The 21st century may well be defined by forced migration, driven by both climate change and ongoing violent conflicts across the globe. With World Refugee Day being marked this weekend, the Middle East once again in turmoil, and the upcoming International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa, we are reminded of the urgent and evolving relevance of walking arts today. Once grounded in individual gestures, modernist spatial explorations, and aesthetic abstraction, walking as a creative practice has expanded into a socially and ecologically interconnected discipline. No longer merely about the artist’s personal journey or conceptual spatial intervention, walking arts now embrace relationality, political awareness, technological hybridity, and often cross disciplinary boundaries.

In the 20th century, walking art was frequently solitary and introspective. Artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton approached walking as a minimal, durational engagement rooted in landscape and time. The Situationists used walking as a critique of capitalist urban spaces. Yet these influential practices often reflected Eurocentric, male, and autonomous perspectives, and shaped by explicit or implicit manifestos—bold, often exclusive declarations of artistic intent.

Contemporary walking art serves as a tool for collective meaning-making, inclusion, political and ecological consciousness. A walking artwork is no longer a mere trace but a dynamic network of relations—a shared moment of presence.
This shift toward relationality marks a decisive break from earlier approaches. Contemporary walking artists see their work not as an isolated creation but as a platform for encounter, dialogue, and coexistence. A walk becomes a space for learning, listening, and co-presence, fostering conversations not only among humans but also across species, temporalities, and forms of knowledge. Prespa is such a walk—not merely a place or a space, but made of walking.

Perhaps the most urgent and complex evolution in walking arts today is the acknowledgment of forced migration as a central political reality. While some artistic walking practices still emphasize choice, aesthetic inquiry, or discovery, millions now walk not by choice but necessity—traversing borders, deserts, conflict zones, and escape routes. These journeys are no metaphors; they are acts of survival.

Today, walking arts have moved beyond the manifesto era. Contemporary practitioners create space for plurality and critical inquiry: Whose land are we walking on? Who is absent? Which stories remain untold? Walking art now is open-ended, adaptive, and rooted in care. It is ecological, decolonial, hybrid, and pedagogical—a transversal practice crossing disciplines and geographies. Above all, walking has become a way of being in relation—with landscapes, ancestors, strangers, histories, and futures. It invites us not only to move through the world but to walk alongside others, asking—who walks with us?

And so, I look forward to walking with you next week in Prespa.

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