‘Walkability’ is often described through what can be counted: pavement width, intersection density, distance to public transport, traffic speed, shade, lighting, gradient, and the distribution of amenities. Useful and practical as attempts at objectivity; they describe material conditions that can make the difference between an ordinary journey and an impossible one. Yet they do not quite fully describe what the related walk will be in practice, or what makes a place available to the human body.

Over the last few months, I’ve spent time to, through manual intervention and automation, structurally organise our archives, since rebranded the Museum of Walking. It’s the largest archive of walking art, with thousands of articles, and over 1400 walking pieces. With the archive taking proper shape, I figured it would be interesting to see whether it also allows us to draw some conclusions by cross referencing and analysing some of its content.
I wanted to explicitly not focus on North America or Europe, and chose pieces connected to Latin America and the Caribbean, an area relatively underrepresented in our archives, and on which, in connection to walking art, less analytical material is available. This also could then perhaps tie in with the upcoming WALK21 Regional Dialogue in Belo Horizonte, hence my connecting this analysis with the concept of walkability.

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A street can satisfy a technical checklist and still be hostile. A route can be physically continuous while carrying a history of expulsion. A public square can be open by law but unsafe at certain times for some of its users. A map can show connections while concealing the effort, fear, waiting, or surveillance involved in traversing its space. Conversely, a damaged, noisy or polluted place might become legible through practices of attention and dissection, revealing relations which standard audits are not designed to register.

This is where ‘walking art’ can become useful. Not quite, perhaps, to extend the concept of walkability, but to broaden the discussion into something more inclusive. Perhaps in a direction of ‘usability’, but not so much in a utilitarian sense, more so in an emotional, experiential context.
Walking art can stage a condition so that it is felt, alter a route so that an implicit assumption becomes visible, or bring several bodies into relation with each other, such that public space briefly behaves otherwise. Walking art can notice not only whether passage is possible, but what passage asks of a person, what histories accompany it, and whose movement is treated as acceptable, or ‘normal’.

This proposition emerged from a provisional analysis of 76 pieces in the walk · listen · create archive that were connected, through the archive’s new geo_location taxonomy, to Latin America and the Caribbean.

We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that the archive is a neutral window onto the field of walking art. The archive is not comprehensive, and one of the places where walking works continue after the event, through descriptions, images, recordings and links, allowing them to be encountered, consumed, compared, and circulated. And so, what is in the archive is the consequence of a combination of factors, not in the least the nature of the network that make up the archive’s contributors, as well as wether the work in question allowed itself to be neatly documented.
Yet, notwithstanding this subjectivity, we can try to draw some meaningful interpretations. And so, this analysis asks two related questions: what do the works notice through walking, and what can an archive notice through the records that remain?

Interpreting themes

The 76 pieces were analysed based on their available descriptions. Each was assigned one or more interpretive themes, when the description gave sufficient support. These themes are broader than the assigned collections these pieces might also be assigned to, and they are not orthogonal to each other. That is to say, a piece can involve ‘listening’, ‘memory’, and ‘power’ at the same time, as these are not genres or mutually exclusive classifications.

Thus, the themes were developed through subjective analysis, hence interpretive, not supplied by the artists, and a different reader, discussions with creators or participants, or when additional individual pieces become available, these interpretations might need to change. The counts indicate recurrence within this particular collection of walking pieces. They do not carry a suggestion of individual artistic importance, social impact, or a prevalence of a particular tendency across Latin American and Caribbean walking art as a whole.

We can’t be surprised by the frequency of ‘mapping’ in an archive of walking practices, and we also can’t really be surprised that the mapping is not conventional; the associated pieces rarely use the map merely to find the shortest route. Maps are broken, walked against, made audible, withheld, stretched across time or turned into evidence.
The themes of ‘power’ and ‘archive’ follow closely. This perhaps suggests that routes in the corpus are often understood as political and historical constructions, not simply as neutral geometry.

Somewhat more surprisingly is the relative absence of pieces connected to the topic of ‘care’, though it would require a deeper investigation as to why this might be the case. Is this typical for the archive as a whole? Do other datasets exist that can point to different relative occurrence of this, and other, topics?

Either way, the archive can help broaden a walkability discussion, but it cannot be made to speak comprehensively about experiences it records only sparsely.

The walker as an instrument

An emerging theme, not explicitly tied to any of identified topics, is how several works do more than send an artist or participant out to observe a place; they modify the walker.
A rule, object, direction or bodily condition changes how movement is possible, turning the body into an instrument for detecting forces that ordinarily go unobserved.

In Marcius Galan’s Cadarço (Shoe Lace), a machine in a São Paulo gallery continuously produces a shoelace tied to the artist’s shoe. Galan can move only as quickly as the machine supplies more line. Walking, commonly imagined as an expression of autonomy, becomes dependent on mechanical production. The work makes cadence political: the route is improvised, but its pace is governed elsewhere. Constraint, time, chance and power converge in a simple tether.

Oeste ou até aonde o sol pode alcançar applies a different external order. Equipped with a compass, the performer attempts to cross the city from east to west, reproducing the path of the sun. Trees, walls and busy streets repeatedly interrupt the virtual line. The straight route is revealed as an abstraction that the city does not obey. Rather than treating each interruption as a defect to be removed from the account, the work makes interruption the account. It is a bodily test of the difference between mapped direction and traversable space.

The script for Olho Cerrado is more unsettling. Blindfolded in the Cerrado, the performer walks until they believe they have reached a clearing, taking a photograph whenever fear is felt. Vision returns only for the attempt to find the way back.
The camera does not document what was seen. It records moments when a feeling crossed a certain threshold. Fear becomes the sensor, although neither stable nor universal. The work therefore complicates the idea of a perception-based indicator. Subjective experience can disclose a condition, but it cannot be detached from the particular body producing it.

In Flávio de Carvalho’s Experiência No 2, the altered condition is social. Carvalho walked against a Corpus Christi procession in São Paulo while refusing to remove his hat. The crowd’s reaction escalated from astonishment to indignation, physical pressure and the threat of violence. The route was physically walkable, but what made passage dangerous was dissent from the ritual order governing the bodies Carvalho encountered.
The work exposes unwalkability as something a public can produce collectively, through norms that decide which gestures and directions are tolerable.

Artur Barrio’s 4 dias 4 noites pushes modification into duration. Over four days and nights of wandering in Rio de Janeiro, exhaustion, hunger and the instability of memory altered both perception and the possibility of later narration. The walk survives through recollection and absence as much as through conventional documentation. It reminds us that a body does not move through a city with constant capacity. Energy, sleep, hunger and time continuously change what a route is.

Taken together, these works push for an interpretive shift. Walking art does not simply collect impressions about a city. It constructs situations in which hidden dependencies become perceptible. The walker is not an objective observer. The walker is a variable, and also the variable through which the system becomes legible.

Counter-maps and the city beneath the diagram

The topic of ‘mapping’ was connected to 41 of the 76 records, more than any other. Yet much of this activity is better understood as counter-mapping. It questions what a map selects, what it omits and how its apparently stable lines relate to lived movement.

Jorge Macchi, María Negroni and Edgardo Rudnitzky’s Buenos Aires Tour begins with a pane of glass smashed over a city map. Its cracks produce eight routes, along which 46 locations were selected. Texts, field recordings and found objects then form an idiosyncratic guide to Buenos Aires in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. Chance does not remove history from the route. It disrupts the usual hierarchy of what counts as a destination, allowing the historically significant and the apparently trivial to occupy the same itinerary.

Ghost Walker reactivates an erased street by walking it again. Here the route is not a new line imposed on the city but a line recovered from disappearance. The body functions as a temporary inscription, making an absent urban form sensible in the present. Here, the ‘memory’ and ‘mapping’ meet, as the street can no longer be located only through what is physically there.

In Feliz Aniversário (Happy Birthday), streets in Rio de Janeiro named after calendar dates were visited on those dates throughout 1999. The result is both a map and a calendar, a year-long drawing made from repeated expeditions. A street name that usually appears as static municipal data becomes an instruction. Urban nomenclature produces a temporal geography, and documentation with a daily newspaper makes the walk into evidence of time as well as place.

The Museum of Yesterday used a location-based app to connect about 160 stories to Rio’s old port. Content can be accessed only by approaching its locations, while the in-app map cannot be freely zoomed or scrolled. Pointers indicate nearby material, but participants must find their own way. The interface does not remove uncertainty from navigation. It uses uncertainty to make the port’s history something encountered through situated effort. The map becomes less a command surface and more a partial nudge.

Walking times between São Paulo metro stations alters the official transit diagram by replacing the usual abstraction with walking times between adjacent stations. The familiar network suddenly registers metropolitan scale through the body. The longest crossing in the modified map would take more than 23 hours without stopping. What looks compact as a diagram becomes immense as duration. This is a modest intervention, but it shows how a change in representational unit can expose a political geography of service, distance and effort.

The counter-map, in these pieces, is not exactly a more accurate picture in the conventional sense. Instead, they reframe the context and, through that, the participants’ take on reality; Their value lies in making the map answerable to body and a history. They do not ask where a line goes, but who can follow it, under what conditions, and what becomes visible when efficiency is no longer the primary principle.

Unwalkability is produced by power

The theme of ‘power’ appeared with 36 pieces, often in combination with ‘constraint’, ‘memory’, ‘border’ or ‘archive’. As such, this might be the clearest challenge this selection of pieces offers to conventional accounts of walkability. A route is not made difficult only by a missing pavement or dangerous crossing. It can be made difficult by surveillance, bureaucracy, colonial history, state violence, religious conformity, or the uneven distribution of safety.

Regina José Galindo’s Who Can Erase The Traces? used a repeated sequence of steps between Guatemala’s Congress and National Palace. The artist dipped her feet in a basin of human blood, walked, then renewed the footprints. Performed in protest against the presidential candidacy of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the action turned an institutional route into an accumulating accusation. The footprints were both bodily trace and political evidence. Walking did not represent violence, reenacted at a distance. It made the civic center carry a visible remainder of it.

In Land Mark (Foot Prints), activists walking on land formerly occupied by the United States Navy in Vieques stamped protest slogans into the ground. The mark disappears, but documentation permits the action to circulate. The work links land, military occupation, collective movement and the archive. It also shows why ephemerality is not the opposite of political effect. A temporary footprint can assert a claim precisely through the mismatch between a vulnerable body and a durable territorial regime.

Working the Line follows the monuments marking the United States-Mexico border west of the Rio Grande. The description details fencing, vehicle barriers, tire drags, seismic sensors and expanded patrol capacity. Here, walking is both the artist’s method and an activity under constant detection. The border is not a line one simply reaches. It is a distributed intervention that interprets footprints, movement and presence. Mapping the obelisks therefore also maps the technologies and institutions that decide which walking counts as passage and which counts as evidence of intrusion.

Paulo Bruscky’s PostAção turns bureaucracy into a public procession. Bruscky and others carried an oversized envelope through Recife, in the Brazilian northeast, to the central Post Office, where it was rejected for exceeding postal regulations. The envelope’s movement between bookstore, street and state institution makes the administrative limit visible as performance.
Walking did not evade the rules; It enlarges the subject until the rule had to announce itself.

Los Pasos de Mama Killa offers a different relation between movement and power. Developed through workshops and public sound walks in Cochabamba and Mexico City, the project used listening, counter-mapping and collective night walking to explore public space with women and LGBTQ+ participants. Routes were shaped from situated experiences rather than imposed in advance. Safety was approached not as a fixed property of a street but as something negotiated through trust, co-authorship and collective presence. This leans into the theme of ‘care’, identifying practices that do more than diagnose unequal access; they can build temporary conditions for being present together.

These examples cover a broad range of subjects; State terror in Guatemala, military occupation in Vieques, border surveillance, postal bureaucracy and gendered night-time safety are not exactly equivalent. The theme of ‘power’ still paints with a broad brush. But, they all ask where authority enters a walk and how it is sensed, contested or redistributed.

Listening as a perception-based indicator

Twenty-seven works were connected with the theme of ‘listening’. In them, sound is rarely just atmosphere. It becomes a means of detecting pace, ecological relation, historical absence and urban change. Listening operates as a qualitative indicator, one that registers what a visual survey or map may leave silent.

Escuchar hacia adentro begins with the soundscape of Rosario, in Argentina: vehicles and machines dominate, while birds, human voices and other living sounds struggle to be heard. The pandemic interruption altered that hierarchy, allowing previously masked sounds and forms of inward attention to emerge. The work connects noise pollution to hyperactivity, stress and lack of time. It asks what urban sound suppresses and what an abrupt silence makes available.

In Maps for listening, birdsong in Mar del Plata’s La Perla area defines sound territories. Trees and urban structures become points where particular songs concentrate. The foldable map resembles a tourist guide, but its landmarks are habitats and aural events. Its instructions, like “Listen. Here, birds sing,” change what qualifies as local information. The resulting recordings also form a sound heritage archive, connecting listening to ecology, mapping and preservation.

Sons do Porto responds to the accelerated transformation of Rio de Janeiro’s port since 2010. Rather than documenting redevelopment only through buildings and land use, it follows how sound creates territories and is reshaped by cultural, social and physical change. This is a valuable proposition for urban research: sound can provide evidence of who is present, what activities remain possible and how a place’s use is changing before those changes are fully legible in official data.

The soundwalk Aquí habita un río follows Panama City’s six-kilometer Matasnillo River from its source to the ocean. Described as the city’s most polluted river, it is addressed as a body carrying knowledge about human and non-human relations. The walk asks what the river says about the city. Listening, here, is not limited to recording audible water. It is an ethical posture that treats a damaged river as an interlocutor rather than infrastructure or scenery.

Sounds of Teotihuacan works with another kind of silence. The archaeological site is approached as a sonic environment whose everyday noise and music have long disappeared. Recordings, reconstructed instruments and musical improvisations do not claim to restore that environment intact. They give form to the fact of its absence. The project expands heritage interpretation from visible monument to imagined and researched acoustic life.

Across these pieces, ‘listening’ does not facilitate or define a standardised template for interaction across dispersed locations. Its strength lies in providing insight into the built environment that rests on a less common mode of interaction. It notices masking, rhythm, habitat, disappearance and change. For walkability practice, such listening can complement technical measures by revealing how a place is inhabited and what forms of life its dominant soundscape permits or overwhelms.

Collective movement makes a public

Twenty-two pieces were associated with ‘collectivity’. Here, the important question is not merely whether several people walked together, but whether coordinated movement changed authorship, relation, or the temporary organization of public space.

Lygia Pape’s Divisor places participants’ heads through openings in a vast sheet of fabric. Individual bodies move within one unstable surface, negotiating direction without a single controlling figure.
Created under Brazil’s military regime, the work can be read as architecture in motion and as a rehearsal of collective agency. Agreement is never complete, but movement remains possible through continual adjustment.

In nós aqui, entre o céu e a terra, chairs associated with public institutions are carried, exchanged and repositioned through collective movement. The familiar object of sitting and authority becomes mobile. The work draws attention to how institutions occupy space while also making their furniture available to another choreography.

Lucia Monge’s Plantón Móvil is an annual participatory walking forest that leads to the creation of public green areas. Participants lend plants their mobility, while borrowing something of the plants’ slowness. Monge insists that this is not simply a group carrying plants. For the duration of the action, the group is the forest. Collective walking becomes a form of interspecies solidarity and an argument about who the city’s streets belong to.

Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains assembled 500 volunteers to shift a dune outside Lima by about four inches. The disproportion between maximum effort and minimal result was conceived in the political turbulence at the end of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship. The physical displacement was almost immediately invisible. What persisted was the collective labor, the story and its documentation.
Here a public is produced through coordinated effort whose political meaning exceeds its measurable spatial result.

These works complicate the idea of participation as attendance. A collective walk can distribute control, materialize solidarity, mobilize institutional objects or create an allegory through shared labor. It can also produce friction and exclusion, as Experiência No 2 makes clear. Collectivity is not automatically emancipatory. The theme of collectivity marks a field of negotiation: who sets the rhythm, who bears the risk, whose difference can be accommodated and what kind of public emerges from moving together.

The record is part of the work

The theme of ‘archive’ was prominent with 35 pieces, though we have to acknowledge that, by design, pieces for which the concept of archiving is integral, are more likely to appear in, well, an archive. After all, only work that leaves some kind of record can enter an archive.
Still, many pieces make that fact thematically important. And, documentation and archiving can change how the work continues.

I Went, predating Strava art by decades, converts everyday movement into a concise record while withholding the experience that produced it. The map declares where the artist went, but not what occurred there. It demonstrates both the authority and poverty of documentation. A route can be preserved with precision while the walk’s social, sensory and emotional content remains inaccessible.

In Paulo Nazareth’s Notícias da América (News from America), the long journey from Minas Gerais toward the United States accumulates territorial and bodily traces. The refusal to wash the dust from the feet until reaching the destination makes the body itself a moving surface of contact. Borders are not only crossed on a map. They gather materially, through dirt, duration, encounters and the racialized histories attached to movement through the Americas.

The photographs of the aforementioned Land Mark, the newspaper evidence in Feliz Aniversário, the remembered fragments of 4 dias 4 noites and the circulated images and stories of When Faith Moves Mountains show different relations between event and residue, even if none can retrieve the walk intact.
Documentation selects, sequences and translates. It may give an ephemeral action political reach, but it can also smooth away uncertainty or turn a collective process into a single iconic image.

This hybrid purpose is relevant to walk · listen · create; The archive does not stand outside ephemerality as its opposite. It is one of the forms through which ephemerality can take shape, after the event. By placing works in relation, it supports continuity, visibility and circulation within the field.
At the same time, the archive’s taxonomies and descriptions influence what can be found and what comparisons can become possible. The present analysis is therefore also an analysis of archival decisions, some intended, some subjective, some accidental. This collection of 76 walking pieces came into view because geographic metadata connected these works. Other relevant works that do reside in the archive may remain outside the set because their locations have not yet been catalogued, because a transregional work is difficult to place, or because its description does not disclose enough to support a particular theme. And that’s not even considering the surely vast amount of work that is not contained in the archive from which these were drawn.

What this archive does not (yet) notice

So, although we have been able to construct an interesting overview and build something of a hypotheses, we should not pretend that these pieces, together, can represent a region as large as Latin America and the Caribbean. Sixty-three of the 76 pieces are connected to Brazil, Mexico or Argentina. Brazil alone accounts for 38. Colombia, Cuba and Peru have two each, while several countries appear only once.
The network, and its curators, are likely biased, intentional or not.

Interestingly, the set also spans just short of a century. Historical works by Flávio de Carvalho, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica and other canonical figures sit beside recent soundwalks, digital platforms, workshops and participatory projects. It’s of course fascinating to be able to dive into the history of, and precursor to, modern day walking art. However, we also have to understand that work that is considered historically valuable is more likely to be well documented, compared to contemporary, local, or more informal work.

Then, particularly in today’s hyperconnected world, artistic interventions, like everything else, are more and more likely to be transregional, or simply international; A piece may draw on a Mexican sounds while taking place elsewhere, compare photography in Colombia with work from another region, or connect Brazil to sites in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America.
So, each individual piece cannot be expected to neatly belong to a single national container. Instead, geography as an indicator can refer to location, subject, origin, itinerary, source, or collaboration.

Perhaps also as a consequence of unintended bias, for a discussion of walkability, the identified collection of walking art provides limited material on ‘disability’, ‘caregiving’, and ‘participant outcomes’. We can find the themes like ‘fear’, ‘fatigue’, ‘safety’, and ‘bodily constraint’, but not quite with the breadth needed to claim that this archive captures the full range of differentiated mobility.
A worthwhile next stage in building the walk · listen · create archive could be to pursue the inclusion of work that fits more closely with the theme of ‘care’.

What walking art contributes

As an attempt at an overall conclusion, we can identify that for the current collection of pieces in the walk · listen · create archive that are connected to Latin America and the Caribbean, walking art provides a venue to expand the concept of walkability beyond physical infrastructure. It does so through at least four recurrent types of adjustments.

First, it alters the terms of movement. A tether, compass, blindfold, procession or long duration changes what the body can detect. Second, it reconfigures representation. Broken maps, absent streets, calendar routes, limited interfaces and walking-time diagrams make spatial systems answerable to lived effort. Third, it reveals that access is governed. Surveillance, ritual conformity, bureaucracy, colonial memory, gender and state violence enter the route and distribute risk unevenly. Fourth, it creates relations through attention and assembly. Listening discloses ecological and historical conditions, while collective movement can rehearse forms of public life based on negotiation, solidarity and shared authorship.

These adjustments don’t fit well as metrics for urban planners to improve the built environment, and should not be reduced to a kind of decorative, or interpretive, arts component within urban policy. Each of these pieces looks at the built environment within a context that cannot easily be captured by objective analysis of existing infrastructure or flows of information; their value is more diagnostic and propositional.
A technical audit can identify whether a pavement exists. A walking piece may reveal the social rule that makes someone hesitate to use it, or the buried river beneath it, the institution that controls its direction, the memory erased by its redevelopment, or the collective practice through which it can be inhabited differently.

The identified themes are provisional, because, in a way, they are arbitrary, but also because the archive is alive. New pieces, corrected locations, and fuller descriptions will change the collection, and perhaps its conclusions. Some artists and participants will disagree with the interpretations, or will want to refine the views offered here.
This only underscores the interpretive nature of this exercise in analysis, which can be considered an instrument for shared research: works are compared without fixing them.

For most walking artists it’s obvious, but walking art does not typically notice an alternative city hidden behind the measurable one. Walking artists are well positioned to take the measurable city, and investigate how it is encountered by bodies, memories, histories and other forms of life. They consistently underscore that what can be a seemingly innocuous route is never only a line between two points. It is always a negotiated field of permission, attention and relation, where only the extent of negotiation differs.
So, any account of walkability that aims to understand how urban space can actually be inhabited needs to notice, and incorporate, that too.

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Note on method used

This article is based on a snapshot of 76 walking pieces from the walk · listen · create archive, carrying geo_location taxonomy connections to Latin America and the Caribbean, reviewed in August 2026. Themes were assigned from the descriptions available, and were allowed to overlap. Counts describe this bounded archival set only.