A celebration of walking arts

Last week the European project WALC - Walking Arts and Local Communities was inaugurated in Guimaraes, Portugal, with 7 partners from 5 EU countries. Their common objective is to establish during and beyond the four coming years, an international center for walking arts, with as center Prespa in Greece, and rhizomatically in Portugal, Catalonia, France and Belgium, calling out to new partners or nodes, with an open and lasting invitation for all collectives and groups in and outside Europe to join this networked center, with walking arts at its core, and based mainly in rural and natural areas of ecological and social fragility.
Community, collective and cooperative practices are what guides this initiative emphasizing collaborative group processes, seeking alternatives to the individual authorship challenged by the global crises and our digital era, exploring parallel pathways for sharing ideas and creativity through walking arts.

walk · listen · create and the other partners aim for inclusive and open design space for joint visioning and decision-making with the participants and communities as equal partners in the co-creation ecosystem. The term 'community' is expanding to include online participants, facilitated by walk · listen · create.

The project advocates for a structural approach recognizing the deep benefits of collaboration in walking arts and the endeavor to (re)build the commons. Co-creation is viewed as a process that respects each person's unique expertise, sharing the responsibility and freedom of determining the collective future. Amid the urgency of contemporary challenges, co-creation acknowledges that no single entity can provide all the answers alone. By tapping into collective intelligence and aspiring towards collective wisdom, co-creation becomes a source of hope in addressing the complex and urgent issues of our time, more needed then ever, as the events in Russia, Palestine and Russia show. And it is there that walking arts comes in the picture, as a medium created by its participating walkers, as a collective rethinking and reshaping of our environment, as a local-global activist and social action of imagination and of creativity.

The project leverages the concept of global Collective Intelligence, as defined by cultural theorist Pierre Levy, emphasizing shared group intelligence emerging from collaboration and collective efforts. The project employs hybrid methodologies, incorporating offline events, an online platform for co-learning and co-creation, as well as online activities, seminars and workshops.

But even more, we look for you, as groups and collectives around the world to join our initiative, by including your artwork, walking activities and events. Let us know that you are out there and we come back to you.
Join our free public meet up called Confluence tomorrow. dedicated to the stories of walkers-refugees, the contribution of the project partner Gigacircus in France, and looking back to the first week long activity of WALC in Guimaraes - Portugal, The Walking Body about more than human walking. Register now for the Confluence talk tomorrow!

Last but not least, a reminder for the writers of you about the deadline of our writing competition on April 2, Neighbourhood narratives – stories around us, inviting you to submit creative and descriptive non-fiction, about buildings, parks, streets, trees and views of places around you to be added to our own Placecloud, software platform for place based podcasts.

Let us walk together.

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