What if the city wasn’t something to consume but something to play? For the Situationists, this was a way of challenging the passive role assigned to people in modern society. Instead of simply following the routes, functions, images, and routines laid out for them, they imagined inhabitants who could wander, interfere, improvise, and collectively reshape

Facing the contemporary environmental crisis, this project was born from the need to rethink nature and re-conceptualise technology as an open-source tool for communities.

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

Made of Walking Prosperpolder and the Future of Walking Arts TThe expression walking arts has become surprisingly familiar. Over the past two decades, it has entered conferences, publications, festivals, university programmes and European projects, bringing together practices that had previously remained dispersed across different artistic and disciplinary traditions.Yet the more familiar the expression has become,

The Contemporary Creation Centre Nau Côclea and the Museu Memorial de l’Exili (Exile Memorial Museum) invite artists to apply for the Walter Benjamin Creation Grant 2026. For thirteen years, the Walter Benjamin Route has invited artists to engage with questions of memory, borders, exile, critical history and the act of walking itself. Artists are asked

Dani Karavan’s memorial to the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Passatjes, has been here in Portbou since 1994. Benjamin died here in 1940. Although he had a safe conduct pass that should’ve allowed him to cross Spain and enter Portugal, the police refused him entry. Because he was in poor health, he was allowed to remain in … Continue reading Dani Karavan, “Passatjes,” Portbou, Spain →

Here’s something new: a walk paired with a book. I’ve never done this before. La Familia Sagrada: does that count as a walk? Does it matter? I walked there; I walked around while I was there, listening to the audio guide; I’ll be walking back. Good enough for me. What an incredible cathedral; what a … Continue reading La Sagrada Familia and 24. Gillian Jerome, Nevertheless: Walking Poems →

In August 2025, a group of walkers set out on foot from Barcelona to Ogassa in the Spanish Pyrenees, eventually carrying a cello to the summit of the Taga, a mountain peak rising above 2,000 metres. This was the 11th edition of the GrandTour, a three-week walk that participants undertake alongside artists from different disciplines,

The Walking Assembly 2026 (9–13 May 2026) is a nomadic, field-based gathering in Catalonia for artists, researchers, educators, and collectives exploring walking as embodied, relational, and ecological knowledge. Moving from conference to assembly, it proposes learning without teaching, where knowledge emerges through shared walking, presence, and collective experience. From Salt to Albanyà and along the Muga River, the Assembly foregrounds water, movement, attention, walking and being together in place as pedagogical forces.

An important reason for this trip halfway around the world was for me to stop in the tiny village of Camallera, in northern Catalunya, for a three day meeting connected to a European collaborative project which the NGO I co-founded is involved in. Here, the bakery only opens at 9am, everyone greets each other on …

Sweat Mapping was an exercise Anne-Marie carried out on a walk from Girona to Banyoles as part of the Walking Arts Encounters 2024

Girona is a small, attractive and friendly city in Cataluña / Catalonia, 105 kms from Barcelona. Popular with tourists, it has almost all the facilities you need for a holiday – an array of cafés and restaurants (including lots of vegan ones (@b12_bar on Instagram) and a Natural Wine bar), a host of sights and … Continue reading Girona

November 2023 I am happy to say that I am in Camallera near Girona, Cataluña / Catalonia, where I am in residence at Nau Côclea (Centre de Creació Contemporània Nau Côclea). I plan to make a Sound Walk. Map of Camallera, Cataluña I plan to walk around the edge of the town, the boundary of the area, listening to and recording ambient sounds. The rhythm of my feet will undoubtedly raise 'stories' from the soil, of the past and present. I will be responding with my own and others’ voices in response to these, aiming to create a rich soundscape of song, musical instrument and found-sounds which will encapsulate the ambience of the place.I have often travelled around the edge of somewhere for an artistic project (in Edinburgh, for example I have led walks around Granton and Leith) and I find that a ring of steps can mark-out a space in which magic can happen. Marking a boundary by human means (as opposed to in, or on a vehicle) and meeting people who live and move along it, is an interesting and enlightening experience. It is one which offers an opportunity to find out more about what and who lives on either side and the nature of separation and unity in this context. As I walk, I will be paying equal attention to the plants, insect and animal life which we share these edgeland sites with, especially observing the effects I have on them, and their presence at specific times of day and at this turn of the seasons. Unidentified flower in the Third Landscape of Camallera Looking at the map, the walk will probably cover a mixed manufacturing, retail, municipal, residential, touristic, rural and agricultural setting, maybe also “Undecided fragment[s] of the Planetary Garden … Neglected areas and wastelands” of the Third Landscape. The psychogeographer in me is always ferreting into nooks and noticing crannies of this sort. (With thanks to Laia Noal for guiding me to this term.) The Third Landscape where small mountains of different grades of ground mirror the Pyrenees in the distance. Camallera When I am in the research and preparation stage of making a Sound Walk, I follow the signs; I take notice of what happens around me, what books land in my lap, and conversations I happen to hear on the radio or when I’m walking. I have been reading about the suppression of freedom and the Catalan language during the Civil War of 1936-39, and all the human suffering caused by Francisco Franco up until 1975. I am fascinated by the Pact of Forgetting (given a legal basis in 1977), a political decision which was made, “in the name of ensuring a smooth transition to democracy” (smithsonianmag.com), and which “also committed the government to “la desmemoria” (disremembering), a policy that entailed avoiding anything that could awaken the memory of the past, such as the observation of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, in 1986…” (Encarnación, New York Times). More recently, the Historical Memory Law (2007) has allowed for “a debate on the civil war "after so many years of silence".” (The Guardian) and there has been interest in engaging with a recognition of the resulting grief. Some of the Civil War mass graves have been opened, and new rituals are being enacted around the acknowledgement of the loss on many levels. I come to this residency with many years of embodied study of death, grief and loss, personally, and through my Shiatsu work, death cafes, and writing. A recurring topic arising from participants at death cafes is our community tendency to ignore death or struggle to find ways to acknowledge it. Walking, Cataluña When I discovered that my visit corresponded with the annual walk across the Pyrénées from France in memory of Walter Benjamin, I knew I must join it. Benjamin was fleeing the Nazi regime in 1940, and was directed across the mountains by Lisa Fittko. He received bad news on arrival in Port Bou on the Spanish side and died by suicide that night, before being able to finally escape to the United States. The coincidence came as no surprise, and it is likely that the Sound Walk that I will be making during my residency will concern loss and its inevitable companion, renewal, as a result. I won't know what exactly will happen until I begin. “This level of inter-generational trauma takes time, so much time, to leave the gene pool. It surges through bloodlines ... How to tell a new story of resilience and hope? ... How can we honour the suffering of our ancestors – of those who came before us – but still try to unravel the chains we find ourselves bound by? Is the answer held within the very soil... Is the answer held in the residue the ghosts leave behind?” — Kerri ni Dochartaigh writing about the Irish Troubles in Thin Places p186 Collecting a feather a day (project began during the Covid pandemic). Feathers have often been associated with grief (see Emily Dickinson) I have already invited some local artists to sing and play to and in the place, people who belong here. If you are from the region or outside and are interested in this project and able to come between 20 November and 2 December (not 24th), I am inviting you to join me for one day or part of one day. Come and walk and listen, and share your feelings. Your contributions will join together in a co-created Sound Walk which will then live on in Camallera for anyone to join at a later date.Dates: 20 November and 2 December. There is one bed for you to stay a night in the artist's cottage if you need to. Let me know if you are interested! tamsinlgrainger@gmail.com Caption for photo gallery above, from left: Forest Bound, Festival of Terminalia, Festivities and DelegatesThe Artist Residency is part of the Separation and Unity Project (Caledonia / Catalonia). You may also be interested in other parts: El Grand Tour, Girona mini-pilgrimage, and Festivities and Delegates.References:Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/battle-memory-spanish-civil-war-180969338/New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/01/06/turning-away-from-painful-chapters/forgetting-in-order-to-move-onThe Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/11/spain.internationalManifesto of the Third Landscape https://teh.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/TEH-Publication-Manifesto-of-Third-Landscape-145x225mm-2022-WEB-Spreads.pdf

A multi-media wall hanging, Festivities and Delegates by Tamsin Grainger

Cyril Bron's motorway walk at the Walking Encounters in Girona

The Project – part 1 June/July 2022 The first part of The Separation and Unity Project between Edinburgh and Cataluña takes the form of walking, walkshop and outdoor performance as part of WALKING ARTS ENCOUNTERS, Walking Arts and Relational Geographies There is a spiritual-political-geographical link between Edinburgh, Scotland where I live, and Cataluña in the … Continue reading International Walking Encounters – Cataluña

Walking Arts Encounters "Walking Arts and Relational Geographies". During 5 days in July the encounters moves nomadically through Catalonia, with a walking caravan, between and in the cities of Girona, Vic and Olot, parallel to an academical conference in these cities. Send us your proposals for walks, walkshops, projects, sound walks, audio papers and papers. Applications are open now, till May 10th!

      There are several stages during the art walk. In each one an artist or group of artists will share something with the visitors: music, dance, visual arts, poetry… Every day people walk about 15 to 25 kilometers along with an artist or a group of artists who have prepared something for them.

The day you decide to drag your big camera to the sea at 6.50 a.m. to be there in time for the sunrise is always a cloudy day. But it doesn’t matter. The appearance of the sun is something to watch, the red and orange and pink that come with it on a cl...

On my way to the beach I found a collection of poems for children, left next to a garbage container. Most of them written by well-known Catalan poets, some originally French or German and some very old ones without a known author. The poems describe th...