6 Apr, 2025

Being in Guimarães for the International Walking Arts Encounters The Walking Body 6 has meant embracing the rhythm of walking in the rain— in the wake of the Atlantic storm Nuria, which swept across Portugal just before the beginning of the event. Rain-soaked walks have become the norm over the past few days. Perhaps it’s no coincidence: the history of walking art, too, began in the rain.
Almost 104 years ago, on April 14th, 1921, the Dadaists staged their first iconic déambulation in Paris. Artists like André Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Francis Picabia took to the streets with a “guided tour” of reading random dictionary definitions as “explanations” of monuments along the way. Ironically, the event was largely cancelled due to rain.
A few years later, in May 1924, the Surrealists picked up the torch. Led again by Breton, alongside Louis Aragon and Max Morise, they embarked on a long walk from Blois—a location randomly chosen from a map—to Romorantin, about 45 kilometers away. Their aim was to blur the boundaries between waking and dreaming, engaging in automatic writing along the way. The walk, however, ended prematurely due to exhaustion and getting lost.
Though these early experiments in walking as art may not have been entirely successful, they planted seeds. And today, in Guimarães, neither rain nor darkness will stop the artists from walking.
The international program features, among other things, a week-long dérive and a night walk led by Catalan artists Jordi Lafon and Montsita Rierola, two of the founding members of Deriva Mussol . Their work brings us full circle—back to those embryonic drifts and nocturnal explorations that marked the prehistory of walking art.
Adding flavor to this walking banquet is Belgian artist Stefaan van Biesen, whose practice spans more than three decades. His work, which merges drawing and writing, social critique and poetic gesture, resonates deeply with both the anti-walks of the Dadaists and the Surrealists’ écriture automatique. Drawing, in fact, appears as a recurring thread throughout the history of walking art—re-emerging in Richard Long’s iconic 1967 piece A Line Made by Walking, which marked walking art’s entry into contemporary visual art.
Throughout its evolution, writing has been just as inseparable from walking as drawing. This brings us to walk · listen · create’s 39 Words Flash Writing Competition, inspired by The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. Don’t miss the submission deadline on April 22.
Also, make sure to join us for the next free WALC Café, featured in The Walking Body program in Guimarães: The New Wave of Walking Artists?. This conversation will complete the circle of a century, spotlighting a new generation of walking artists—practitioners of a discipline that is constantly evolving, questioning itself and the world we live in, and charting new paths between waking and dreaming, toward a next 100 years of walking arts.

Geert Vermeire co-founder of walk · listen · create

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