SWS21
Listen to stories, get closer to nature, travel to far away places, immerse yourself in different cultures, add your voice, record the ambience, and learn how to make sound walks.
Despite the ongoing pandemic, we had more then 150 events and pieces submitted to Sound Walk September 2021.
- Media pack (19 August 2021)
- Media pack (17 January 2022)
Part of Sound Walk September 2021 was Sound Walk City · prelude, a festival of sound walks, performances and sound works, coinciding with Sound Walk September 2021, organised by Cona, and entered on the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana.
In numbers
Sound Walk September 2021 in numbers:
- 94 eligible walking pieces for the SWS Awards.
- 64 events organised by the global community.
- Started a new series of writing competitions, the first of which received 124 submissions from 109 participants.
- We had contributions from all non-arctic continents.
- On the ground events in Ljubljana.
- 2 winners, 2 honourable mentions, 13 shortlisted works.
Achievements from throughout the year:
- At the end of 2021, our library of walking pieces contained over 500 works.
- We’ve started a weekly curated mailing list on MailChimp, migrated it to Sendy, and, at the end of 2021, had just short of 600 subscribers, with opening rates of around 50%.
- We’re now offering paid supporting memberships, which is supporting our work with badly needed funds.
- We grew registered memberships to over 2500 individuals.
Help was had
We’re very happy with the help from Benedetta Piccio and Margo Nsana. Benedetta had a focus on customer relations. Margo helped out with social media management, and design.
Attack of the Wolfdogs: A Secret Audio Adventure
It’s time to seek out the secrets of Southwark and we need your help! Experience our brand new, free, self-guided audio adventure which begins outside the Unicorn Theatre and takes in the river and old cobbled streets of Shad Thames. Join your audio guides as together you try to save the city. You’ll need to
Decoding Nature: Sense Impression and the Biophany
For this walk, Zorica Kelly Markovich has partnered with Sound Walk September and MSVU Art Gallery bringing to life an augmented, interactive walking experience. In Decoding Nature: Sense Impression and the Biophany, the artist has layered audio recordings from nature to create an immersive sound walk, encouraging deep listening within and without the environment. Bringing
Round Our Place
Round Our Place is an exploration of meaningful places across Partick East and Kelvindale in Glasgow, Scotland. It is filled with the voices, visions, dreams and memories of people living in the community. There is a unique story and soundscape at each location along the route and a couple of added extras for you to
No Vantage Point
Join Duncan Speakman, a composer and sound artist, who creates narrative sound led experiences that engage audiences in uncontrolled public and private space to find out how we can reframe the idea of immersive media as something that exposes and reveals the entangled ecologies we exist in.
Distance Drift: Soundshot
Distance Drifts are remote walks designed to get participants walking alone together in creative and curious ways. To coincide with Sound Walk September, project curator Sonia Overall invites you to participate in a Distance Drift walking collage of found sounds. To join in live you will need a mobile device and a Twitter account. Follow
Freight, walking with history
Freight, 1893. This is a one hour long sound walk with different local voices reading the list of freight carried on the Liverpool to Leeds newly opened canal. A list of Canal Rates, Tolls and Charges. I recorded volunteers from Leeds, Hull, and Goole, listed below, who beautifully animate what could be a dry historic
WE WALK – Strategies from Zurich
WE WALK thematizes the artistic practice of walking in the public urban space of Zurich. Not only since the Corona pandemic have questions been raised about new urban spaces and a new understanding of the public sphere. The artists present in this exhibition have long been engaged in participatory knowledge transfer, cultural participation, negotiation and
Walking as a Question, crossing walking, writing and listening
Some years ago Kristine Samson und Sanne Krogh Grogh proposed the Audio Paper bringing together audio, performance and text in a new and hybrid format. This concept was extended into a new form of audio walk, during the Walking Arts Encounters / Conference in Prespa. Writers of these audio papers are invited to talk at this Walk Listen Café.
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Writing Words of Wonder – Shoreline Stories
A workshop is to help you become a better nature writer. Over the course of 90-120 minutes we’ll use two complementary forms – haiku and flash fiction – and draw inspiration from the shoreline (sea, lake, pond, river or stream) and other parts of the natural world.
•Escaping Accelerated Reality
Slovenian dramaturge, publicist and producer Jasmina Založnik will engage in a conversation about the performativity of walking in the context of art. More precisely, she is interested in a sound walk as a form that evades spectacularity of art products and as a form of slowing down.
Postcards from the Shifting Shore
A Slow Marathon along coastlines on opposite sides of the world to generate debate on rising sea levels. The 42km walk will happen simultaneously at two different locations Firth of Forth (Cramond to Portobello) & Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The walk considers flow, time and the sea that connect us all. Both artists
•Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Sound Walks to Experience Disappeared Histories
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/carceral-geography-in-el-paso-sound-walks-to-experience-disappeared-history-tickets-166438370647 This interdisciplinary research project investigates the history of carceral geography in El Paso, TX through archival research and embodied mapping, leading to the creation of audio walking guides accessible to the public. Carceral geography is a lens on architectures and social relationships that are disappeared or displaced within neoliberal systems of incarceration, raising
Listening to Bees
This track is a BInaural recording, so please listen with headphones if you can. Listening to Bees is one of a set of tracks recorded on location in May 2021 at Fairlight Country Park in Sussex. I recorded the sound with binaural ear mics on loan from Falmouth University as part of a training course
Rain at Mavrovo National Park
Digital and technology can indeed become control instrument to oppress nature and human beings, but it is up to us to adapt them critically to our human world. We no longer need to believe we are representing the real world of nature. A counter claim to the idea that technology is destructive in our relationship
Beneath our Feet
This sound piece reveals the hidden history of part of the Fairlight Country Park which leads to a ruined Lookout Tower. As you walk you can listen to the history of the site and the Tower and of the people connected with it together with a soundscape composed from recordings I made walking to and
Daydream Livorno SoundWalk 1
Listening and Noticing This first step will provide a practical set of inputs and resources for how to document your perspective on everyday sonic moments. Techniques and strategies discussed in this session are suggested as ways of approaching our daily collective soundwalks into the streets of Livorno. To participate, any combination of the following are
