A performative walk by Mary Marinopoulou (Greece)
What happens when the body slowly disappears into the landscape? Can walking become an act of transformation that blurs the boundaries between self and environment?
A Participatory Walk in Disappearance invites participants to co-create a performative journey through the landscape. As the walk unfolds, natural and found materials gathered along the route are carefully placed onto the performer’s body and face. Layer by layer, the body gradually merges with its surroundings until it disappears beneath an evolving assemblage of leaves, grasses, earth, branches and other traces of place.
The work explores wearable scenography as a living process of transformation, questioning visibility, embodiment and the material relationships between humans and their environments. Participants become active collaborators in this collective ritual, discovering how simple gestures of gathering, touching and covering can evoke new ways of perceiving presence, absence and belonging.
Moving between performance, walking and environmental art, the work invites reflection on the material traces that connect us to the places we inhabit and the fragile entanglements that bind body, landscape and memory.
Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) is an artistic cooperation project, co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe, starting in January 2024 for four years. With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, backed up by an online counterpart in the format of a digital platform for walking arts.
WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers already practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, and having met at the significant previous walking arts events and encounters in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and during online activities at walk · listen · create.
We acknowledge the support of the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant program in the framework of the European project WALC (Walking Arts and Local Community).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
| Mary Marinopoulou |
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