WAC25: Walking Home / Walking in Transition
The International Prespa Walking Arts Encounters 2025 (WAC 25) will be titled Walking Home / Walking in Transition. We invite artists, writers and other creative practitioners, critics, and researchers to gather in Prespa, Greece in summer 2025. Anyone wishing to participate as an attendee is also welcome.
News
Attendees
Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) is an artistic cooperation project, co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe, starting in January 2024 for four years. With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, backed up by an online counterpart in the format of a digital platform for walking arts.
WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers already practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, and having met at the significant previous walking arts events and encounters in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and during online activities at walk · listen · create.
We acknowledge the support of the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant program in the framework of the European project WALC (Walking Arts and Local Community).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
On WLC, this conference is maintained by: Geert Vermeire, Annemarie Lopez
A Line to Cross, A Voice to Follow
A 17m walk across a real border trace (Albania-Greece). A synthetic voice reads GPS coordinates. The challenge: cross a red line in perfect sync with the voice calling out the border point. A fragile choreography of precision.
7 + 7 PLACES #3 (towards WAC 27)
The Third Online Meeting for the 7 + 7 Places project will take place on Wednesday, February 11th2026, 20:00 EET (19:00 CET). During the two previous meetings we touched upon various approaches to the Place of Prespes and discussed six different walkshops that unfolded in Prespes as part of the International Encounters 2025 (WAC). In
+2 The Blue Parade (what the body knows)
The Blue Parade is a participatory walking artwork created by Stefaan van Biesen and Annemie Mestdagh for the “Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies” meeting in Prespes, Greece. The piece consists of a portable, ultramarine-blue textile structure carried collectively through the landscape as a “nomadic library.” Participants walk together, collect small objects from the environment, and place them in attached PET bottles, creating a mobile archive of local memory and identity. The act of carrying the canvas fosters awareness, cooperation, and a temporary community, turning the walk into a sensory, reflective ritual that highlights embodied knowledge, shared experience, and themes of journey and displacement.
Cinemawalking: Tracking Shots are a Question of Morality
The WAP Walkshop in Prespa, Greece (June 7, 2025) explored the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of movement through landscape using the cinematic tracking shot as a guide. Participants examined how walking through space—particularly unfamiliar terrain—shapes perspective, time, and moral responsibility, discussing examples from Godard, Sachs, Hopinka, and others. They then created their own “cinemawalks” with cameras and smartphones, experimenting with movement, framing, and duration to reveal partial views and shifting temporalities. The workshop interrogated how art mediates place, perception, and ethical engagement.
WALC Confluence 9 – Prespa Reflections – walking home, walking in transition and beyond
We are keen to hear from attendees and participants of this year’s Prespa Encounter – were you there? What were your highlights and how would you like the Encounter to evolve? If you have been to a previous Encounter in Prespa, but were unlucky enough not to be there earlier this month, we would still like to hear about the highlights and memories you have too.
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Walking Home / Walking in Transition – Open Call Encounters Prespa
Walking Home / Walking in Transition sets the theme for the next International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa (WAC 25). This WALC Café offers a closer look at what you can expect in July 2025 and zooms in on its themes, context, place, the call criteria and what is offered to interested participants. The Prespa
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Water, Earth, and Peace: Coming home to where we come from
Walking in transitional, interstitial spaces where Water and Earth meet is special. From walking-with and sensing the presence of rock and water bodies, on the banks of Lake Prespa (Greece) or the River Maas (Holland), it emerges to feel Water as home and relational peace quality, which inspires humans to create. To co-create and find forms for joint walking, artistic work, and ecosomatic practice, as ways of storytelling with Earth & Water.
• Drawing Cartographies of Perception
This walkshop explores the personal and subjective nature of navigation and cartography and the diverse ways people perceive and move through space, using the acts of walking and drawing as primary methods of investigation.
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(In)Audible Bodies
The artistic research project (In)Audible Bodies of Irini Kalogeopoulou is a soundwalk that took place in Psarades (WAC 25) investigating the concept of silence through an embodied listening and relational experience.
Babylon Revisited
Participants, each speaking only their mother tongue, engaged in a walk and discussion without a shared language or set topic, creating a dynamic, horizontal process of interaction. The experience emphasized expression over comprehension, producing a multilingual soundscape. Some other themes explored included communication beyond understanding, identity, isolation, reflection and connection, disorientation, and the power of being present and included.
I AM A HUMAN SEISMOGRAPH
Presented at WAC 25, I AM A HUMAN SEISMOGRAPH encouraged Walkshop participants to develop their own codes and systems to generate walking drawings that document and celebrate sensorial attentiveness and presence in the world.
• Weather Walk
In October 2024, I spent four weeks as an artist in residence in rural Switzerland. I faced the weather on the same route (almost) every day. Based on the residency’s explorations I wrote a script to host a Weather Walk (Zurich/Psarades).
• Walking with Children
A program within WALC25, curated by Clare Qualmann, Clementine Butler-Gallie & Athanasia Tziona. It created playful, intergenerational encounters with children, connecting local communities and affirming children as equal participants in walking art.
Prespa’s Butterflies: A Cardio-Cartography of the Threshold for WAC25
A 55km, 2-stage walk from Florina to Prespa. Using a butterfly sticker to capture the landscape's trace and a sensor for my heart's rhythm, the walk's cost is measured in heartbeats, not kilometers. A cardio-cartography of a symbolic return.