Finding common ground
Tate Modern is currently showing an exhibition by the late Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. Though not strictly a walking artist, her work blurs the boundary between body and landscape through performance and ritual. Leaving the studio behind, Mendieta walked into the landscape, using her body to transform mud, water, fire, flowers, and trees into works that often lasted only as long as the weather allowed.
Mendieta described these earth/body sculptures as an attempt to heal her childhood exile from Cuba: an obsessive, almost primeval act of becoming one with the earthly womb.
This tension between displacement and the desire to reconnect echoes in the work of Francis Alÿs, who celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday this week. In 2006, after reading about Cuban boat people caught in a legal no-man’s-land between sea and shore, Alÿs staged Bridge/Puente. Fishing boats from Havana and Key West lined up across the water to form a temporary, ephemeral bridge, a way to walk home that could only ever be imagined.
More recently, walking artists Clare Qualmann, Alisa Oleva, and Manal Massahla have led walks for the Whitechapel Gallery's Backyard Biennial, inviting diasporic communities to share their stories of the city, mapping the meaning of home and the line between private grief and public space. Meanwhile, artist Ridha Dhib is currently walking from Paris to Nafplio for Mnémosyne, counting the journey in heartbeats rather than kilometres and leaving a ‘Proof of Presence’ with each person who gives him shelter along the way.
Whether we are evoking a lost home or searching for the rhythm of an adopted place, walking art is a form of attunement. We must step out of our comfort zone and tune into the world around us, to the weather, the terrain, the unplanned encounters. Only by listening closely do we make this new terrain our home.
Our upcoming Sound Walk September offers a chance to put that listening into practice: submissions close at the end of next month.
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Writer, walker, digital storyteller, psychogeographer
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Placecloud
Researchers use Placecloud to mark sites of significance with short podcasts.
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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, cross... Keep reading
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2026-09-02 17:00 UTC
· Online
For our first Walking Writers Salon after the summer break, and to open Sound Walk September, we are delighted to welcome Canadian writers and researchers Kit Dobson and Ken Wilson in conversation discussing Kit’s Field Notes on Listening. Many of us walk out with scant attention to what we hear, our brains filtering o... Keep reading
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After travelling around the globe, Made of Walking returns to Belgium, in Prosperpolder. Belgium provides a fitting place for this return. Situated at the crossroads of Europe, Prosperpolder embodies many of the questions that Made of Walking has explored over the past decade: borders and flows, ecology and industry, h... Keep reading
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