Walking both forward and backward, as WALC enters its fourth semester, building on many meaningful and inspiring steps, but also walking in reverse. This special WALC-inspired newsletter looks both to the past and toward the path ahead.

A first wave of WALC residencies have taken place in Portugal, Catalonia, and France, alongside the development of a vibrant online platform with over 2,000 contributing users. Together, these milestones highlight the growing momentum and evolving potential of walking arts in the 21st century.

We see this beautifully embodied in Migrating Voices the thoughtful work of Gigacircus in France, connecting live performances of refugee artists with artists in their home countries using immersive technologies. In Guimarães, Portugal, the The Walking Body at School of Arts at UMinho has been reimagined as a walking field — an open-air space for mutual learning, where young artists explore art beyond boundaries and walls in the community where they are part of. The Grand Tour art residency of Nau Côclea in Catalonia unfolds along a 300-kilometer journey, with the artists and audience forming a walking group that moves for 3 weeks through nature and villages. Along the way, artists and audiences alike become fluent beings within a fluent landscape — immersed in a continuous process of movement, transformation, and letting go. Meanwhile, walk · listen · create has rolled out a vast online tapestry — not merely the world’s largest walking arts archive, but a dynamic network connecting people, practices, and places across continents. It's a kind of walking constellation — or, to borrow from Lewis Carroll, a map as big as the territory.

And then there's Prespa. The International Prespa Walking Arts Encounters 2025 -starting tomorrow till July 6- bring together 130 artists and researchers in the landscape itself, in a bold gathering made by walking — with each participant contributing a fragment of the kaleidoscope of walking arts today. It is an encounter marked by unexpected variety and diversity, challenging the obvious and sparking new connections and relationships that didn’t exist before.

This is just the first movement — introducing the musical themes and the march-like leitmotif — of what is becoming an international symphony of walking arts. It is now being enriched through new collaborations with four selected EU-based collectives, or Nodes, whose contributions will add new layers to the composition and will be announced during the Prespa Encounters.

This evolving fugue will continue to unfold through further international and global collaborations, contributing to the development of a Walking Arts Course and the creation of a network where walking becomes a new form of learning — interwoven with locative media, interactive mapping, and augmented reality.
And this is only the beginning. Much more is yet to come — so keep listening as the crescendo builds in the years ahead.

Even a collective journey like WALC includes both forward and backward motion. In the spirit of walking arts — rooted in the unexpected. At times, one step forward, two steps back. And strangely, there is value in that too.
In the end, WALC may be remembered not only for its artistic achievements, but for shaping a new genre altogether: Walking Arts as Much Ahead as in Reverse — a slow, honest performance of moving forward while embracing the steps taken backward.

We learn by walking together—step by step, day by day. Even as we navigate the challenges of an ambitious project like WALC, even when we confront the paradox of disconnection within the very idea of connection—within the framework of a European-funded large scale project —something essential persists. Endurance. Care. Poetic resistance. The quiet art of finding new paths when the wind pushes back.
What else is walking arts about, if not this?

Or to paraphrase the Latin phrase “Per aspera ad astra”: no road to the stars but a walked one.

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