

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Project Lab & Living Archive

In the intersecting Project Lab & Living Archive, all strands come together. Participants who wish to continue beyond the course deepen their practice through additional workshops, collaborative experimentation, and collective reflection. Walking experiences are transformed into stories, maps, and locative works, culminating in a collective showcase that weaves individual projects into a growing global constellation of walking arts.

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Objectives of the Online Sessions

The seminar series opens a unique doorway into the world of walking arts. Participants will:

• Explore the conceptual foundations, history, and evolution of walking art, from early avant-garde strategies to contemporary practices.
• Analyze and interpret walking-based artworks in relation to local communities and fragile ecologies, uncovering how artists collaborate with people, places and our more than human environment.
• Connect walking to socio-political issues, collective memory, and identity, understanding how artistic movement through landscapes also moves through culture.
• Develop ecological awareness through walking as a situated, embodied practice, fostering attentiveness to environmental relations, multispecies coexistence, and the ethical care of landscapes as shared commons.
• Discover and create with locative media and emerging technologies that are reshaping walking practices, offering new ways to map, share, and co-create experiences in public space.

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Course Outcomes

By the end of the 13 seminar sessions, participants will:

• Develop and present an original walking-based project, rooted in their personal interests, research or artistic practice.
• Gain a complementary knowledge of the historical, theoretical, and technological dimensions of walking as art, bridging thinking and making.
• Join an active international network of walking artists and researchers through WALC, opening pathways for future collaborations, residencies, exhibitions and shared projects.

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For Who?

This course is for people interested in exploring walking as a creative, ecological, and collaborative practice at the intersection of art, place, and contemporary media. It is open to artists and cultural professionals, researchers and students, and community practitioners working with embodied research, mapping, storytelling, and site-specific practices. We specifically call out to participants from rural or remote areas, WALC partner regions, and ecological, cultural, or social boundary zones, as well as to those engaged in community-based, environmental, and cultural initiatives. We encourage participation from people of all backgrounds, identities, ages, and lived experiences, including underrepresented groups and minorities.

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Content

Summary of the Online Sessions

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Block 1 (Sessions 1–3): Foundations of Walking as Artistic and Social Practice 

Session 1 – Introduction to Contemporary Walking Art

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Yannis Ziogas — Saturday March 7

This opening session provides a historical and conceptual foundation for walking as an artistic practice. Starting with Rousseau, and passing through Baudelaire, Thoreau, the Dadaists, Situationists, Richard Long, Fulton, Solnit and Stalker, the session traces how walking has evolved as a method of thinking, art-making and social critique. Participants explore global genealogies and contemporary frameworks beyond Western models, learning to recognise walking as a critical, culturally varied practice with community relevance.

Session 2 – Walking as a Form of Art

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Aspasia Voudouri — Saturday March 14

With Australian Walking Artists; Molly Wagner and Melinda Hunt 

This session examines how walking became a recognised artistic medium from the 1970s to today, focusing on artists who used walking to transform landscape, site and perception. Case studies include Richard Long’s Athens Slate Line and Hamish Fulton, showing how walking activates physical and symbolic environments and impacts local audiences. The session explores the relationship between walking art and society, revealing how artistic gestures respond to and shape cultural and historical contexts.

Session 3 – Sociology of Art and Walking as Daily Practice

Session Coordinator / Instructors: Dora Bampali and Fay Stevens — Saturday March 21

Walking is approached as an everyday, transformative social act. One strand looks at historical and sociological perspectives across time and regions (Fay Stevens), while another examines walking as a “primordial technics” (Stiegler), and as a practice that rewrites lived space (de Certeau). The session ends with a practical walking score and group discussion, encouraging participants to link theory with embodied experience.

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Block 2 (Sessions 4–6): Walking as Shared World-Making

Session 4 – Walking the World / Marcher le Tout-Monde: Mobility, Anthropology, and Artistic Practice

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Sylvie Marchand — Saturday March 28

This session reflects on walking across cultures in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Through films and field-based artworks, Sylvie Marchand presents her ethnographic and artistic approach shaped by the movements of the communities she works with. Themes include subsistence mobilities (Circassian nomadism, Mongolian pastoralism), spiritual mobilities (Raramuri rituals, pilgrimage to Compostela), and contemporary mondialité through walking and migration in Europe and Central America.

Session 5 – Walking Art and Community-Based Practices

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Jez Hastings — Saturday April 25

With WAP/BKN Björkö Konstnod; Anna Viola Hallberg (Sweden) and Janice Jensen (Germany) 

This session introduces case studies where walking becomes a collective artistic and social act. Participants learn how walking can empower and assemble communities, shifting from individual experience to collective choreography. The focus is on participation, local engagement and co-creation, with examples drawn from international networks and community nodes.

Session 6 – Collective Memory Walk (Micro-Project)

Session Coordinator / Instructors: Katerina Pistola and Stefania Veldimiri — Saturday May 2

Walking is explored as remembrance and witnessing. Case studies show how walking can revive hidden histories, post-industrial or post-conflict sites, and personal memory. The session introduces oral history, storytelling and “walking archives” as decolonial and sensory methods. Participants design and facilitate a Collective Memory Walk, engaging local people and generating material for the WALC toolkit. Walking becomes an ethical and aesthetic act that links memory, place and identity.

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Block 3 (Sessions 7–9): Walking as Critical Spatial Practice

Session 7  – Walking and Gender

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Katerina Pistola — Saturday Aprll 18

With Colletivo Amigdala; Federica Rocchi (Italy)

This session explores how gender shapes walking, space and artistic expression. Through feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives, participants examine walking as a strategy of resistance, visibility and empowerment. Case studies consider safety, mobility, representation and voice. Participants design a gender-conscious walking micro-project, developing methods of documenting gendered experience through sound, movement and storytelling. 

Session 8 – Walking Art in Urban Environments

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Miguel Duarte — Saturday May 16

With the Rerouting project; Clementine Butler-Gallie (UK) and Viviane Tabachi (Brazil) 

Walking is developed as a perceptual, critical and artistic method in the city. Through theories such as Strollology, psychogeography and ecological urbanism, participants examine how walking reveals the layers of urban space. Debate, case studies and a short online walking exercise connect theory with lived experience. The session encourages new forms of urban awareness, sensory practice, and collaborative imagination.

Session 9 – Art of Mapping and Counter-Mapping

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Athanasia Tziona — Saturday May 23

With Anima Loci; Alex Wilk (UK) and Tommaso Gorla (Italy) 

Focusing on maps as artistic and cultural tools, the session analyses how mapping and counter-mapping shape perception, experience and power. Participants explore theoretical frameworks (Debord’s dérive) and key artists who use maps to inscribe place, question assumptions and reveal personal narratives. The session reframes walking as inscription, narrative and the observation/recording of place—combining spatial thinking with creative practice.

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Block 4 (Sessions 10–12): Walking in the Digital Age (2001 to Today)

From Embodied Experience to Networked Commons and Ecological Infrastructures
Session Coordinator / Instructors: Fred Adam and Geert Vermeire

Session 10 – The Digital Turn: GPS, Mapping, and Locative Storytelling

Saturday June 6

The year 2001 was a turning point in the history of location-based technology. After several decades of military development of the Geo-Positioning System GPS by the US Army, finally a precise location was accessible to the public worldwide. The democratization of this technology opened up a very large window of creative opportunities by associating digital media to locations, locative media was born. In this session we will explore a blooming of creative proposals and understand how and why locative media has fallen flat and has not been fully understood yet for its social and environmental benefits.

Session 11 – Walking, Sound, and Augmented Space

Saturday June 13

With Simon Piasecki (UK) 

The session explores locative sound as a walking art practice, examining how location-based audio engages with the historical, social, and physical layers of public space through WALC, walk · listen · create and Sound Walk September. It then focuses on walking as a collective artistic practice, showing how shared and digital platforms, as walk · listen · create and Locative Media Supercluster transform walking into a relational, collaborative form of knowledge-making grounded in co-presence, care, and collective authorship.

Session 12 – Walking as Commons: Art as Network and Future making

Saturday June 20

With Stefaan van Biesen

This session explores walking as a form of commoning—an artistic, ecological, and social infrastructure for shared knowledge and imagination. Grounded in WALC’s distributed network of hubs and nodes, it examines how walking arts can act as a living network that connects people, technologies, and environments. Inspired by Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and Morton’s Ecological Thought, the session considers how art operates as a connective tissue between local and global scales, between human and more-than-human communities. Participants will study how the WALC sustains collaboration and ecological awareness, and how walking—through mapping, dialogue, and digital commons—can shape the future trajectories of artistic and planetary interdependence..

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Conclusion

Session 13 – Designing Your Own Walking Inquiry

Session Coordinator / Instructor: Yannis Ziogas — Saturday June 27

Each participant or group that attended the course will realize a walk based on their experiences and the outcome of the training sessions. A text will elaborate on the ideas that initiated the walk and the methods that were implemented. New ideas are introduced in their approaches, concepts related to critical thinking, locative media, and community-based practices. The sessions will capitalize on the 12-session experience of the course, introducing innovative approaches in the field of walking art or enriching existing concepts and techniques.

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Continuation

Project Lab and Living Archive 

Lead by: Fred Adam and Geert Vermeire (Locative Media Supercluster) – 4 workshops and process continuation throughout Autumn 2026 and 2027 

Up to seven interdisciplinary groups of six participants (explorers) will be able to build on the online sessions—especially Sessions 10–12—after the course end to collaboratively produce digital and locative artistic works focused on ecotones, edge habitats, and boundary zones (ecological, cultural, or social).

• Collaborative mapping (19 September)
• The collective digital body (26 September)
• Walking & locative media (3 October)
• Walking and ecological intelligence (10 October)

Concrete Outputs

• Up to 7 locative media group projects, combining sound, video, image, text, web content, and/or augmented reality.
• An interactive map and walking web app, where all projects are geolocated and publicly accessible.
• A digital toolkit documenting methods, workflows, and local practices developed by the WALC HUBs and Nodes.
• A virtual exhibition and exhibition-ready digital content that accompanies the final physical exhibition in Thessaloniki and in the HUBs.
• Artistic content on the WLC/WALC online platform and the Walking Museum, integrating all participant contributions.

Process and Facilitation

• 4 online artistic workshops supporting production, peer exchange, and technical guidance 
• A structured group creative process involving course participants and the WALC HUBs and Nodes across Autumn 2026–2027.

Impact

• Transferable tools and methodologies for future walking-based, community-driven digital practices.

Long-term enrichment of the WALC Living Archive as an open, evolving commons.

Timeline and inquiry

• Timeline
• Web
• Questions: info@supercluster.eu