Made of Walking is an international series of artistic encounters, residencies and laboratories initiated in 2016 by The Milena Principle and its partners. Bringing together artists, researchers, local communities and environmental organisations in remote, peripheral and border landscapes across Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond, each edition explores walking as an artistic, ecological and regenerative cultural practice. Artist residencies, walkshops, performances, exhibitions, collaborative mapping, public conversations and site-responsive interventions become opportunities not simply to produce artworks, but to cultivate enduring relationships between people, places and more-than-human worlds.

Operating at the intersection of walking arts, sound art, locative media, ecological art, socially engaged practice and art-science collaboration, Made of Walking draws inspiration from Joseph Beuys‘ concept of Social Sculpture, Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt‘s Spaziergangswissenschaft (strollology), Tim Ingold‘s notion of correspondence, David Abram‘s ecological phenomenology, Robin Wall Kimmerer‘s ethics of reciprocity and Édouard Glissant‘s Poetics of Relation. Rather than proposing a fixed methodology, the project has gradually evolved into a living ecology of artistic practices that continually adapts to the landscapes, communities and relationships from which it emerges.

Concept and Methodology
Made of Walking understands walking as a relational, ethical and regenerative cultural practice through which artistic, ecological and institutional knowledge emerges in movement. Rather than treating walking simply as a research method or artistic medium, it approaches walking as a way of learning with landscapes rather than about them. Knowledge does not arise from detached observation but through embodied participation, attentive movement and repeated return. Walking becomes an ecological epistemology: a way of discovering how places gradually reshape perception, imagination and understanding.

Inspired by Tim Ingold’s concept of correspondence, Made of Walking understands artistic practice as an ongoing dialogue between bodies, landscapes, histories, technologies and more-than-human worlds. Artists do not simply intervene in places; they gradually learn to correspond with them. Rivers, weather, plants, infrastructures, local memories and communities all become active collaborators in artistic research.

Walking therefore becomes an education of attention. Slowness, sensory perception, hospitality, conversation and shared experience create the conditions through which overlooked ecological and cultural relationships become perceptible. Rather than representing landscapes, artistic practice develops through sustained engagement with them. Every walk becomes an invitation to discover that local places already participate in wider ecological, historical and planetary processes.

Hospitality occupies a central place within this methodology. Shared walks, meals, conversations and everyday encounters are not activities surrounding the artistic programme but artistic practices in their own right. They generate trust, reciprocity, shared memory and mutual care — the social infrastructures from which future collaborations emerge. Walking is understood not only as movement through existing commons but as a practice of commoning, continually creating temporary communities and shared responsibilities that often outlive the event itself.

This perspective also extends the ambitions of relational aesthetics. Rather than asking how artworks create encounters, Made of Walking asks what kinds of relationships remain alive after the artwork. The emphasis shifts from producing artistic events towards cultivating regenerative cultural ecologies capable of evolving long after each residency or exhibition has ended. Return, maintenance, friendship, care and long-term collaboration become as significant as artistic production itself.

Building on recent developments in walking arts, Made of Walking proposes what might be described as a relational-regenerative turn. While contemporary walking arts have established walking as an artistic methodology and, more recently, as a material, embodied and more-than-human practice, Made of Walking shifts the question from what walking enables us to know towards what kinds of relationships, institutions and futures walking may enable. If the spatial turn foregrounded place, the performative turn emphasised embodied action, and the material turn highlighted the agency of matter, the relational-regenerative turn focuses on the long-term ecological conditions through which relationships themselves continue to evolve. Walking is understood less as movement, method or medium than as an ongoing practice of correspondence, maintenance and regeneration capable of reorganising cultural cooperation itself.

History
Since 2016, Made of Walking has been artistically coordinated or co-curated in Delphi (Greece), La Romieu (France), the Akamas Peninsula (Cyprus), Prespa (Greece), Catalonia (Spain) and, in 2026, Prosperpolder (Belgium). Each edition has emerged through close dialogue with its host landscape, exploring themes ranging from botany and coastal ecologies to migration, more-than-human walking, relational geographies and regenerative cultural futures.

Rather than functioning as a travelling festival, Made of Walking has gradually evolved into a distributed ecology of recurring encounters. Artists, researchers and communities return across successive editions, carrying ideas from one landscape into another. Projects begun in Delphi reappear years later in Doel; conversations initiated in Prespa continue in Prosperpolder; collaborations established in Catalonia find new forms elsewhere. Landscapes themselves become recurring collaborators, continually reshaping the questions artists ask.

In this sense, Made of Walking resonates with Édouard Glissant‘s vision of the Tout-Monde: not a universal culture, but a world of relations in which places remain irreducibly singular while becoming increasingly connected through exchange, difference and mutual transformation. The project does not seek to dissolve local identities into global narratives, but to cultivate the conditions through which places, communities and practices can continually learn from one another without losing their specificity.

The tenth anniversary edition in Prosperpolder marks an important new chapter. Organised within the Creative Europe Cooperation Project Walking Arts and Local Communities (WALC), it unfolds within one of Europe’s most complex border landscapes, where wetlands, polders, heavy industry, ports, agriculture and internationally protected nature reserves coexist. Rather than treating these tensions as problems to resolve, the residency approaches them as fertile conditions for artistic inquiry.

Under the theme Common Ground: Corresponding with Place, artists, researchers, residents and visitors explore how careful attention to one landscape may open onto wider ecological and planetary relationships. In doing so, the residency launches From Place to Planet, a two-year programme culminating in an international symposium and Walking Commons expedition in 2027.

Since 2018, the annual spin-off laboratory The Walking Body (TWB) has extended this research in Guimarães, Portugal, through week-long walkshops, exhibitions, lectures and artistic residencies organised with Lab2PT and the University of Minho.

Legacy
Over the past decade, Made of Walking has brought together nearly 1,000 artists, researchers and practitioners through its physical encounters. More importantly, it has generated an international ecology of collaborations that continues to evolve across projects, landscapes and institutions.

This living network contributed directly to the creation of walk · listen · create, now an independent international platform connecting more than 8,000 artists, researchers and practitioners through publications, podcasts, online talks, digital commons and artistic exchange. It has also inspired new walking arts initiatives around the world, including Australian Walking Artists and interdisciplinary walking collectives in North America, South America and Asia.

Today, Made of Walking is increasingly recognised not simply as a recurring programme of artistic events, but as an evolving experiment in regenerative cultural cooperation, culminating in the EU co-funded project Walking Arts and Local Communities (WALC). Performances, exhibitions and residencies are understood not as endpoints but as temporary crystallisations within much longer processes of correspondence, ecological learning, commoning and collective care. Its lasting legacy lies less in the individual works it generates than in the living ecologies of relationships it enables — relationships that continue to unfold across places, projects and communities long after the walk itself has ended.

Ultimately, Made of Walking suggests that walking is not only an artistic practice but also a way of reorganising culture itself: through correspondence, hospitality, commoning and regenerative relationships that continually reconnect people, places and more-than-human worlds.

In this perspective, every walk becomes both a local encounter and part of a larger planetary conversation, where the future of culture is cultivated not through isolated events, but through living ecologies of relation.