El Grand Tour project curated by Clara Gari of Nau Côclea in Camallera, Spain which this year celebrates its 10th edition, is a 250+ km, three-week walk that participants undertake with artists who come from many disciplines.
Every day the walk is about 15km in duration, with participants joining artists that have different proposals to share with the walkers, and who develop other actions throughout the duration of El Grand Tour. In the destinations, you will be join by local people who will come to look, listen, read, hear and participate, in poetry, dance, installations, performances, music. You also explore the territory in the company of local people.
El Grand Tour is open to everybody, and you can choose to walk all the journey or only some of the days.
From Puigcerdà to Barcelona, from the 13th to 31st August we will walk together in a nomad and a ephemeral caravan made up of artists and all the people have signed up for the trip.
Some people will walk with us along the whole journey: the Pyrenean editor, designer and visual artist Marie Bruneau, the walking artist Jordi Lafon from the Deriva Mussol collective, and the Greek Anna Piatou, invited to participate this year to develop her research on the similarities in the vindication of historical justice in the memory of Greece and Catalonia as a result of their respective of Civil Wars. The visual artist Alba Sauleda has also been invited to develop her artistic research about dreams, and to build a common ‘freckle map’ made of the bodies of all the participants.
We are going to share a lot of stories with storytellers and will also meet local artists and ecologists along the way, such as the shepherds of Can Ginebreda, the singer, Toni Casassas, who recovers traditional vocal music in a contemporary key, or the duo of research artists SiteSize, have worked intensively on the ecology and memory of the Besós river, along the course of which we will arrive in Barcelona.
As Clara Gari writes: “We will have the opportunity to share their intuitions, their narratives and their gestures about the wandering of the mind, borders and limits, the experience of the body lived in community and in the passing of the days. If this sounds intriguing, or it arouses your curiosity and you want to know more about the project. You can consult our website or write to us by e mail Clara [splat] naucoclea [splot] com as there is still time to join and travel with us.”
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.
