The Marŝarto Awards complement our Sound Walk September Awards providing a cash prize incentive to artists to submit their compositions for the only award for walking art. Entering its third year, we want to celebrate the winner and honourable mention from the previous year, and are delighted that Tamsin Grainger (winner) and Marie-Anne Lerjen (honourable mention) are our guests at this café.

Tamsin Grainger’s Walking Like a Tortoise was the jury’s clear choice as the winner in 2024, recognised for its community building, storytelling and deep engagement with the act of going for a walk. Emerging from a charming story about a stow-away tortoise in Granton, Edinburgh in the 1940s, it evolved into a slow unfolding of histories and personal experiences, past and present, shared through walking conversations. A combination of solo and group walks, Walking Like a Tortoise looked at boundaries historical and contemporary, and how they shape our experience of a place. Beginning as a collective walk in Edinburgh as part of the Festival of Terminalia, the project became an ongoing exploration of the boundaries of Granton, a district in Edinburgh, in which people were invited to walk “leisurely like a tortoise”.

When the body heats up, as we exert ourselves, over long distances, in hot weather, the pores in our skin release salty moisture to cool us down. Marie-Anne Lerjen’s piece Sweat Mapping draws this basic corporeal reality up through a pipette to map bodies in motion as well as the terrain through which they move. Conducted on a five-hour walk from Girona to Banyoles in Catalonia in summer 2024, Lerjen spoke to individual participants about the sensations of walking in the heat, archiving both the conversations and the walk with a few beads of sweat from each of them. Laying a piece of glass atop a sketch of the region, she traced its water systems with the collection of sweat droplets so that the bodies of the walkers ran into the topographies they traversed. The resulting trace map revealed through the residue the cycles that connect the air, the land and its waters, and our fleshy, sweaty selves. An audio recording from the conversations accompanies the work. Sweat Mapping is as humorous as it is freighted. It prompts us to ask: what bells of guidance do the beads of our bodies’ own thermoregulatory mechanisms sound in a rapidly warming world?