This week, a new Banksy appeared in Waterloo Place, London: a suited man, flag over his face, steps forward from a plinth. Reuters described the figure as “blinded by a flag” and moving forward, unaware of the danger ahead, while AP simply noted that the sculpture shows a man striding forward with his face obscured by the flag. The first thing I noticed was not merely the man being unaware of his surroundings, or the overt hints of nationalism, but that the man is walking. Not standing in triumph, but in motion, and that that motion is taking him into the abyss.

Statues typically freeze heroes into poses of permanence. Banksy’s figure does the opposite. He uses the periphery of the monument, the plinth, and integrates it into the message. The man is not being honoured for what he has done. He is being shown at the moment before the consequence of his actions will cause his literal downfall. Walking, here, is not freedom; it is obedience disguised as agency. The body moves, but the face cannot see. The flag, supposedly a symbol of belonging, becomes the instrument that prevents orientation.

This is not the first time Banksy has used walking or movement to question the reigns of power. Arguably, that's what most of his work is about.
In Choose Your Weapon, a hooded figure walks a dog on a chain. The dog is rendered in the visual language of Keith Haring, whose barking dog motif is widely associated with street art, activism, and resistance. This work by Banksy is often read as a commentary on youth violence, but also as an argument for art as another kind of weapon. The choice in the title is not just between peace and violence, but also between different ways of occupying the street.

The figure in Choose Your Weapon is a social stereotype: he is the tabloid “hoodie”, representing the supposedly threatening urban youth. The dog on the chain intensifies the threat, but the Haring reference questions it, counters it, a cartoon made into an accomplice. The work points to that both we can choose how we present ourselves in public, but also that we choose how to interpret the work of others.

Banksy regularly addresses migration, also occasionally through walking. One on this topic is The Son of a Migrant from Syria, painted in 2015, in the Calais “Jungle”. The mural depicts Steve Jobs as a travelling migrant, carrying belongings and an early Macintosh. One of the defining figures of consumer technology, and through that the exploitation of capitalism, is reintroduced as the child of migrants, who are being kept at the gates of Europe and the US, the biggest purveyors of capitalism.

For the migrants in the Jungle, walking is not choice. It is not the dérive facilitating exploration of the public space. It is forced movement. It is the body made to cross borders because staying has been made impossible (by whom?). This distinction is central to much walking art concerned with migration: walking can be a method, but it can also be a suffering. It can be a way of knowing a place, or a record of the fact that a place has refused you.

A different form of interrupted walking appears in Banksy’s New Orleans work after Hurricane Katrina, in the image of Abraham Lincoln as a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. The piece uses one of the central figures of American state mythology to expose abandonment in the aftermath of disaster. It is not simply a joke about presidential iconography. It recasts public movement as destitution: not the heroic march of emancipation, but the daily drift of someone displaced by systems that have failed to serve those for whom they were designed to function.

This is where Banksy’s walking figures meet a wider archive of walking as a political practice. On walk · listen · create, the Borders & Migration collection gathers works in which walking is not simply movement through space, but an encounter with checkpoints, labour, forced passage, and unequal freedom of movement. In Emily Jacir’s Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work), the artist records her daily walk across the Surda checkpoint to Birzeit University. The work describes how the Ramallah-Birzeit Road was disrupted by a military checkpoint, forcing people, including disabled people, elderly people, and children, to walk distances of up to two kilometres depending on military decisions.

As someone who subscribes to the idea that everything is art, as well as coming from the Middle East myself, I am naturally attracted to Jacir’s work, and it’s worthwhile to point out that, here, walking is not a metaphor or symbol, it’s the restriction itself. The work emerges from a commute, but the commute has been militarised. The artist’s daily walk becomes evidence: of surveillance, humiliation, route disruption, and the conversion of ordinary passage into a controlled event.

Paulo Nazareth’s Notícias da América (News from America) addresses a similar theme, if at a different scale. It’s a long-duration performance in which Nazareth travelled from my neighbouring state of Minas Gerais, here in Brazil, to the United States, primarily by walking and occasionally by bus, documenting encounters, landscapes, objects, and social relations along the way. The journey becoming a kind of “residency in transit”, where displacement was both method and artwork.

Nazareth’s showed that the Americas are not a neutral geography of opportunity. They are a set of borders, racial histories, labour routes, fantasies, and exclusions. Walking became a way to make those relations visible at the speed of the body. Unlike Banksy’s Steve Jobs mural, which condenses the migrant into a single public image, Nazareth let the journey accumulate. 

This week’s news makes these pieces, and Banksy’s work, harder to treat as purely artistic. (But, then again, don't we see the same news on repeat, every week?) Reuters reported that Afghan refugees were stranded at the Torkham border crossing as Pakistan continued mass repatriations, with some families waiting more than twelve days. Many were people born or raised in Pakistan who now faced removal to a country they may barely know.

At the same time, at least 17 migrants died and nine were missing after a boat broke down and drifted for eight days off Libya. AP later reported that the boat had been carrying Sudanese migrants and that only seven survivors were rescued.

These stories are often described as migration, border, or humanitarian crises. But they can also make us question who is allowed to walk? Who is forced to walk? Who is stopped? Who is pushed from road to sea because legal routes are unavailable? 

We accept that these crises are a consequence of persecution, conflict, violence, climate shocks, and economic destruction. But too many, our leading politicians in front, are refusing to admit that, in large part, these shocks to the system are the consequence of imperial abuse by the center, of the periphery, and by the elite abusing the working classes, the precariat, in the Global North as well as the Global South.

So we return to Banksy, who’s anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist work has repeatedly attacked consumer culture, banks, corporate capture, and the absurdities of market desire; Banksy Explained groups a set of his works under graffiti, consumerism, and capitalism, reading pieces such as Cash Machine Girl as critiques of capital’s ability to capture and endanger everyday life.

And, so, this is where migration, labour, and walking converge. People move across jurisdictions because survival has been made impossible where they were. Histories of imperial power still shape contemporary forms of outsourced exploitation. The digital economy, once hailed as the great equaliser, gives us a very current example: content moderation and data-labelling labour in the Global South, where workers absorb the psychological cost of keeping platforms commercially usable, leaving workers with PTSD, anxiety, and depression.

And this brings us to May Day, May first. Marked by marches and demonstrations around the world, its origins tied to the struggle for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886, when a national strike led to clashes, deaths, and a mystery man detonating a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. 

It still took decades before the 8-hour workday became law in the United States, but these protests and marches against exploitation, though accompanied by violent opposition, were the necessary trigger for change.

Banksy’s walking art belong in this continuum. The man at Waterloo Place walks blindly into the void of nationalism. The hooded youth in Choose Your Weapon walks through the projection of violence. Steve Jobs, reimagined as a migrant, walks through the hypocrisy of borders and technological worship. And Lincoln pushes a cart through the wreckage of a state that fails its people.

And, so, Banksy, Jacir, and Nazareth, all show who can move freely, and who is made visible, or made visible only as a threat. Who is forced to keep moving, and who is celebrated only after being turned into a monument.

Keep walking.

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