Made of Walking Prosperpolder and the Future of Walking Arts

TThe expression walking arts has become surprisingly familiar. Over the past two decades, it has entered conferences, publications, festivals, university programmes and European projects, bringing together practices that had previously remained dispersed across different artistic and disciplinary traditions.
Yet the more familiar the expression has become, the more I find myself hesitating before using it. Not because walking has become less important—quite the opposite. Looking through the programme of Made of Walking Prosperpolder, I realised that what interested me most was no longer the walks themselves, but what gathers around them: conversations, observations, stories, collaborations and relationships that continue beyond the moment of walking.
The programme brings together projects from different countries, landscapes and artistic traditions. No common methodology was imposed, yet the individual contributions gradually began to appear as parts of a wider field of correspondence. What connected them was not a particular form of walking, but a shared willingness to let encounters with places, communities and other practices reshape the work.
The question was therefore no longer simply what walking can produce as an art form. It was what walking makes possible—and how those possibilities continue after the walk has ended.

After the Walk

Putting together the programme of Made of Walking Prosperpolder, I was returning to it again and again not simply to check practical details or revise the order of events, but because reading it as a whole became an unexpected exercise in itself. At first it appeared remarkably heterogeneous.

Projects emerged from different artistic traditions and different countries. Some were rooted in performance, others in ecology, mythology, collaborative mapping, digital media, storytelling or social practice. Their methodologies had developed independently, often over many years, in landscapes as different as Prespa, El Hondo, Guimarães, Villefagnan and the polders of the Scheldt estuary.

Nothing suggested a common methodology. Nor had one been imposed.

But still the more I read the programme as a whole, the less it resembled a sequence of individual projects. Connections began to appear that had not been consciously planned. A concern with wetlands unexpectedly resonated with collaborative mapping. A project developed around Greek mythology entered into dialogue with community work in Beveren. Ecological observation, artistic research and oral history repeatedly crossed one another without ever becoming the same thing.

The programme seemed to be doing something beyond bringing projects together. It was quietly creating a field in which practices could enter into relationship.

The connections I recognised in Prosperpolder reminded me of encounters in Prespa, Guimarães, Catalonia, Villefagnan and many other places over the past ten years. None of those experiences had seemed particularly exceptional at the time. They belonged to different projects, different organisations and different landscapes. Yet seen together they suggested that something had been developing quietly.

It became difficult to think about walking arts primarily through individual works.

What seemed to persist were not isolated projects but the ways practices over time entered into correspondence with one another as they travelled between places, communities and landscapes.

The work itself appeared to have shifted. Not outside the walk. But no longer entirely within it either.

Looking Back

Once I had noticed this, I could not look at the field in quite the same way.

Walking arts have never been a single movement. They emerged at the intersection of many different trajectories: land art, performance, psychogeography, site-specific practice, environmental art, socially engaged practice, pilgrimage, activism, anthropology, locative media and, more recently, artistic research. Their diversity has always been one of their defining qualities.

At the same time, that diversity concealed a remarkably persistent assumption. The artwork could still be identified.

Whether one thinks of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Janet Cardiff, Wrights & Sites or many others, one can point to the work itself. The walk, the route, the intervention, the performance or the sound piece remains the centre of gravity. Even when participation became more prominent, the artwork largely retained its identity as something conceived by an artist and experienced by others. Nothing about that has become obsolete.

Those works remain foundational. They continue to shape the field in important ways. Yet the practices gathered in Prosperpolder seem to belong to another moment as well.

Their point of departure is still the walk, but their attention often shifts elsewhere. Rather than asking what walking can produce as an artwork, they ask what kinds of relationships walking can make possible between people, places and different forms of knowledge.

The shift is subtle, and I would be cautious not to overstate it. Earlier traditions have not disappeared. They continue to coexist with more recent developments, often within the same practice. Even so, the balance seems to have changed.

New concerns slowly entered into correspondence with existing practices. Questions of ecology, situated knowledge, participation, digital culture, more-than-human relations and artistic research did not arrive as a coherent programme. They accumulated over time, intersecting with practices that had originally emerged from quite different traditions. Looking back, it is perhaps this accumulation, rather than any single innovation, that now seems most significant.

Artists began working in the same landscapes over longer periods. Collaborations with ecologists, historians, educators and local communities became less exceptional. Research increasingly unfolded through residencies rather than isolated commissions. The walk became one moment within a much longer process of observation, correspondence and return.

Seen from this perspective, Made of Walking Prosperpolder does not appear as an isolated event. It reflects a broader evolution that has been quietly taking place across many different contexts, often without those involved describing it in quite the same way.

I suspect my own understanding of walking arts has changed in much the same way.

When the first Made of Walking encounters were organised in July 2016, the emphasis naturally fell on bringing practitioners together. The field itself was still taking shape. Simply discovering that similar questions were being explored in different countries already felt significant.

Over time, something else happened. The encounters themselves began influencing the practices they had initially set out merely to present. Projects returned in different forms. Artists borrowed methodologies from one another. Conversations continued long after the encounters had ended. Collaborations that had never been planned emerged almost incidentally. Looking back, it becomes difficult to separate the evolution of individual practices from the evolution of the field itself.

That may be one of the least visible but most important developments of the last decade. Walking arts no longer consist only of individual works. They also consist of the relationships through which those works continue to change.

For many years I probably thought of walking as the common denominator that held the field together. Whatever our differences, we walked. That seemed enough.

Reading the programme of Made of Walking Prosperpolder, I realised that walking no longer appears to be the most interesting thing the projects have in common. What they share is something less immediately visible. Each proposes a way of entering into relationship with a place.

That relationship takes very different forms. One project listens. Another maps. A third follows insects. Someone else works through embroidery, mythology, performance or conversation. The artistic languages differ considerably. Even the pace of the projects differs. Yet they all begin from the assumption that a place is not simply there to be interpreted. It participates in the work.

Looking across these projects, I became increasingly aware that what they shared was not a common method. Their approaches remain remarkably different. What they seem to share instead is a willingness to let the encounter with a place reshape the work itself. The proposal is no longer entirely formulated beforehand. It develops through conversations, repeated visits, unexpected observations and forms of knowledge that only become available once the work has begun.

Twenty years ago many walking projects asked what became visible through walking. Increasingly, they seem to ask what kinds of relationships walking makes possible.The distinction is small. Its consequences are not.

Because once relationships become central, the artwork itself begins to change. One consequence of this only became apparent when I began looking more closely at the projects themselves.

Their differences remained obvious. 22 Stops evolved from a choreography first developed in Delphi. Walking with Io revisits mythology through encounters with participants from De Bron and De Stroom. Storylarking moves between attentive observation and writing. Common Ground gathers memories and conversations into an embroidered map of Beveren. Other works engage biodiversity, digital mapping, community gardening, wetlands or the industrial history of the Scheldt estuary.

There is no common aesthetic. Nor do these projects share a recognisable methodology. Yet they seem to approach a place in a remarkably similar spirit. None of them treats the landscape simply as a setting within which the work unfolds. Nor is the place reduced to a theme waiting to be interpreted. Again and again, the projects begin by acknowledging that the landscape already possesses its own histories, rhythms, forms of knowledge and relationships. Artistic practice enters that complexity rather than replacing it.

This may appear self-evident, but it marks a considerable difference from many earlier ways of thinking about site-specific practice. A site was often understood as the location where a work took place. Increasingly, it becomes the place with which the work develops.That  distinction may sound linguistic. I do not think it is. Working in a place and working with a place are not quite the same thing.

The first assumes that the work arrives. The second assumes that the work begins by listening. That listening takes many forms.

Sometimes it means walking repeatedly through the same landscape before deciding what to do. Sometimes it means allowing local memories to redirect an artistic proposal. Sometimes ecological observation changes the very questions that seemed worth asking. Sometimes a project simply unfolds more slowly than originally anticipated because the place itself demands another rhythm. None of these situations can be planned in advance.They emerge through sustained attention.

Looking back, I realise that this quality has become increasingly characteristic of many practices that interest me most. The work no longer begins with a concept that is subsequently realised in a particular place. More often, the concept itself develops through the encounter. One could even say that the artistic proposal remains deliberately incomplete until it has entered into correspondence with the landscape in which it will take shape.

That word—correspondence—has become increasingly important to me.

Not because it names a theory, but because it describes a movement. Nothing simply determines anything else. The artist does not disappear into the landscape, nor does the landscape dictate the work. Instead, both gradually influence one another. The project changes through the place, while the place is experienced differently because of the project.

It is perhaps this reciprocity that now seems more significant than walking itself. Walking makes it possible. It is not necessarily what the work is about.

The Place of the Work

Looking again at the programme, another aspect came into focus. The individual projects remained remarkably distinct. They neither resembled one another nor converged towards a common aesthetic. Yet reading them together made it increasingly difficult to think of each work as entirely self-contained. The walk was clearly important.

It brought people together. It created the conditions for observation, conversation and encounter. But the work rarely seemed to begin or end there.

A story gathered during one walk quietly resurfaced in another project. An ecological observation became part of a later discussion. A local conversation redirected an artistic proposal. A participant carried an idea from one workshop into another. None of these movements appeared in the programme itself, yet they seemed to belong to the work just as much as the events from which they emerged. That is perhaps what first made me question the idea of the artwork as something clearly bounded.

Not because individual works had somehow disappeared. On the contrary, 22 Stops, Common Ground, Storylarking, Walking with Io or Microcosmos Walk each retain their own artistic language and internal coherence. Their identities remain intact. What changes is something around them. They continue to influence one another after they have apparently finished.

Looking back over the past twenty years, I realise that this has become increasingly characteristic of many walking-based practices. Festivals, residencies and encounters rarely conclude when their public programme ends. Conversations continue. Collaborations emerge unexpectedly. A method developed in one landscape quietly reappears in another. Sometimes the most significant consequence of a project only becomes visible years later.

This has little to do with documentation. Documentation records what happened. What interests me more is what continues happening afterwards.

Perhaps this is why I have become increasingly interested in the notion of a living archive. An archive usually preserves the past.

A living archive remains part of an unfolding process. It gathers documents, certainly, but also conversations, unfinished ideas, recurring questions and relationships that continue developing across different places and moments. It does not simply remember previous work. It allows previous work to continue participating in future work. Seen from this perspective, the projects gathered in Prosperpolder appear less as separate contributions than as different moments within a longer conversation.

Not because they pursue the same objective. Nor because they share the same methodology. Each retains its own questions. What they share is the willingness to remain unfinished.

Not unfinished in the sense of incomplete. Unfinished because the encounter with a place does not end when the walk is over. The work remains available to be altered by later conversations, another season, another landscape or another community.

Perhaps this also explains why returning has become so important within walking arts.

One does not return simply to repeat an earlier experience. One returns because the work itself has continued changing in one’s absence. The place has changed. The people have changed. The questions have changed. Returning is not repetition. It is another stage in the work.

Places That Answer Back

Reading through the programme once again, I noticed that the places themselves seemed unusually present.

That may sound like an odd observation. Walking has always been concerned with place. Yet what appears in Prosperpolder is not simply another collection of site-specific works. The landscape is never treated merely as the setting in which something happens. Again and again it interrupts, redirects and occasionally resists what the artists had imagined beforehand. The wetlands are an obvious example.

One arrives thinking about ecology and quickly discovers that ecology alone is not enough. The tidal landscape opens onto the history of land reclamation, agriculture, shipping, industrialisation, migration and border making. Every attempt to isolate one aspect of the place almost immediately encounters another. Water becomes history. History becomes economy. Ecology becomes memory. None of these layers can be understood independently for very long. 

Something similar happens in Doel. It is tempting to approach the village through a single narrative: disappearance, resistance, abandonment or resilience. Yet none of these descriptions quite holds. Every conversation complicates the previous one. Houses that appear empty are still inhabited. Industrial infrastructure exists alongside orchards and gardens. Stories of loss coexist with stories of attachment, humour and everyday life. The place continually refuses to become a symbol of only one thing.

Looking at the programme in this light, I began to realise that many of the projects share a similar discipline. Not a common methodology. A common patience.

Rather than arriving with a fully formed interpretation, they leave enough room for the place to redirect the work. Sometimes this happens through conversations with residents. Sometimes through repeated walks. Sometimes through unexpected encounters with birds, tides, vegetation or traces of earlier lives. The project gradually changes because the place itself proves more complex than the original proposal. This is not entirely new. Many site-specific practices have worked in this way for decades.

What seems different today is that the relationship itself increasingly becomes the work. The encounter with the place is no longer simply a preliminary stage before artistic production begins. It remains active throughout the process, continuing to influence decisions, methods and even the questions that appear worth asking.

Looking back, I realise that this has also changed my own understanding of artistic research.

For a long time I thought of research as something carried out in a place. The place provided material, context or inspiration. Increasingly I have come to think that the relationship works both ways. A landscape has its own tempo. It insists on certain questions while quietly dissolving others. Assumptions that seemed convincing elsewhere suddenly lose their certainty. Problems that had appeared peripheral become unavoidable. The work changes, not because the artist has become more knowledgeable, but because the place has gradually reorganised what demands attention. Perhaps this is why returning has become so important. Not because another visit simply adds more information.

Returning makes visible what could not be recognised before. The place has continued changing. So has the person returning to it. Every encounter therefore begins from a slightly different point, allowing another conversation to emerge.

It may be that places never really provide answers. What they do, more quietly, is alter the questions we find worth pursuing.

Perhaps this is also why I have increasingly found the notion of anima loci more useful than the familiar expression sense of place. A sense of place often describes how people experience a landscape. Anima loci suggests something more reciprocal. The place is not simply experienced.

It gradually reveals its own character through the relationships that develop within it. That character cannot be reduced to geography, heritage or ecology, although it includes all of these. It emerges from the continuous correspondence between human and more-than-human lives, memories and futures, material processes and imagination.

Walking, at its best, does not represent that correspondence. It participates in it.

Learning Landscapes

One thing that becomes increasingly visible after working in walking arts for many years is that projects have a tendency to outgrow themselves.

An encounter is organised around a particular moment. A residency occupies a few weeks. A funding programme begins and ends within a fixed period. Yet the most significant consequences often emerge elsewhere and much later. Collaborations continue. Questions remain unanswered. Methods quietly migrate into other contexts. Looking back, it becomes surprisingly difficult to identify where one project finishes and another begins.

Perhaps this is less a characteristic of walking arts than of the places in which they unfold. Landscapes have their own timescale.

They do not recognise project periods or funding cycles. Relationships with a place deepen through return, repetition and familiarity. What initially appears as an isolated event gradually becomes part of a longer conversation.

Reading the programme of Made of Walking Prosperpolder, I realised that many of the contributing practices had developed in exactly this way.

The Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa were never simply recurring gatherings. Each encounter left questions that resurfaced in the next. Workshops evolved into collaborations, collaborations into research, research into educational programmes, friendships and new artistic initiatives. Looking back, the individual editions become increasingly difficult to separate from the longer process they helped to sustain.

The same continuity can be recognised in The Walking Body in Guimarães. Each edition inherits questions from the previous one while opening others that remain unresolved. Practices mature not because they are repeated, but because they continue encountering different people, different circumstances and different ways of thinking.

Something similar happens in Nau Côclea’s Grand Tour, although through another rhythm. Here, long-distance walking gradually became inseparable from hospitality, shared meals, correspondence and the patient construction of temporary communities. The journey is no longer simply movement across territory. It becomes a way of remaining in conversation with it.

Migrating Voices, developed in Villefagnan, begins elsewhere again. Listening rather than walking occupies the foreground, yet the underlying movement is remarkably similar. Stories travel across languages and landscapes. What appears to be a project gradually becomes an ongoing practice of correspondence between remote places and the people who inhabit them.

These examples do not suggest a common methodology. If anything, they demonstrate how resistant walking arts remain to methodological uniformity. What they seem to share is another understanding of duration.

Practice changes when it is allowed to remain in dialogue with the same places over time.

Reading the Prosperpolder programme, I came to see it less as the next event in a sequence than as another chapter within a much longer conversation. Not because it repeats what happened in Prespa, Guimarães, Catalonia or Villefagnan. It could not. The Scheldt estuary asks different questions from the mountain lakes and borderlands of Prespa, the post-industrial site of Guimarães, the Mediterranean coastal wetlands and mountain ranges of Catalonia, or the agricultural mosaic landscapes of rural western France.

That difference is precisely what matters. Practices are not simply exchanged between places. They are translated.Every landscape receives them differently. Every community changes their direction. The work that leaves one place is never quite the same work that arrives somewhere else.

For that reason I have become increasingly hesitant about speaking of the transfer of methodologies. Methods can be described. Practices cannot simply be transferred. They are shaped by the relationships through which they develop. Perhaps this is one of the distinctive qualities of walking arts today.

Their strength does not lie in establishing a shared European methodology. It lies in making it possible for fundamentally different practices to remain in correspondence while continuing to belong to the landscapes that have formed them.

Institutions That Walk

Thinking through these developments, another question gradually emerged. If artistic practice changes over time, what kind of institutional structures allow that change to continue?

Walking arts have always existed in an interesting relationship with institutions. Festivals, biennales, museums, universities, archives and cultural organisations have all played an important role in making the field visible. They have created opportunities for artists to meet, works to circulate and ideas to be discussed. Without them, walking arts would probably never have developed into the diverse international field we know today.

At the same time, many of the most significant developments seem to happen between institutional moments rather than within them.

A residency officially ends, yet the collaboration continues. A publication closes one conversation while opening another. An encounterl disperses, but the questions raised there quietly reappear several years later in another landscape.

The work rarely follows the same rhythm as the institution that temporarily hosts it. This is not a criticism. It simply reflects the different temporalities at play.

Institutions often need beginnings and endings. They organise programmes, budgets, exhibitions, catalogues and reporting periods. Practices develop differently. They mature through repetition, return and correspondence. They move at the pace of relationships rather than calendars.

Looking back, I realise that many initiatives that have shaped walking arts over the past two decades have gradually evolved in this direction.

Made of Walking, The Walking Body, Prespa International Walking Arts Encounters, Grand Tour, Walking Arts and Relational Geographies, walk · listen · create and many others have never been only festivals, encounters, research projects or organisations. Over time they have become environments within which practices continue developing. Individual events matter, but they are less important than the continuity they make possible.

One thing that has often struck me over the years is how poorly project calendars correspond to the rhythm through which practices actually develop. A residency may officially last three weeks, yet the conversation that began there continues for years. A publication appears to conclude a piece of research, while in practice it often marks the beginning of another one. Landscapes are indifferent to these administrative rhythms. They continue changing, and the practices that remain in dialogue with them change as well.

This is one reason why I have become increasingly cautious about thinking of institutions primarily as places that preserve or represent a field. Preservation is obviously essential. Without archives, books, recordings and exhibitions much would simply disappear. But preservation alone cannot account for how many walking practices actually evolve. They continue through return, correspondence and repeated encounters with places that are themselves never quite the same.

Perhaps institutions are less like museums than gardens. Not because they should become informal or unstructured, but because their task is to care for conditions rather than outcomes. The distinction may seem slight.

It changes almost everything.

Thinking about the proposed International Centre for Research and Practice of Walking Arts, I therefore find myself less interested in the image of a central institution than in the possibility of creating continuity across fundamentally different places. The Scheldt wetland does not need to resemble Prespa. Guimarães should continue asking different questions from Catalonia. Villefagnan should not become another Prosperpolder. 

The value of an international centre, if it is to have one, will not lie in bringing different practices under a single framework. Walking arts have always developed differently from one place to another, and there is little reason to believe that this diversity should disappear. What matters is that practices developed in Prespa, Prosperpolder, Guimarães, Catalonia, Villefagnan or elsewhere remain available to one another—not as models to be reproduced, but as experiences, questions and methods that continue to change as they encounter new landscapes.

Looking back over the last two decades, this may be one of the less visible achievements of walking arts. Not the emergence of a unified field, but the gradual formation of a community that has learned to work across difference without attempting to erase it. Practices remain rooted in particular places, yet they continue to influence one another in ways that are often impossible to plan and sometimes difficult even to recognise.

If there is a challenge for the years ahead, it may simply be to create the conditions in which those conversations can continue. Not because they lead towards a single understanding of walking arts, but because they keep the field open to questions that none of us could have anticipated on our own.

Older Paths

While writing these pages, another thought kept returning. Perhaps some of the developments I have been describing are not entirely new.

Looking back, it is striking how often modern histories of walking begin with artistic movements of the twentieth century: surrealism, psychogeography, land art, performance, conceptual art or site-specific practice. Those genealogies remain indispensable, yet they tell only part of the story.

Walking has long served purposes that were never primarily artistic.

Pilgrimages, seasonal processions, transhumance, communal walks and countless Indigenous traditions all remind us that paths have often been ways of maintaining relationships rather than simply moving between places. A route was rarely just a line across the landscape. It connected memory, territory, ritual, livelihood and forms of knowledge that could only be sustained through repeated movement. Seen from this perspective, some contemporary walking practices begin to look slightly different.

Their significance may lie less in inventing new artistic forms than in recovering ways of working that modern culture had, for a time, placed in the background. The walk becomes important not because movement is aesthetically interesting in itself, but because it creates the circumstances in which relationships—with places, with others and with the more-than-human world—can be renewed. This is not a return to older traditions. The contexts are entirely different.

Digital technologies, artistic research, ecological thinking and contemporary forms of collaboration have transformed the questions walking now addresses. Yet they have also reopened questions that many older walking cultures never stopped asking: How is knowledge carried across generations? How does a landscape become familiar? What kinds of attention are required before a place begins to reveal itself?

Perhaps this also explains why walking continues to occupy such an unusual position within artistic research.

Its contribution is not simply that it produces another perspective on the world. It slows the process through which understanding develops. Scientific observation, artistic speculation, local memory, ecological knowledge and lived experience do not immediately become one another. Walking allows them to remain alongside one another long enough for unexpected connections to emerge. Looking back, I suspect that this may be more important than movement itself.

Perhaps this is why walking continues to occupy such a particular place within artistic research. It does not simply produce another way of looking at the world. It allows understanding to develop at the pace of continued encounters—with places, with others, and with questions that are never entirely exhausted. 

In that sense, the walk is rarely the end of the work.  More often, it is where the work begins again.