Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City where she was also the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center from 2009 to 2017. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships.
As Babak Fakhamzadeh wrote in his book review: “Radhika Subramaniam’s Footprint: Four Itineraries is less a book about feet than about the entangled histories, metaphors, and politics that follow in their wake. A hybrid, sitting between critical essay, travelogue, and cultural history, Subramaniam’s text is structured around four “itineraries”, Stride, Pace, Trudge, and Track. The book meanders across centuries and continents, from fossilized prints at Laetoli to the boot marks on the moon, from Hopi migration routes to border patrol surveillance, from urban pavements to the abstracted “carbon footprint.”
Stories of footprints testify to colonialism, imperialism, and suppression but woven through them are histories of desire, persistence, mobility, and of lightness. In taking you on a series of journeys to understand why and what it means for our future, Footprint: Four Itineraries asks if it is yet possible to tread lightly on our world?
Walking Writers Salons are hour-long events in which you will get to meet a Walking Writer and learn from them how they weave writing and walking, and how they interpret their surroundings. Each Salon will include a discussion with the author, inviting questions from the audience, and may include a multiple choice quiz or other amusing challenge, in which a winner will receive a prize. We would like to thank Tim Roberts at np-press for offering a print edition of Footprint: Four Itineraries as a prize.
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
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Footprint: Four Itineraries
Footprint: Four Itineraries takes the footprint for a walk—to the Himalayas, the American southwest, to Arnhem Land and the moon, through monuments, prehistoric sites, sidewalks, and paintings, alongside artists, cartographers, surveyors and trackers, hesitating at revolutionary debate and solitary reverie, waylaid by war and land claims, sniffing greed and curiosity, recognizing both falter and fit, moving stealthily and boldly—to test the lasting power of this very material metaphor.
• Is it possible to tread lightly on our world?
A Walking Writers Salon with Radhika Subramaniam Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City where she was also the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center from 2009 to 2017. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban
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• Squatting and Common Land in Hackney
What has encouraged the rise in squatting today – what are the political, economic and legislative currents that encouraged this, and what is the impact of squatting not just in its immediate locale, but also across our collective culture? Who should care if it is on the increase? All this and much more was revelaed in Melissa Bliss’ Squatting and the Common Land walk co-produced by Andrew Stuck at the Museum of Walking.
• Walking the blue and the green
We welcome back Martyn Howe as a Walking Writers Salon guest to celebrate his new book The Coast is Our Compass. Why are we drawn to a place where the land meets the sea? And what deeper truths emerge when these instincts come together in a journey around England’s shoreline? The Coast is Our Compass
• • Beneath the Dreaming Spires
Five years in the making, A Certain Logic of Expectations is a surprising, intriguing photo narrative of a well-known university-dominated city, created by Mexican photographer Arturo Soto. Soto studied at Oxford as a doctoral student, traversing the city incognito, capturing the quirkiness of British suburbia, a counter-narrative to the tourism blurbs that often quote Victorian
• • Walking towards a home in Greece
When author Julian Hoffman first arrived in Greece’s remote Prespa region, his Greek was “almost non-existent.” Walking became a form of literacy for him—a way to learn the language of the land by tracing the steps of others, reading stone walls, abandoned houses, plant communities, and animal tracks. “Walking was a way in,” he says,
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A 100 day Walk across Europe with a Wolf for company
Conservation policies across Europe have been encouraging ‘re-wilding’ of landscapes, including the re-introduction for animals that once roamed more freely. Scientists have been tracking such re-introductions, and back in 2011, a wolf left its family pack in Slovenia, crossed the Alps and journeyed across Europe for thousands of kilometres. Critically-acclaimed and celebrated travel writer Adam
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Very interesting, looking forward to this
Made me think of this:
Footprints
by Stephen Wilson
You kept a record
of my first tooth,
first word, first steps.
Leaving the house now
after all those years,
my bootmarks are diamonds
in the mud outside
your door. Next winter
the sole’s lattice will be pressed
in the memory of snow,
lasting only
as long as the thaw
and in time my track faint
as rain, nothing but a ripple
of displaced water.
es
When we fall silent
When we let things grow
When we know —even without seeing— how many beings are watching us
It is a choreography between presence and lightness: we belong to the earth that walks us, and that is the heart of the footprint.