Abstract 

Walking Between Worlds reflects on Made of Walking Prosperpolder as both an artistic gathering and an evolving practice of walking arts. Set within the border landscape of the Scheldt estuary, it follows nine days of walks, performances, workshops and conversations through which artists, residents and visitors come to inhabit a place together. Prosperpolder emerges not simply as the setting of the programme but as one of its participants, continually reshaping the questions brought to it. Particular attention is given to Polder Lab, a two-year collaborative process that situates artistic practice within long-term ecological and social relationships. Seen in the wider context of Walking Arts and Local Communities (WALC), the article argues that contemporary walking arts are moving beyond the production of individual works and singular artistic visions towards sustained forms of correspondence between landscapes, communities and the more-than-human world.

Walking Between Worlds

Some landscapes show themselves immediately. Others take longer. Prosperpolder belongs to the second kind.

At first there seems little to distinguish it from countless other lowland landscapes. Fields stretch towards distant dikes. Poplars interrupt the horizon before it opens again towards church towers, container cranes and the cooling towers of the Doel nuclear power station. Country roads pass farms that appear untouched by time, although one of Europe’s busiest ports lies only a few kilometres away. Along the Scheldt, immense ships move almost silently between Antwerp and the North Sea.

The contrasts are obvious. Understanding them takes longer.

This has always been a negotiated landscape. The sea withdrew and returned. Villages disappeared beneath storm tides while others emerged behind newly constructed embankments. Military fortifications became nature reserves. Reclaimed farmland now borders internationally protected wetlands. Industry, agriculture, ecological restoration and everyday village life continue to occupy the same territory—sometimes uneasily, but rarely in isolation from one another. Walking makes these relationships easier to notice.

A road that first appears to cross empty fields follows the line of an old drainage channel. A distant industrial skyline explains the geometry of nearby wetlands. Stories about flooding, farming and migration acquire another dimension after standing on the riverbank where those histories unfolded. Place reveals itself less as scenery than as accumulated memory.

It is precisely this layered character that makes Prosperpolder such a fertile setting for Made of Walking.

For nine days artists, researchers, residents, historians, ecologists and visitors from across Europe will share walks, performances, conversations, workshops and meals. They will map, listen, embroider, record sounds, follow insects through grassland, trace forgotten stories and speculate about possible futures for landscapes shaped by continual transformation.

Calling the gathering a happening or an artistic programme soon feels inadequate. The timetable remains useful, but experience rarely follows it.

A conversation begun over coffee will return unexpectedly while crossing the marshes. A remark made during an evening talk will resurface beside the river the following morning. Someone identifies an unfamiliar plant during one walk and days later, that observation could become central to a discussion about heritage, biodiversity and local memory.

By the third day, few people will be concerned about where one activity ends and another begins. Reflection will continue while walking. Artistic works spill into shared meals. Local histories will interrupt theoretical discussions. Weather, tides and chance encounters will redirect plans with surprising ease. More than once the schedule changes because rain arrives or because a conversation simply proves too interesting to abandon.

The programme will begin to resemble something else. Not a sequence of events, but a way of spending time together. People stop moving from walkshop to walkshop.

Instead, they will move through an expanding web of relationships in which landscape, conversation and artistic practice continually reshape one another. It is difficult to identify the exact moment this shift occurs. Perhaps while waiting for the water bus across the Scheldt. Perhaps during a shared meal after an evening walk. Or perhaps it was already long before anyone arrived, carried within the histories, waterways and footpaths that had been quietly connecting people across this landscape for centuries. Whatever the moment, Prosperpolder no longer feels like the backdrop to an artistic programme. It has become one of its collaborators.

Walking a Landscape

The days will unfold between Beveren, Kieldrecht, Prosperpolder, the Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe, Fort Liefkenshoek and Doel. On a map they appear as separate destinations, each with its own history and identity. Walking between them tells another story. Paths, waterways and conversations gradually reveal them as different expressions of the same territory.

Water is the thread that binds them together. Its presence is constant, though never quite the same. Drainage ditches organise reclaimed farmland. Creeks wind through tidal marshes. Massive embankments hold back the Scheldt while, elsewhere, the river has deliberately been allowed to reclaim former agricultural land. Every path records another chapter in the long negotiation between human intention and ecological process.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe. Many visitors arrive expecting wilderness. They leave with something more complex.

The marsh still bears the outlines of villages swallowed by the sea centuries ago. Grazing cattle share the salt meadows with migratory birds. Ecological restoration unfolds alongside memories of farming families and vanished settlements. Local guides move effortlessly between discussions of salt-marsh vegetation, tidal dynamics, family histories and medieval embankments, never treating natural and cultural history as separate subjects. One continually explains the other.

Seen from the walls of Fort Liefkenshoek, the estuary tells yet another version of the same story. The river that once marked military frontiers now carries thousands of containers towards destinations across the world. Watching immense ships pass beneath seventeenth-century fortifications, history no longer appears as a succession of completed periods. Trade, warfare, migration, engineering and ecological adaptation occupy the same stretch of water, each leaving traces without erasing the others.

It is striking how quickly the scale of attention can change. Earlier in the morning everyone is looking towards the horizon, following ships and cranes across the estuary. By the evening  twenty people are kneeling beside a drainage ditch during Fred Adam’s Microcosmos Walk, debating beetles no larger than a fingernail.

The monumental and the microscopic demand the same quality of attention.

The landscape seems determined to resist every attempt to settle into a single perspective.

Questions raised during walks continue inside Polder Lab, initiated by artist and researcher Simona Vermeire as a collaborative process extending over two years. Unlike many artistic projects, the laboratory does not begin with a finished proposal waiting to be realised. It begins with a set of shared questions.

What happens when wetlands are approached not only as ecological systems but also as living infrastructures connecting bodies, rivers, drainage networks, fungi, memories and stories?

How might artists, scientists, local residents and environmental organisations investigate those relationships together without assuming that one form of knowledge should take precedence over another?

These questions are explored through NYMPH / LYMPH, Vermeire’s poetic framework for the laboratory. Rather than offering explanations, it proposes correspondences. Water moving through an estuary is placed alongside the circulation of lymph through the body, underground fungal networks, drainage systems and other largely invisible forms of connection. None of these comparisons asks to be taken literally. Instead, they encourage participants to think across scales, allowing scientific understanding and poetic imagination to remain in conversation.

The laboratory begins indoors, with moving images, sound and discussion. Before long everyone will be outside.The change is almost incidental, yet it alters the discussion. Ideas that seemed persuasive in the meeting room encounter mud, reeds, changing tides and uneven ground. Some observations will become sharper. Others will lose their certainty. New questions will appear almost without anyone noticing.

Then the weather may intervene. Heavy rain sends people reaching for umbrellas, but no one will expect the session to end. The conversation simply continues while walking towards the nearest dike. Someone may remark that there is no bad weather, nor good weather, that there is only walking weather. Weather has become another participant in the discussion. Nobody disagrees.

Scientific observation slips into storytelling. Artistic research begins to resemble fieldwork. Local knowledge unsettles academic assumptions, while ecological detail reshapes artistic proposals. At other moments the conversation simply falls away as everyone watches wind passing through the reeds or flocks of birds shifting direction above the marshes.

Silence is not treated as an interruption. It is part of the inquiry. Prosperpolder does more than host the programme. It will redirect it.

Questions will change because of the places in which they were asked. Walks have altered discussions that began indoors. Encounters with residents, guides and the landscape itself reshape artistic intentions. Rather than serving as a backdrop for cultural activity, Prosperpolder enters the work as an active collaborator.

Walking in Many Forms

By the middle of the week, the question people may ask each other may have changed. No one will be particularly interested anymore in what event comes next. Instead they may begin comparing ways of walking.

That shift says something important about Made of Walking. Although everyone spends the week on foot, almost nobody walks in quite the same way. Walking becomes choreography for one artist, ecological inquiry for another, storytelling for a third. Elsewhere it appears as mapping, listening, writing, performance, care or simple observation. These differences never seem to compete. They give the gathering its texture.

No common methodology lies beneath the programme. What people share is a willingness to let the landscape shape how they work.

One morning, Portuguese artist Natacha Antão will invite participants to wander through Beveren collecting fragments of place: plants, conversations, memories, overlooked details, anything that seems worth carrying back. Later these traces are stitched into a collective embroidered map. The result will not be a representation of the town. It is a record of encounters.

Routes sit beside conversations. Botanical observations meet remembered stories. A patch of embroidery marks a place where someone paused to listen rather than somewhere of geographical importance. The map gradually becomes less concerned with location than with relationships.

A similar attentiveness informs Annemarie Lopez’s Storylarking. Participants will be encouraged to notice what usually slips by unnoticed: the rhythm of footsteps on cobblestones, an abandoned object beside the road, changing clouds over the fields, a sentence overheard in passing. Writing begins with observation rather than invention. Stories are not imposed upon the landscape but discovered within it.

The exercise is surprisingly demanding. Most people realise how quickly attention normally passes over such details.

The same question returns, although in a very different form, during Walking with Io, that will be developed by Catalan artist Alba Sauleda together with participants from the local day centres De Bron and De Stroom. The project begins with conversations. Not about mythology. About everyday life. Favourite places. Family memories. Small frustrations. Streets people have walked hundreds of times without really thinking about them. Only later does the story of Io enter the conversation—not as something to illustrate, but as another way of approaching experiences that are already there.

By the time the walk will unfold through Beveren, familiar streets will have acquired another resonance. The myth has become less a story from antiquity than a companion to the places, gestures and conversations through which participants have explored it together.

It will become difficult to say who has guided whom. Alba brings the project. The participants transforms it. The town itself does the rest.

Later in the week, attention will shift again.

During Microcosmos Walk, Fred Adam asks everyone to stop looking towards the horizon. Instead of container ships, church towers and distant cranes, the evening is spent following beetles through grasses, sketching insects, comparing leaves and arguing over species that are unknown or familiar across continents. Twenty minutes may be spent discussing an animal no larger than a fingernail. Nobody will find that strange. Looking closely will become the point.

Biodiversity will no longer be an abstract environmental concern. It acquires names, colours, behaviours and personalities. Participants will leave noticing the ground beneath their feet in ways they never had before.

Another day, another change of perspective.

Doel has become one of the most contested villages in Flanders. For some it symbolises industrial expansion; for others it represents loss, resilience or the uncertain future of communities living beside Europe’s largest port. Walking through its streets, abandoned houses stand beside carefully tended gardens. Murals cover empty façades while children continue cycling through the village. Nothing settles into a single narrative.

It is here that Greek artist Katerina Drakopoulou presents 22 Stops.

The work has travelled through many landscapes since it was first developed during Made of Walking in Delphi in 2016. Each place alters it. In Doel the choreography is remarkably simple. Participants will stop. Turn. Wait. Listen. Change direction. Walk more slowly. Look where they might not otherwise would have looked. The village does much of the work. Curtains move behind a window. A bicycle leans against a house that appears abandoned. Machinery from the port drifts across birdsong. The smell of flowering lime trees lingers longer than expected. Nothing spectacular happens.

Yet people begin noticing things they had walked past only minutes earlier.

Darkness transforms perception in Simone Etter’s night walk. As vision recedes, listening becomes more important. So does trust. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Lessness, the walk explores uncertainty rather than absence. Voices appear from unexpected directions. Familiar paths become unfamiliar. Participants instinctively will move closer together. The landscape they thought they knew during daylight will seems to belong to another place altogether.

Elsewhere, Mary Marinopoulou will approach walking through movement itself. Improvisation, writing, found materials and simple collective exercises will encourage participants to pay attention to weight, balance, gesture and the ways bodies continually negotiate weather, terrain and one another. The emphasis is never on performance in the theatrical sense. It is on becoming more attentive to how movement shapes perception.

Seen individually, these projects differ enormously. Some make use of digital technologies. Others deliberately avoid them. Some generate maps, objects or installations. Others leave little behind except altered habits of attention. Together, however, they suggest something shared. Walking is no longer simply a medium through which art is made. It is a way of entering into relationships that take time to develop. That may be why participants later may struggle to describe individual artworks separately.

What they may remember instead are encounters. An embroidered map. A beetle crossing a boot. Pancakes shared in Doel. Rain sweeping across the marshes. A conversation resumed hours later without anyone quite recalling where it had begun. These memories will remain not because they are extraordinary. Theywill  remain because they changed the way a place was experienced.

Hospitality

There is a moment during almost every edition of Made of Walking when the distinction between participants and hosts begins to dissolve. It rarely happens during a keynote lecture or a workshop. More often it begins around a table.

Sharing homemade soup. Someone arrives with farmhouse bread. It appears beside French cheese, Portuguese alheiras, Greek sweets and Spanish wine brought by the participants. Conversations drift between languages without much concern for translation. A discussion that started over dinner quietly continues the next morning while walking along the dike.

The programme has not paused. It has simply changed form.

Hospitality has always been central to walking cultures. Pilgrimage routes, shepherds’ paths, trading roads and travellers’ inns depended on gestures of welcome that made movement possible. Contemporary walking arts inherit that tradition, although hospitality here extends beyond providing accommodation or meals. It creates the conditions under which strangers can become collaborators. That process cannot be scheduled. It develops through repeated encounters.

People walk together. They prepare food together. They help each other translate, carry equipment, navigate unfamiliar paths or simply wait when someone stops to look more closely at a flower or photograph an insect. These small acts accumulate almost unnoticed, gradually transforming a temporary gathering into a community. Prosperpolder offers a particularly fertile environment for this.

The programme is centred in Hof ter Welle, a former manor farm whose scale encourages encounter rather than anonymity. Participants share breakfast before leaving for the day’s activities and return in the evening with muddy boots, notebooks, recordings and stories. Long tables become places where ideas continue to circulate long after the formal sessions have ended. Local residents enter this conversation naturally.

Some will guide walks through landscapes they have known for decades. Others will share memories of flooding, farming, migration or the gradual expansion of the port. Their contributions are never presented as supplementary information to the artistic programme. They are part of its fabric. One afternoon, after a walk through Prosperpolder, a resident may quietly remark, “You should come back in winter.”  In winter the fields disappear beneath water, birds gather in different numbers, the wind feels cold across the dikes. The landscape everyone has been describing throughout the week is only one of its many seasonal identities.

The landscape is not a fixed setting. It continues changing long after visitors have gone home.

At Fort Liefkenshoek, historical interpretation will unfold less as a lecture than as conversation. Questions about military history lead to discussions of migration, shipping, ecology and contemporary geopolitics. Looking across the Scheldt towards the container terminals, it will be impossible to separate local history from global networks of exchange.

In Doel, hospitality carries a different meaning.

The village has lived for decades with uncertainty about its future. Yet visitors are welcomed not into a museum of disappearance but into a living community. Pancakes are served in the local meeting hall. Stories are exchanged without nostalgia becoming the dominant tone. Residents speak candidly about conflict, resilience and everyday life, allowing complexity to replace the simplified narratives that often surround the village. These encounters remind participants that communities are never abstract concepts. They consist of people whose lives continue after the artists have departed. This awareness also shapes the relationship between the international participants themselves.

The programme will bring together artists from different generations, disciplines and countries, some of whom have never met before. Participants are invited from all over the world. Formal introductions quickly become unnecessary. People begin recognising one another through shared experiences: the person who noticed the wild orchids, the one who always walks at the back, the one carrying microphones, the person who keeps asking unexpected questions.

Professional identities soften. Relationships become more personal. This does not emerge by chance.

It reflects years of collaboration between organisations and individuals who understand that artistic exchange depends as much on trust as on expertise. Walking slows the pace at which relationships develop, but it often deepens them. Time spent moving through a landscape together creates conversations that would be difficult to reproduce in conference rooms or online meetings. Hospitality extends beyond human relationships.

Throughout the week, participants will be repeatedly invited to consider what it might mean to be welcomed by a landscape rather than merely to visit it. This shift is subtle but significant. Instead of asking what can be taken from a place—its stories, images or inspiration—the emphasis turns towards learning how to remain attentive to its rhythms, histories and vulnerabilities.

That attitude requires patience. It also requires reciprocity.

Walking becomes less an act of discovery than an ongoing practice of entering into relationship. By the end of the week, many participants will speak less about the artworks they have experienced than about the people they have met, the meals they have shared and the conversations that continue long after the official programme has ended.

These will not become peripheral memories. They are part of the work itself. For walking arts, hospitality is not simply an ethic of welcome. It is one of the ways knowledge is created, exchanged and carried forward.

Europe as a Conversation Between Landscapes

Although Made of Walking Prosperpolder unfolds within a small corner of northern Belgium, it is never only about this place. Throughout the week, Prosperpolder remains firmly rooted in its own geography while continually entering into dialogue with other landscapes carried by those who have come here.

Participants arrive from across Europe and beyond: artists, researchers, educators and local practitioners whose work has developed in forests, mountains, islands, wetlands, cities and rural territories. They bring different experiences, methods and questions. Yet these are not presented as models to be transferred from one place to another. Instead, they become invitations to comparison, correspondence and mutual learning.

This is one of the ambitions of Walking Arts and Local Communities (WALC).

Rather than building on just a single European centre for walking arts, WALC develops as a constellation of places, each contributing its own ecological, cultural and artistic knowledge. Prosperpolder becomes one hub among others: Prespa in Greece, Guimarães in Portugal, Catalonia in Spain, Villefagnan in rural France, together with the growing network of affiliated Nodes across Europe and beyond.

What connects these places is not a common landscape. It is a shared way of working.

Each territory asks different questions. The mountain villages around Prespa explore borders, diaspora and coexistence across national frontiers. The peri-urban fabric and heritage of Guimarães invite reflections on community, memory and everyday life as a canvas for alternative ways of learning and teaching. El Hondo examines water management, biodiversity and fragile wetland ecologies. Villefagnan investigates rural transformation and social connection in times of forced migration and planetary crises. Prosperpolder adds another perspective, where estuary, agriculture, industry and nature conservation meet in continual negotiation, as breeding ground walking arts as future making.

None of these places seeks to represent Europe. Together, they suggest another way of thinking about it.

Europe emerges not as a political abstraction or an administrative framework, but as a network of landscapes learning from one another through artistic practice. Each encounter enriches the next. Questions raised in Prespa reappear differently in Prosperpolder. Methodologies developed in Guimarães acquire new meanings beside the Scheldt. Conversations that begin in Belgium continue months later in Spain or Greece, returning transformed by another landscape and another community.

This circulation of ideas is as important as the movement of people. Walking itself becomes a medium through which knowledge travels.

Not by producing fixed methodologies, but by allowing practices to adapt to new ecological and cultural contexts. Artists rarely repeat projects unchanged. Instead, each place reshapes what is possible. Local residents become collaborators rather than audiences. Histories alter artistic intentions. Landscapes resist imported assumptions and insist upon their own particularities.

During one of the conversations, someone may well joke that an overlooked drainage ditch has become the European Parliament of Walking. The image captures something essential about the gathering. Far from institutional buildings and formal procedures, artists, residents and researchers will stand beside a narrow strip of water, discussing wetlands, migration, local histories and the future of walking arts. Decisions will not be taken through votes but through listening, disagreement, curiosity and the slow accumulation of shared experience. The landscape itself will become part of the conversation, shaping what can be said and how people respond to one another.

Unlike a parliament built upon debate and voting, this assembly functions through shared experience. Agreements are rarely formalised. Consensus often emerges while walking rather than during meetings. Conversations continue across meals, ferries, village streets and muddy footpaths. Differences remain visible without demanding immediate resolution.

Walking offers another model for dialogue. People move together without needing to arrive at identical conclusions.

This openness also explains why WALC has increasingly shifted its attention away from producing isolated artistic events or singular artistic visions towards cultivating longer-term relationships. Residencies extend across months or years in processes instead of singular moments. Collaborations continue between editions. Artists return to places they already know, discovering that landscapes, communities and their own practices have changed in the meantime.

Polder Lab exemplifies this evolution. Rather than treating Prosperpolder as a temporary site for artistic intervention, it establishes an ongoing process through which artists, scientists, environmental organisations and local communities continue investigating the territory together. The laboratory remains active after the visitors leave. Future encounters will not begin from zero but from relationships already established.

This deepening distinguishes WALC from many international cultural networks. Mobility remains important, but mobility alone is no longer the objective. The emphasis has shifted towards continuity. Towards creating conditions in which artistic exchange contributes to local ecologies instead of merely passing through them.

This approach also changes how success is understood. Traditional cultural evaluation often counts audiences, performances or exhibitions. These remain relevant, but they reveal only part of the picture. Equally significant are the collaborations that continue afterwards, the local initiatives that emerge independently, the friendships that develop across countries, the methodologies that evolve through repeated encounters, and the renewed ways in which participants return to their own communities. Many of these outcomes resist easy measurement. They nevertheless shape the future of the network.

Seen from this perspective, Prosperpolder is not simply hosting an international programme.

It is participating in a larger conversation that continues across Europe, carried from one landscape to another by those who walk between them.

From Event to Process

When the final walk comes to an end, there is no clear sense of conclusion.

People embrace, exchange addresses, promise to visit one another’s projects. The meeting spaces grow quiet. People leave Hof ter Welle one by one. Yet very little actually feels finished.

Perhaps this is because Made of Walking has never understood itself as an event in the conventional sense. Events occupy a defined place in time: they begin, they unfold and they end. What has emerged in Prosperpolder follows another rhythm. The walks certainly take place during a particular week, but the relationships they generate continue long afterwards, returning in new collaborations, shared research, future residencies and renewed encounters. This continuity has become increasingly central to the development of walking arts.

For many years, walking-based artistic practice was primarily understood through individual works with singular artistic visions: a guided walk, a performance, a sound walk or walking augmented experience, a mapping or a temporary intervention. These remain important forms, yet they no longer describe the whole field. Increasingly, walking functions as a way of sustaining processes that unfold across seasons, disciplines and communities.

Polder Lab exemplifies this transition. Rather than producing a single artistic outcome, it establishes an infrastructure for continued inquiry. Artists, ecologists, researchers, heritage organisations and residents contribute different forms of knowledge without seeking to reduce them to a common language. Scientific observation, artistic experimentation, embodied experience and local memory remain distinct while continually informing one another.

This is not interdisciplinarity understood as the merging of disciplines. It is correspondence.

Each practice retains its own integrity while learning to respond to others. Walking provides the conditions for that correspondence because it unfolds at a pace that allows observation, conversation and reflection to coexist. Time spent moving through a landscape slows decision-making. Ideas can remain provisional. Unexpected encounters are not interruptions but opportunities. Questions often become more valuable than immediate answers.

Throughout the week, this openness repeatedly shapes the work.

A local resident’s recollection redirects an artistic proposal. Heavy rain transforms the route of a workshop and, with it, the discussion taking place within it. A chance encounter with insects during one walk becomes central to another conversation about biodiversity. Participants return to places already visited and discover that changing weather, tides or simply accumulated familiarity have altered their perception.

The landscape continues teaching.

Equally important is what participants carry away.

Not only recordings, photographs or notebooks, but altered habits of attention. Many will describe returning home and walking differently through places they thought they already knew. Familiar streets invite slower observation. Everyday routes reveal overlooked ecologies. Conversations with neighbours acquire renewed significance. The practice extends beyond the programme because walking itself has changed.

In this sense, the most enduring outcome of Made of Walking Prosperpolder may not be any single artwork presented during the week.

It may be the capacity to recognise relationships that had always existed but had remained unnoticed.

Between drainage ditches and rivers. Between industrial infrastructure and migrating birds. Between myths and everyday experience. Between local knowledge and international exchange. Between artistic practice and ecological responsibility. Between people who, only days earlier, had been strangers. These relationships are neither fixed nor complete. Like the landscape itself, they remain in continual transformation.

Walking does not resolve that complexity. It teaches us how to remain within it.

Epilogue

Prosperpolder reminds us that landscapes are never simply places we inhabit.

They are ongoing conversations between geology, ecology, history, labour, memory and imagination. Every generation inherits these conversations and, through its own actions, contributes another layer to them. Walking makes that process tangible because it unfolds at the speed of attention. It allows places to disclose themselves gradually, through repeated encounters rather than immediate understanding.

What emerges during Made of Walking Prosperpolder is therefore more than an international gathering of artists.

It becomes an exploration of how walking can create forms of knowledge rooted in experience, reciprocity and care. The artworks presented throughout the programme differ widely in method and intention, yet together they demonstrated that walking is not simply a medium for artistic production. It is a way of cultivating relationships: with landscapes, with communities, with histories, with other species and with one another.

Within WALC, this approach continues to evolve.

The network is no longer defined primarily by the circulation of artists across Europe, but by the circulation of relationships. Landscapes become connected not through standardised methodologies but through ongoing correspondence. Each place contributes its own questions, while remaining open to those brought by others. Prosperpolder enters into dialogue with Prespa, Guimarães, El Hondo, Villefagnan and many other territories, each enriching the conversation without dissolving its own particular identity.

Perhaps this is the deeper significance of walking arts today.

In an age characterised by acceleration, environmental uncertainty and increasing social fragmentation, walking offers neither nostalgia nor escape. It proposes another way of paying attention. One that values slowness without rejecting change, embraces complexity without demanding simple conclusions, and recognises that understanding a place begins not with controlling  it but with learning how to dwell within its rhythms.

As participants depart from Prosperpolder, the programme will not really end.

The paths remain. The tides continue their daily movement through the marshes. Birds cross borders without recognising them. The conversations travel onwards, carried into other landscapes by those who had shared them.

Walking, after all, is never only about reaching a destination.

The walk never really ends. It simply continues elsewhere.