Walking as a Question
International Walking Arts Encounters/Conference. Thirty local walks and walkshops, twenty hybrid walkshops and fifteen audio walks (in Prespa and remote), twenty online events (walkshops, talks and panels) take place together with a three day conference at the Prespa Lake at the border of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania. The walks in Prespa intersect with walks of ten hubs in three continents, bringing walking together to a global level. All events are for free and open for everyone.
International Walking Arts Encounters/Conference (Prespa and remote)
July 4th to July 17th 2021, Prespa, Greece
What questions does walking pose? What questions can walking be used to explore? Who walks? Who chooses to walk? Who is forced to walk? Who can walk? Who cannot?
Thirty local walks and walkshops, twenty hybrid walkshops and fifteen audio walks (in Prespa and remote), twenty online events (walkshops, talks and panels) take place together with an exhibition and a three day conference in the village of Lemos at the Prespa Lake at the border of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania. The walks in Prespa intersect with walks of ten hubs in three continents, bringing walking together to a global level. This stands for a collective and collaborative celebration with more then a hundred walks around the planet in just ten days.
In raising walking as a question in itself, we invite critical and artistic engagement with the limits and possibilities of this most everyday of modalities.
Walking as a Question brings artists and researchers together,from more than 25 countries, joined in walking and discussing about questions of walking in a pandemic and post-pandemic perspective.
All events are for free and open for everyone with an interest in walking as an art. Free booking below.
Organized by the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts, University of Western Macedonia, Greece in collaboration with Made of Walking (VIII) / the Milena principle and walk · listen · create.
Telegraph (Prespa)
Telegraph (Prespa) is a video artwork created through a global participatory project during the International Walking Arts Encounters 2021, led by artists Christopher Kaczmarek and Deirdre Macleod. The project involved participants from Prespa, Greece, and worldwide exchanging walks and gestures via video and written prompts, resulting in a collective composition that connects local and remote spaces through shared walking experiences.
A Secular Pilgrim: Discussing the Efficacy of Pain and Suffering in Endurance Walking.
This Audio Paper documents a 160 km walk along the North Pilgrim’s Way in North Wales and The Two Saints Way between Cheshire and Lichfield, exploring the performative and embodied aspects of pilgrimage. The discussion focuses on the significance of the route itself, examining themes of meditation, repetition, pain, and the interaction with nature in both secular and sacred contexts.
Transeuntis Mundi – Web Derive 01
The Transeuntis Mundi Project uses immersive 360° walkscape recordings to create a transmedial archive of cultural heritage from diverse global sites, currently representing four countries across four continents. Led by Brazilian artist Candida Borges and Colombian researcher Gabriel Mario Vélez, the project integrates technology, nomadic practices, and artistic research to produce virtual reality works, audiovisual compositions, and performances reflecting millennial human passage.
Remote togetherness – reflections on Prespes and walking in situ
This paper builds on previous work from Prespes 2019, combining memories of walking the land with reflections on COVID-19’s impact on mobility. It explores themes of contested territory, deep listening, and ancestral connections through a performative audio format that integrates poetic, theoretical, and meditative elements.
Embodied presence, sonority and movement
This paper presents a methodology for walking workshops that explore the boundaries between the body and place through embodied presence and acoustic perception. It combines Deep Listening practices, sound art, and technology like piezoelectric microphones and sonification to investigate how walking and sound shape spatial awareness and sensory experience.
Political Soundwalks: listening to the political protests in Minsk, Belarus
Political Soundwalks is an audio archive of field recordings from protests, rallies, and cultural resistance events in Minsk during the 2020-2021 Belarusian political unrest. These recordings document how sound was used by protesters and state forces to contest urban and political space amid severe risks, including arrest and violence.
To commemorate, to remember, to imagine. Research notes on walking as a methodology in Québec
Commemorative walk, Memorial walk, Jane’s walk. These are all forms of walking that lead to the act of remembering. The idea of such a walk is to be able to discover a place in situ, and to grasp, in the effort of imagination summoned by the narrative, the events that took place in the past.
Performing memory in familiar places
This audio paper explores the author's repeated visits to their grandparents' villages near Prespes, using walking as a method to reconstruct family memories tied to historical migrations and trauma following the Greek Civil War. It considers the landscape as both a stimulus and archive of memory, blending personal narrative with cultural history through embodied spatial experience.
Ted The Mole in the Touristed City
Before listening to it, please choose a place in your city that has been recently modified for the worse, becoming less human friendly and more hostile in its spatial design and architecture: here, there should start your audio walking experience.
Gnowing me, Knowing You: Questions raised by walking the labyrinth in the maze
This post examines Helen Curry’s suggested reflective questions for labyrinth walkers and explores the labyrinth’s historical and symbolic significance as a spatial pattern fostering introspection and spiritual growth. It also discusses the contrast between labyrinth and maze navigation through the lens of hermeneutical theory, drawing on the author’s experience of the interactive installation Labyrinthe (2021) to argue for the productive interplay between these two forms in the learning process.
Linaceae
This short fiction explores the city of Brighton through the perspective of a neuroqueer person with PTSD, who perceives people and spaces as associative colours. The narrative is paired with a soundscape recorded during a walk around Brighton and Hove, with an accessible version available without sound for those with sensory sensitivities.
Walking Contención Island
This project documents a series of walks undertaken during the three Covid-19 lockdowns, creating an imaginary island called Contención Island through mapped routes, chance-determined shorelines, and sound recordings. It explores themes of embodied walking, the nature of borders, and the symbolic resonance of the island within urban and ecological contexts.
Left Foot, Right Foot
Yiannis Christidis and Efi Kyprianidou's experimental digital media project investigates how the repetitive bodily act of walking fosters mind-wandering and focused reasoning. Drawing on Charles Bukowski’s *White Dog*, the work explores walking's role in mental flow states that redirect attention outward or facilitate self-reflection, with implications supported by recent psychological and neuroscientific studies.
Soundwalk: “Aquí habita un río” (A river lives here)
This post explores the relationship between Panama City and its urban waterways through a multisensorial soundwalk along the six-kilometer Matasnillo River, the most polluted in the area. It offers an open letter reflecting on what the river reveals about the environment and human connection from its source to the ocean.
Where am I? A dislocated soundwalk
Where are we when we walk? Are we here, in this place that our feet move through, or are we there, lost in thoughts and memories of other times and places? This playful and dream-like soundwalk aims to throw these questions into confusion. It can be taken while in Prespa or anywhere else, including indoors.
Towards Nothing: Photographing Through the Lens of Zen Intuition
This website presents a portable participatory walking artwork accessible via any internet-connected mobile device, designed to be used while walking in any location worldwide. It emphasizes the process of photographing through a Zen-based intuition during walks, proposing a new exhibition method focused on in-the-moment, immersive interactions rather than static images.
Short trips, Walking under constraint
During the spring lockdown in France, the artist conducted daily walks limited to one hour within a 1 km radius, creating routes based on drawings like flowers and snails. This process resulted in an archive of 64 drawings, two reflective texts, and a series of engravings exploring the neighborhood and urban changes under strict outing restrictions.
Livin’ My Life Like It’s Golden (Gate Bridge) – the performance
This post documents a spiritually and artistically framed sense walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on July 4, 2021, marking the author's daughter’s 26th birthday and exploring themes of personal restoration and eco-spirituality. The performance uses walking as a vehicle for mother-daughter connection, self-exploration, and metaphorical resistance to worldly responsibilities.
over borders #2
This post introduces a curated PDF collection of walking scores—photographic, text, and graphic—that explore walking as a method to challenge the objectification of environments and anthropocentric perspectives on place. Curated by Jez Riley French and Pheobe Riley Law, the collection will be available for free download from 1st July 2021.

