We arrived in the flatlands of the Charente in the last days of May, carrying laptops, agendas, PowerPoints about our deliverables, European acronyms and all the fragile optimism required to believe that human beings from five countries can agree on anything.

It was a heatwave. Our nostrils tingled with the whiff of ammonia rising from the fields. We shooed the flies that came to greet us. The Atlantic light washed over the fields of maize, khorasan wheat, camelina and mustard. Yellow fields stretching towards dark lines of trees. Elderflower. Chestnut blossom. Wild cherries along the road. The calls of wrens, blackbirds, tree pipits.

Villefagnan is an old village from when the Charente was a landscape of grain and mills. It once had fourteen windmills. They’re mostly ruins now, except one restored by the commune in an act of collective memory. The agricultural economy remains: farmers still grow wheat and maize, lentils and chickpeas, pooling their crops together in a co-op to withstand the pressures of large-scale modern agribusiness.

And while the farmers sorted and packed their grain and chickpeas at the local co-op, we held our Walking Arts and Local Communities partners’ meeting beneath a parachute tent from the Algerian war, above the workshop space of Gigacircus; part farm (there were sheep eating the grass in the back garden), part laboratory, part circus. Around us were keyboards, rain-sticks, gongs, strange machines, traces of performances.

Gigacircus and its partner association Temps Reel had spent years making hospitality a practice rather than an idea. The festival planned for the end of our stay formed part of their Hospitalité en Actions project, a long collaboration with people from the village and elsewhere, artists, residents and displaced people. Some of these men and women wandered in and out of the studio and kitchen, preparing food, talking in quiet voices.

Somewhere between the agenda points and the spreadsheets, an accordion sighed from the kitchen.

There were visiting artists: Claudia Urrutia, a singer, and Ridha Dhib, a walking artist, who had walked the ten kilometres from Ruffec train station to be there. And later that weekend a Mexican performer and artist, Gustavo Alvarez, would accompany the procession from an iPhone screen, his voice and image moving with us through the streets.

Sylvie Marchand, former circus artist and anthropologist, whose research had taken her into the world of voodoo healers, and Lionel Camburet, who had once lived with the Cree in Canada, had consciously created a place where borders blurred, where chez nous took on a new meaning. Fred Adam, their technical wizard, also specialises in the art of relaxing in a hammock. And Sandra Waeckel, indefatigable production assistant, helps keeps the show on the road.

It seemed right that we were here.

The six partners of WALC: Gigacircus, the University of Western Macedonia, The Milenna Principle, walk · listen · create, Nau Coclea, and Action Synergy, had been assembled over years by Geert Vermeire, who once studied to be an orchestra conductor and who conducts still, though, now, not with a baton. Around the table, among others, was Yannis Ziogas, whose passion for walking as an art form had given rise to the Prespa Walking Arts Encounters, one of the living centres of this whole constellation. Also around the table: Babak Fakhamzadeh, walk · listen · create’s technical maestro, and Andrew Stuck, a former urban designer with a tireless enthusiasm for walking and walkers in all our variegated forms.

There were moments when the European machinery groaned and cranked in all its strange theatre: the language of work packages and deliverables; the solemnity of decisions that may or may not matter; the small rituals by which humans try to create order. There were strong personalities. There were speeches. There were artistic differences of opinion negotiated with the earnestness of peace treaties.

Kostas Diamantis-Balaskas from Action Synergy, a charming and surprisingly youthful-looking man given the hundred or so projects he has managed, had the job of making sure we met our EU obligations. He told us we were one of the most passionate groups he had encountered. A euphemism, perhaps. But he has seen others take their money and simply tick the boxes they must tick.

But not the walkers.

The same people arguing about the best way to make walking art more accessible, better known, more inclusive in Europe beneath the tent would later walk together through the fields, eat together under trees, swim together in the village waterhole, or stand quietly beside a prehistoric tumulus contemplating the desire to make a lasting mark on the world.

Maybe it was all the talk of windmills, but I started to wonder if there was something Quixotic about all of this, a small coalition of European walking artists meeting to discuss walking art while wars grind on at our margins, Ukraine and the Middle East. Then again, Don Quixote cared enough about the world to try to save it.

Some decisions were made. A book. A residency. An exhibition. The future, or a version of it, sketched out. Natacha Antão Moutinho, an artist and academic from Portugal, even sketched a picture of a cocktail made with various piquant regional suggestions of the group. It was probably undrinkable, but it didn’t lack for flavour.

One afternoon we walked the P’tit Tour de Villefagnan, stopping at the garage studio of Jacky Legros, a retired carpenter who turned wood into extraordinary Chinese balls, perfect spheres conjured by hand. Sophie Lopez worked there too, her surrealist paintings propped against the walls. And Lubna Sakhnini, a Palestinian artist, her charcoal works delicate and haunting.

And we were not alone in our implausible optimism. Around us and among us, that weekend, were people who had crossed genuine borders under genuine duress: from Palestine, from Eritrea, from Algeria. They were not there as symbols of anything. They were in the kitchen, they were at the tables, they would join the procession and our meal.

For the Sunday procession in the streets of Villefagnan, I had brought two whirligigs, miniature windmills. I was unaware of the milling past of the region when I bought them, they were just colourful props that had appealed to me, ways of capturing the elements on my walks. But with the synchronicity that sometimes accompanies our artistic whims, they seemed to belong here: fragile machines designed to harness invisible forces. Two rainbow whirligigs, one attached to a long tube for blowing bubbles. Tiny machines powered by breath, human and elemental.

My job was simply to walk, to join in the parade and bring a bit of colour and movement and childish joy to accompany the songs and masks and rhythms, like the orchestra musician who plays the triangle.

Around us, the feverish preparations for Saturday. Food from Eritrea, Algeria, Palestine. Singing. Totemic costumes. Ankle bells. Tambors. A temporary village assembled itself from many villages.

The procession moved through the hazy afternoon streets. Children appeared. The drums kept the pace. Bubbles rose and broke in the June heat. The whirligigs spun. Claudia sang. A villager told the story of his grandmother.

Somewhere in the movement and noise of it, a young man asked if he could try my bubble mill, and I handed it to him, and then lost him and it in the crowd.

After the procession, I had asked a man to help me peg my remaining whirligig to the top of the globe sculpture in the main square so it would catch the breeze.

Later, Cheffe Saran fed a hundred and thirty people. A borderless meal. There was dancing. There was music. And somewhere in the middle of it, a boy came to find me. He was Palestinian and didn’t speak English or French but he made it clear that he wanted the whirligig. So I went back out into the warm night, unpegged it from the globe, and gave it to him.

He didn’t smile exactly. He nodded a thank you, holding it carefully, solemnly even. Later I saw him walking with his sister. She had the other windmill, the one that made bubbles, the one I had lost earlier in the crowd. And I wondered if that was why he had wanted mine.

Because we don’t want to play alone.

The next day, most of the WALC partners returned to our various countries and our various lives. And Villefagnan would continue with its own affairs.

But so much of what we make and do in this world is a way of looking across at another person and saying: Come with me.

We have great hopes for our project: that it will spread the word of walking as an art form, a way of relating to the environment, to each other. For now, if our strange nomadic orchestra leaves only a few toy windmills behind, a couple of happy children, bubbles in the air, perhaps that is already something.