Introducing the Milena Principle (hosted by the Private Foundation Van Biesen Mestdagh) as WALC`s new partner: a nomadic artistic platform that understands walking as movement, relation, and utopia. Through Made of Walking, it cultivates walking as a commons: collective, ecological, ethical, and performative. Rooted in Renaissance humanism and Spaziergangwissenschaft, its practices position walking arts in the 21st century, dissolving boundaries between art and life, foregrounding care, encounter, migration, and commons across places, species, and communities and futures together.

A Renaissance of Movement

Made of Walking builds on an approach that consciously relates past, present, and future, drawing from the Milena principle’s core vision: that artists are, in essence, travellers. In this nomadic vision, the artist is always both host and guest and an intermediary between places and times. This living practice is rooted in the Milena principle’s base; Flanders, cradle of the Northern Renaissance — where, centuries ago, artists moved ceaselessly between cities and landscapes, collaborating across boundaries of discipline and cultures. 

Then, as now, the artist was often at once a writer, scientist, technologist, botanist, revolutionary, philosopher, or activist. This polymathic spirit flourished alongside the birth of Utopia (1516) — Thomas More’s radical imagining of a society without imposed hierarchy, written and partly situated in Flanders. More envisioned a new society shaped by its people through amicitia (cultivated friendship), mutual aid, and democracy. Such ideals resonated with his equally nomadic Flemish contemporary and friend Desiderius Erasmus, whose The Praise of Folly (1511) celebrated humanist values of learning and dialogue. The Milena principle carries forward this Renaissance inheritance, not as nostalgia but as a methodology: art as a lived utopia in movement.

Equally significant for the Milena’s artistic vision is the image by early 20th-century Flemish painter Gustave Van de Woestijne, titled Hospitality for Strangers (1920). It depicts a stranger from behind, walking with a small backpack, as he is welcomed at the door of the artist‘s village house — a First World War refugee. The backpack later became the logo and thematic symbol of the Milena’s artistic developments.

From its beginnings, the Milena principle’s projects have been collective and nomadic. They take shape in encounters, journeys and walks, where the road is as important as the destination, and where those encountered along the way — inhabitants, migrants, refugees,  co-travellers, and more than human companions — are integrated into the process. The boundary between artist, audience and local community dissolves, along with the boundaries between the human and more than human, culture and nature, economy and ecology.. As Joseph Beuys affirmed in Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture) (1970s) and his lemma “Alle Menschen sind Künstler” — all people (including all non-human entities) are artists. 

No less, the Milena leans on the ideas brought forward by Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt’s Spaziergangwissenschaft (the science of strolling) (1990s), which advances walking as a collective force for thinking, imagining, and transforming landscapes.

In this expanded field, and deeply embedded in the developments and crises of 21st-century and its contemporary art practice, a walk as proposed by the Milena principle becomes a sculpture of relations, and the world itself a studiolo — a symbolic space in the ephemeral work of the Milena principle, both outdoors and indoors, a place of (more-than-human) meeting, library, and artist’s studio, magnificently represented in Antonello da Messina’s painting Studiolo (1474–1475).

Walking is central to all the activities of the Milena: as movement and as a transformative artistic medium — blending action, performance, installation, sound art, locative technology, literature, ecological practice, and embodied knowledge. The Milena moves as a collective body of work, not as autonomous production, but as a platform for encounter, conversation, and coexistence. A walk becomes a space of learning, listening, and co-presence. It fosters dialogue not only between humans, but also between species, between time scales, and between situated knowledge.

Walking as Contemporary Practice

Walking is one of the simplest human acts, yet its artistic potential is vast. Walking offers a form of thinking-in-motion, where the body’s rhythm and the world’s textures merge into a single stream of perception. The walk is at once a physical journey and mental landscape, an open frame for curiosity and encounter.

In the 21st century, walking arts have moved beyond the solitary, linear explorations of land art or conceptual gestures. Today, walking is relational — a way to weave together ecologies, communities, and narratives. It is a space for conversation that does not depend on walls or screens, where ideas emerge from the shared perception and moving. 

Walking is also a form of embodied research. Each step is a measure of space and time, each path a question. The act of walking creates a living archive of sensory and emotional impressions, an archive that can be translated into sound, image, text, or performance — but which always retains something untranslatable, something that resists capture.

In this sense, walking arts cultivate both knowing and unlearning. They dismantle the hierarchies of institutional knowledge and open space for mutuality, presence, and more-than-human wisdom. They encourage listening to what only has a voice in more than human terms.

Walking as Creative and Reflective Practice 

Walking generates a space where the imagination is both anchored and freed. As the Milena principle’s co-initiator Stefaan van Biesen describes, “the walker becomes more than an observer — he is a participant in the world’s unfolding”. Walking demands a certain openness: the willingness to let the path lead, to be interrupted by the unexpected, to adapt to ever changing landscape or the fellow walker. 

Reflection emerges naturally in walking as a byproduct of movement. Encounters — with people, animals, or elements — become prompts for rethinking one’s own position in the world.

In the words of Stefaan van Biesen: “Thoughts drifting through our minds leave their traces behind. We move within a vast panoramic field. The traveler’s path is never straight; instead, the landscape advances to meet him, and a way unfolds of its own accord. At its heart lies a spiritual transfiguration within the embrace of nature.”

Walking in this sense is a practice of attention: to oneself, to others, and to the environment. It is also a practice of humility, recognising the limits of one’s knowledge and the value of what is encountered along the way.

Movement, Migration, and Ethics

In our time, walking cannot be separated from its political realities. For millions, walking is not leisure or art but necessity — the only way to flee war, persecution, or ecological collapse. These forced migrations form the shadow ground of any artistic walking practice.

To walk as an artist today is to be aware of one’s own mobility as privilege and to consider how walking can become an act of solidarity. It means walking with rather than walking about. It calls for shifting from the role of explorer to that of accompanier, bearing witness to stories that are not one’s own, and recognising that every path has histories of displacement and survival.

Here, the Milena principle’s idea of the artist as nomad, thinker, and agent in movement finds new urgency. Change can only happen in motion, but motion must be ethical — attuned to the pace and conditions of others, refusing to leave anyone behind. This merges the poetic with the political: the walk becomes a thread of connection across borders, species, and times.

Politics of the Heart / Walking as Political Resistance

In the 21st century—an age of plural voices and fluid identities—art has become polyphonic. It no longer stands still as a single form; art unfolds as multiple practices: transdisciplinary, performative, ephemeral. What has happened to art mirrors our fast-changing world, and to politics itself.

In the 20th century, change was often pushed forward by words—declarations, certainties, proclamations. In the 21st, words alone are no longer enough. This is a time that demands movement. And what embodies movement more fully than walking: polyphonic, performative, collective, intersectional, rooted in place.

This is the spirit behind the Milena principle’s Politics of the Heart. Walking—something as simple as putting one foot in front of the other—can be a deeply political act. Protest becomes embodied, not only spoken. In these moments, the walk itself is the message: we are here, we feel this, we resist.

As James C. Scott reminds us, “everyday resistance” is built on small, repeated acts that can be the most powerful. In parallel, Lucius Burckhardt’s Spaziergangwissenschaft (the “science of strolling”) emphasizes the minimal gesture: even the smallest act of walking can reshape how we perceive, use, and imagine our environment. Walking quietly reclaims public space, and by doing so, it disrupts.

There is also an ethical dimension to walking. Walking together insists on inclusion. The Milena principle, at its core, is driven by dialogue with local and Indigenous communities, weaving artistic practice into the fabric of shared experience.

Here, walking is not about answers or resolutions, but about opening a path of possibilities. It becomes a practice of listening and imagining together, of co-creating meaning across differences, and of grounding political urgency in relational care. In this sense, walking embodies both resistance and solidarity—holding complexity without erasing difference, and nurturing community without imposing sameness.

Walking Arts and the Commons

The Milena principle’s initiatives, specifically its Made of Walking flagship project, cultivate walking as a commons — a shared space of movement, learning, and creation. This commons is not tied to a single physical site but unfolds as a network of relationships, extending across geographies through both embodied encounters and digital connections.

In this commons, knowledge is not delivered from expert to audience but arises collectively. Every walk is a process of co-creation where roles are fluid: the artist may become a participant, the participant a host, and the environment a co-creator. The walk itself provides the structure, the rhythm, and the stage.

Quoting Geert Vermeire,  co-initiator of the Milena principle and convenor of Made of Walking: “Eventually there may be nothing more free than walking, it does not consume, it does not need anything, and if done together—and in the right time and at the right place—it can bring about a metamorphosis of walkers becoming the walk, and of the landscape becoming the walkers.”

Such a model resists the extractive logic often present in cultural production. It does not seek to maximise visibility, output, or spectacle. Instead, it values depth of relation, reciprocity, and attentiveness. Walking arts embrace slowness, improvisation, and unpredictability, cultivating openness to being changed by the encounter.

As commons, walking arts generate practices that are social, ecological, political, and performative at once. They weave solidarity, multispecies awareness, and collective imagination into gestures that are modest yet transformative. This is their power: to create fragile but enduring spaces of commoning, step by step, across places and communities.

Spaziergangwissenschaft and the minimal gesture

the Milena principle’s  curatorial attitude is grounded in a minimal gesture, a notion first articulated by Swiss sociologist and aesthetic thinker Lucius Burckhardt in his Spaziergangwissenschaft—the Science of Walking or Promenadology. Burckhardt, active in Kassel alongside Joseph Beuys during the 1980s, sought to merge science and subjectivity through walking. His “science” was not about measuring landscapes but about perceiving them critically—revealing that landscapes are constructed by our gaze. The minimal gesture was his key tool: the smallest possible act capable of shifting perception, of awakening awareness to the invisible processes that shape what we call our “environment.”

For Burckhardt, the minimal gesture was a corrective to modern excess—to speed, noise, and the overproduction of meaning. It embodied restraint, sensitivity, and precision. Instead of monumental interventions, promenadology proposes almost imperceptible acts: walking a route differently, pausing where one usually passes, or walking silently as a group. These gestures do not seek to change the world through force but to reveal it anew through attention. They are at once aesthetic, ethical, and ecological—a philosophy of lightness that values awareness over alteration, presence over possession.

the Milena principle inherits and expands this promenadological legacy. The minimal gesture is not only an artistic strategy but the collective project’s curatorial ethic. Each of its rengagements operates through small, situated acts that make collective perception and care itself the medium of art. Curation is no longer about displaying objects but about choreographing relations, about creating conditions in which people, places, and more-than-human presences can encounter one another with renewed attention. 

Within the framework of the Milena principle and the promenadological ethic of the minimal gesture, the curator is no longer an authorial figure who defines meaning, but a catalyst—one who sets processes in motion and creates the conditions for encounters to occur. The catalytic curator works through activation rather than control, enabling rather than directing.

As in chemistry, where a catalyst transforms other substances without itself being consumed, the curator acts through presence, facilitation, and relational energy, initiating reactions among artists, walkers, landscapes, and communities. Their work is often invisible, taking form through a configuration of attention that allows connections to unfold organically. The curator does not impose form but amplifies potential—a subtle instigator of awareness who choreographs contexts. The journeys or walks become the exhibition, and the collective perception it generates becomes the artwork.

In this sense, the curator as catalyst is both participant and listener, attuned to the dynamics of place and group. They cultivate permeability rather than authorship, embodying a practice of care and responsiveness. The success of such curatorship lies not in visibility, but in resonance.

the Milena principle translates Burckhardt’s Science of Walking into a living curatorial laboratory—a form of promenadological curation in which every step is an artistic and epistemological gesture. 

As Burckhardt proposed, walking is not an individual pursuit but a collective science: a mode of co-perception and co-creation. When we walk together, we produce knowledge collectively, not by abstraction from outside but through shared experience from within. The landscape is no longer external; we belong to it, and it to us.

Happenings and actions

The Milena principle realizes happenings and actions. Most of its actions are spontaneous and take place in public space, where the body becomes an artistic instrument and art flows seamlessly into life. For the Milena principle, there is no division between disciplines—art is a natural extension of being both person and artist.

The Milena principle prefers to use the term action rather than performance. While recognising the relevance of performance as one of the artistic disciplines that feed into the polyphonic score of walking arts, it broadens the notion into a wider set of artistic gestures. Walking, by its very nature, is not necessarily staged, framed, or intended. It often unfolds in ordinary places and everyday time, without a clear audience or boundary between art and life, allowing space for its open, lived quality.

As practiced by the Milena principle, walking is in the first place relational more than representational, emphasising encounter, dialogue, and participation over “showing” or “performing,” and avoiding the performer–audience divide. Walking art tends instead to dissolve those roles, making everyone present part of the act. At its core, walking is a research method, a tool of relation, and a commons practice. It resists commodification and is valued precisely because it leaves no trace. Moreover, walking arts are inherently transdisciplinary: at once ecological fieldwork, collective ritual, site-specific art — hybrid, fluid, and beyond disciplinary capture.

Still, walking has often been described as performance, and in many ways this comparison is justified. A walk can indeed be framed as a score or script, a temporal action unfolding in public space, and a gesture of presence carrying symbolic and aesthetic weight.

In the end, walking art oscillates between performance and action. It can be understood as performance when seen through the lens of body-based, time-bound action. Yet it also exceeds that category, unfolding as a situated, relational, and transdisciplinary practice. Walking is less about performing for an audience than about moving-with others — human and more-than-human — in ways that generate connection, care, and new forms of imagination. 

Among the actions of the Milena principle, Happenings play a key role. The Milena principle’s understanding of Happening has roots in Allan Kaprow, who coined the term in the late 1950s to describe an art form that blurred the boundaries between life, art, artist, and audience. Kaprow’s Happenings integrated body movement, sound, text, and even smell, dissolving the separation between creator and participant. He shaped the development of performance, installation, and Fluxus art through works that emphasized impermanence, process, and participation. For Kaprow, the Happening was playful and open-ended, with no fixed start or finish, where meaning was co-created in the moment.

The happenings and actions of the Milena principle—at their core diverse formats of lived and artistic encounters—were first incubated in the Tempus fugit 24-hour art exhibition and a series of art pop-up events in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany (2003–2007). They draw inspiration from Fluxus and the performance experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, which in turn profoundly shaped the development of walking arts. Fluxus’ trajectory continues in contemporary practices: Francis Alÿs’ walks through Mexico City and Israel (The Collector, The Green Line) frame walking as both social critique and poetic gesture, while Janet Cardiff’s audio walks create layered performative experiences where participants drift between reality and fiction. In this lineage, the Milena principle collaborated extensively with the collective Escoitar, recognized for their early work with collaborative GPS-triggered audio walks. This partnership led to international actions with WIT Urban Team (2010–2016) and to notable community-based performative audio walks such as A Knocking Bird (Sint-Niklaas, 2014) and A Balkan Tale (2012).

Today, in the 21st century—a time defined by fluid identities, plural voices, and constant motion—walking art is more than ever deeply performative. It embodies the ephemeral, the collective, and the situated: qualities that mirror our age itself, resonating with its ecological, social, and political dimensions.

Central to the Milena principle’s practice is the importance of play, improvisation, spontaneity, and collective ritual. These elements invite approaching the world as if for the first time, with open eyes and renewed curiosity. 

Walking art, then, is the act of walking as if for the very first time. One of the core objectives of the Made of Walking encounters was precisely to bring participants and artists together in remote, unfamiliar places where they would walk collectively for the first time. This created a fertile state of being “lost,” of drifting, of letting things happen, and above all, of cultivating trust in the other.

In this way, dérive—one of the key original concepts that shaped walking arts—emerges as simultaneously a critical method, a performative act, and a space of improvisation. To drift together is to practice openness, to embrace uncertainty, and to allow art to surface from encounter itself. It is both playful and serious, ritual and chance, a mode of inhabiting the world that resists fixity and celebrates presence.

As expressed by Geert Vermeire: “Walking art is joy, the joy of being surprised, to wonder, to be together. It is joy that transforms walking into art, joy is its catalyst.”

The future will be beautiful, or will not be

Dérive, chance, presence, and resisting fixity align deeply with the urgencies of the 21st century. In a time dominated by accelerated systems, rigid ideologies, and ecological breakdown, these practices insist on slowness, unpredictability, and openness to what emerges. The Milena principle explores ways of being that resist control and certainty, cultivating resilience, creativity, and the capacity to adapt. 

For the future, this ethos is crucial: it suggests that survival—cultural, ecological, social—depends not on rigid planning or monumental declarations, but on the capacity to drift, to remain present, to trust, and to continually rediscover the world with new eyes.

Walking arts extend a Fluxus-inspired spirit into the present of our distressing time: modest gestures with transformative potential. Whether enacted as protest, meditation, collective ritual, or playful drift, walking reconnects body, environment, and imagination. It insists on presence and participation, opening paths where art is lived rather than simply observed.

Thus, walking becomes an act of radical imagination: to inhabit the world otherwise, to compose futures that are fluid, open, shared and beautiful again. 

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Geert Vermeire and Stefaan van Biesen, august 2025