Among the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington is a small collection of coloured envelopes once addressed to Walter Benjamin. They were sent to 10 rue Dombasle, Paris. Orange, yellow, pale blue. Today they are empty, but their surfaces are covered in tiny handwriting: corrected sentences, crossings-out, additions. Benjamin had reused the envelopes as writing paper for one of the early manuscripts of On the Concept of History, written in exile in 1940, shortly before his death in Portbou. Paper was scarce, time was short, and writing itself had become a matter of urgency. The envelopes travelled. Benjamin did not.

These modest objects are the starting point for Una desfilada de sobres buits (A Parade of Empty Envelopes), the project by Núria Rovira Terradas selected for the 2026 Walter Benjamin Creation Grant. On 26 September, Rovira will walk with a group from Banyuls-sur-Mer to Portbou, following the mountain route Benjamin took in September 1940, guided by Lisa Fittko as he fled the Gestapo. 

The walk is part of a project initiated by Nau Côclea, the contemporary art centre I direct, together with the Museu Memorial de l’Exili and the Walter Benjamin Chair. For fifteen years, we have invited contemporary artists to work along this same route, involving the walkers themselves whenever possible.

Although the details of the proposal cannot yet be revealed, and will remain a surprise until the day of the walk, we can say that the artist will rely on the complicity of the walkers and on those empty envelopes to approach Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. Walking and remembering will become part of the same action, involving making, unmaking and leaving room for whatever chance may bring. Memory will not appear as an archive in which the past remains intact, but as something that survives only by being reactivated in the present.

I have been closely involved in the route since its beginnings and over the years I have seen how its relationship with memory has gradually changed. When I invited Ada Vilaró and Pep Aymerich to intervene along the path in 2011, I had no idea that this Walter Benjamin walk would still be going fifteen years later. Their action appeared and disappeared across the mountain: two distant figures on the ridge, a fragile body carrying another among the last vineyards of Banyuls, paper boats at the pass, then the fog. Since that first experience, very different artists have worked with Benjamin’s writing and memory through theatre, performance, radio, objects, oral transmission, sound, humour and minimal gestures. The one thing that has not changed is the path, which, of course, is not neutral. We are now preparing a book bringing together all these creative experiences, to be published this autumn.

The route crosses a border that generations of people have travelled in both directions while fleeing war, dictatorship and persecution. In 1939, Spanish Republicans crossed north during the Retirada. Barely a year later, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe were trying to cross south. Today we walk the same route wearing good shoes and carrying food in our backpacks, but that does not turn the mountain into neutral territory. Borders continue to classify people according to passports, origins and political decisions.

During the pandemic, when France closed many of the smaller crossings through the Pyrenees, this became tangible once again. In 2020, while preparing an artistic intervention specifically about exile, a group was stopped by French police at the border. The officers were armed. They asked to see the identity papers only of the two African participants and of another walker who was wearing a Palestinian scarf. It was difficult to imagine a more uncomfortably precise illustration of what the work itself was trying to address.

Perhaps this is why Benjamin’s work has lent itself so well to this kind of approach. The route has never tried to illustrate his thought literally. Instead, artists have been invited to use it, take it apart, connect it with other stories and put some of its fragments back into circulation. Over the years, the project has shifted from the still vivid memory of the wars that marked Cerbère, Banyuls and Portbou towards an increasingly urgent awareness of the present: migration, exile, nationalism, the proliferation of borders, and the mechanisms through which history decides who will be remembered and who will disappear from the story.

There is also something that happens specifically when we walk. The conventional relationship between artist and walkers is altered. Nobody sits down and waits for the work to begin. Everyone must climb the same mountain. Fatigue, weather, conversation, silence and whatever unforeseen event occurs become part of the piece. The walker is no longer exactly a spectator, but someone who intervenes, however minimally, in what takes place. Walking together produces a temporary community in which the work cannot be completely separated from the shared experience.

In this sense, the route comes surprisingly close to Benjamin’s figure of the “author as producer”: not simply someone who makes works for others to consume, but someone capable of transforming the conditions of production and creating situations in which others can act. Walking together is not the only way to do this, but it is a particularly simple and radical one. It requires neither technology nor special skills. It is an individual action that can be performed collectively and that, in being shared, produces an ephemeral community, articulated through the path, time and common effort.

Núria Rovira’s envelopes will make one final journey, symbolically retracing the extraordinary route taken by Benjamin’s papers after his death. Hannah Arendt carried the manuscript into exile and read passages from it during the voyage to the United States. In 2026, the envelopes will travel again, but this time empty. The words will have disappeared, but perhaps they will survive somewhere else: transformed, imperfectly remembered, lodged for a while in the memories of those who walked with them.

There is something profoundly Benjaminian in this reversal. The document disappears, but something is transmitted. The object survives, but the writing escapes. And once again, crossing first a mountain and then an ocean, words find their own way across the border.

We invite you to cross the border with Núria Rovira’s correspondence.

About the artist

Núria Rovira Terradas is an artist from Valls working between Catalonia and England. Her practice centres on sound and performative research and on activating spaces through listening, movement and participation. She is particularly interested in liminal places, ruins and spaces in transformation, and in the relationships between landscape, memory and ecology. She studied Fine Art at Lancaster University and completed an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2024. She has developed projects and residencies with the Lancaster Data Science Institute, Signal Film & Media, Fundación Botín and Eufònic, among others.

About the walk

The Walter Benjamin Route will take place this year on 26 September 2026, following the mountain path from Banyuls-sur-Mer to Portbou associated with Walter Benjamin’s final journey in 1940. The walk forms part of the annual Walter Benjamin Colloquium and is organised in connection with the Walter Benjamin Creation Grant, with the participation of the Museu Memorial de l’Exili (MUME), theWalter Benjamin Chair, Nau Côcleaand Portbou Town Council. Participation is free of charge, but advance registration is required. Registration will be available through the Museu Memorial de l’Exili website.