Jalan Gembira is a walking collective based in Yogyakarta that has been exploring the city on foot since 2016. Formed in response to the challenges of walking in motorcycle-dominated cities, Jalan Gembira positions walking as a way to reclaim public space and reflect on urban life. The practice brings attention to issues of safety, accessibility, and social inequality, particularly for women, children, and marginalized communities. Jalan Gembira creates supportive walking experiences that cultivate sensitivity to the city’s layers, both visible and unseen. The collective engages in archiving through embodied experiences, tracing memory, place, and movement through presence, observation, and occasional visual or written traces.
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pedestrian acts
By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.
Added by Asli Ozgen-Tuncer
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