The article right underneath Simon Pope’s “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,” was Hilary Ramsden’s “Walking & Talking: Making Strange Encounters Within the Familiar,” which seems to be an example of the kind of transformative walking projects Pope is calling for at the end of his essay—walking that would transform participants through encounters with other people. Indeed, Ramsden begins with an account from a participant in a research project, A Walk around the Block, in which she was asked to talk to a stranger (54). “This participatory, practice-led arts research explored whether playful interventions within habitual walks could provoke new understandings of the ways in which we perceive and relate to our neighbourhood and neighbours and, amongst other things,” Ramsden writes, “potentially create opportunities for unfamiliar encounters and encounters with strangers leading to a heightened openness to communication and dialogue” (54-55). Walking in one’s neighbourhood—which Ramsden sees as mundane and possibly even boring—“would become a laboratory for experimentation with opportunities for a range of different encounters and a means to create a conduit between intuitive, embodied micro and vernacular knowledges of the quotidian habits of our life worlds,” on the one hand, and on the other, “more macro intellectually based formal knowledges” (55). For Ramsden, “[t]his conduit or liminal space of not-knowing, is a time for questioning, curiosity and openness to hitherto unencountered feelings, thoughts and provocations which might lead to increased communication and dialogue with others, unknown or not” (55).
The autobiographical background of this project included experiences—living in council estates, trying to understand the genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda, and later living in Detroit—which led Ramsden “to question notions of neighbourhood cohesion, understanding and tolerance,” which encouraged her to explore those ideas “through play and improvised movement interventions” (55). Her research questions for this project were:
Can intentional acts of walking be a different, and more embodied way of engaging people in dialogue in order to provoke changes in attitudes and assumptions? Can playful interventions within a habitual walking routine provoke changes in attitudes to and perceptions of neighbourhood and neighbours that might lead to increased communication and dialogue? (56)
She wanted to know “whether a resistance to the unfamiliar and the strange might be shifted or ‘nudged’ through physical interruptions of habitual patterns to create an openness to increased communication and dialogue between people of diverse backgrounds and life worlds, through a communal process of walking together,” although the initial work focused on individuals rather than groups, because of the complexity of organizing groups of people to walk together more than once, and because she thought before group walks could be used to increase communication and dialogue, individuals should already have had “an experience of the potential of playful walking interventions to heighten their awareness and openness” (56).
She describes her methodology as a “meshwork” that drew on the geography of place, conceptual arts practices, and qualitative methods of inquiry (56). In particular, Ramsden used the work of David Seamon, Francis Augoyard, Situationist walking practices, clowning techniques, and “contemporary theorists and practitioners concerned with the city” (56). She notes that the term “meshwork,” which I’ve seen in a lot of writing about walking, comes from Henri Lefebvre—another reason to read his work, I suppose (56). She describes walking as a research methodology, outlining a genealogy of walking art practices that reaches back to Richard Long and even earlier—useful for her primary audience of geographers—and suggests that what is most unique and compelling about contemporary walking practices is the way that walking is simultaneously the artistic material and the transaction between artist and audience (57). She notes that “walking has become a touchstone and point of departure for a myriad of explorations and academic research” (57). The contemporary artists she describes here experiment with form and content while being preoccupied “with the mundane and the everyday,” and their work is participatory and collaborative, “introducing a wide range of individuals and groups to an examination of relationships to the surroundings woven through walking” (58). Following Tim Ingold, she suggests that pedestrians can be seen “as co-creators of their surroundings—and in the case of this particular research, of their own neighbourhoods” (58).
Ramsden’s research departs from contemporary walking art, she suggests, because “it takes the everyday walk as a research space or laboratory,” and because her approach is based on movement inspired by the practice of Moshe Feldenkrais and by creative play and improvisation, and because “participants in the research became collaborators and authors of their interventions” (58). She considered her participants regular or daily walks to be aesthetic practices in which new habits of noticing and reflection might be developed (58). “The uniqueness of a regular walk to the shops, the bus stop, school or work is that, being a familiar practice, it almost invariably enables the walker to switch off from paying attention,” which “offers a discrete time-space within which to experiment and move back and forth from paying attention to switching off, potentially creating a conduit, a liminal space of moving-between, and making connections between small nuanced changes in the everyday and more abstract conceptual thought processes” (58). Her participants stated that not paying attention was what drew them to walk regularly rather than drive or cycle (59). “Introducing interruption into this walk in the form of performative interventions would necessitate a repeated yet temporary bringing to the surface of a more focused attention in order to provoke questioning and reflection on provocations emerging from the walk and the interruption,” she continues, so her methodology “seeks not only to refocus our perceptions but also through these interruptions to trouble the sensibilities with which we perceive” (59).
Ramsden also suggests that her approach to interruption is unique, since it comes from the movement work of Moshe Feldenkrais, who argued that a change in movement was linked to a change in attitude, and that at any one time our activities take place on four levels: thinking, feeling, sensing, and moving (59). “A shift in any of these has potential to produce shifts in the whole self, thereby bringing about change,” she writes, noting that movement is the most immediate and concrete ground for such changes (59). So she introduced “this movement-inflected concept of interruptions within the parameters of the everyday walk” (59). She also drew on play, clowning, and the Situationist détournement to create “performative interventions which asked participants to follow cues or ‘enticements’ within the parameters of the everyday walk, to act outside expected or normative patterns of behaviour” (59). The point was to generate experiences of surprise, unsettling her participants without upsetting them, interrupting their familiar, everyday patterns in order to provoke a sense of estrangement and defamiliarization, allowing participants to look at their surroundings in a new way (60). In addition, because the participants themselves are the researchers and artists, authorship becomes participatory and collaborative, and “the volunteer walking is instrumental in her/his own practice of intentional, improvised walking” (60).
The theoretical basis of the project seems to be taken from David Seamon’s A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter, which I haven’t read. “The encountering we do on a daily, albeit, semi-aware level on a regular walk that brings us into contact with neighbours, animals and objects, locates and contextualizes us in a familiar lifeworld,” Ramsden suggests (60). The slowness of walking enables us to notice these encounters (61). Seamon calls the “network of interwoven threads of daily routines” a “place ballet,” and the collective rhythms of their choreography “creates the vibe or rhythm of a neighbourhood” (61). That rhythm can create a sense of routine as well, against which improvisations can occur (61). Ramsden’s participants “were required to encounter familiar surroundings more attentively and in unfamiliar ways—for example, by focusing on one colour, or by wearing a different pair of shoes, by walking backwards, by going out of their way to talk to someone” (62). These encounters were supposed “to provoke questioning and reflection, developing a receptivity to encountering the unfamiliar and potentially leading to communication and dialogue with others and possibly a change in perceptions, habits, and assumptions” (62).
Ramsden wanted participants to feel free to experiment and play, intending that they “might consciously experience a sense of connection between a so-called everyday cognitive state and moments of wonder” or astonishment (62). She also wanted “to create opportunities for the creation of a ‘not-knowing’ affective space as a temporary, ludic time-space, where thinking beyond, questioning and communication might be possible” (62). The phrase “not-knowing” comes from the work fo Jane Bennett, and it suggests “a state of mind and/or feeling which might emerge firstly, from a process of paying increased attention and/or secondly from the jolt of an interruption, provoking questioning or eliciting responses that differ from habitual patterns” (62).
Participants walked somewhere they would regularly walk. Most were recruited in Bristol, but some were recruited in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both cities are walkable (62). Most participants were women, white, middle-class, relatively educated, and comfortable with writing (63). All were provided with Walker’s Packs containing maps of their neighbourhood, paper for note-taking, and a set of eight interruptions from which participants could choose (64-66). Those interruptions, which Ramsden lists in their entirety, were “to provide the opportunity for risk-taking and experimentation,” and they ranged from low-risk activities to activities involving a higher degree of risk (66). Participants could make notes or drawings or take photographs (66). Afterwards, Ramsden interviewed them (66).
In her discussion of her findings, Ramsden notes that participants found the walking as a welcome opportunity to pay attention and develop awareness (68). They noted that “they tended to go in and out of noticing and encountering, being able to maintain a high level of attention for short periods of time only,” confirming Seamon’s notion of a continuum of attentiveness (69). They found being absorbed in the exercises to be pleasurable (69). That pleasure came from “concentration and engaging with detail” (70). One interruption, which asked participants to talk to a stranger, was chosen by more than one-quarter of the group, and it meant “breaking the familiar rhythm and pace of our walk and going out of our way, perhaps literally,” although participants found it empowering (71-72). Participants said they became more receptive to and aware of their surroundings, and that this change continued after the project ended (72). However, some participants found the burden of awareness to be tiring (73). “Participants began to see their surroundings and people within them with new eyes, from the perspective of engaged observer, slightly outside the categories they habitually inhabited, yet sufficiently familiar within the parameters of their everyday walk,” Ramsden writes. “As such they were developing a receptivity to encounter, within the everyday” (73). The process, in some cases, shifted the habits of participants (73). “This kind of improvisatory and performative practice of interrupting habits and assumptions employing an everyday walk in a neighbourhood offers unique and significant strategies for developing awareness of our neighbourhoods and surroundings,” she concludes. “It goes further by requiring participant walkers to question and reflect on their thought processes thus developing the potential for individual change and openness to the unfamiliar and strange, with a view to increasing receptivity for communication and dialogue” (74).
So Ramsden’s project is in interesting example of using solo walking practices to engage people in ways that might change their habits of attention and assumptions about a familiar space and activity. It might even be the kind of transformation Simon Pope was calling for in his essay, “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,” which I just posted about. It struck me, when I read Pope’s essay, that he seemed to be looking for work that was already happening, and Ramsden’s project is an example, I think, although I could be wrong. There are other examples of similar projects in this stack of articles, and I’ll get to them in time. Perhaps even tomorrow!
Works Cited
Pope, Simon. “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking.” C Magazine, issue 121, 2014. https://cmagazine.com/issues/121/walking-transformed-the-dialogics-of-art-and-walking.
Ramsden, Hilary. “Walking & Talking: Making Strange Encounters Within the Familiar.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 18, no. 1, 2017, pp. 53-77. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1174284.
Seamon, David. A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter,Routledge, 2016.
