Marcel Mauss’s short and suggestive 1934 essay on the “techniques of the body” pointed out that the most ordinary movements and gestures of the human body are learned rather than natural. Cultures around the world have found extraordinarily diverse ways of performing fundamental human actions such as sitting, standing, squatting, bending, or walking. With the human body as an instrument, the human walker plays a variety of songs, with different rhythms, metres, and cadences, which grow from and impart different sociological, psychological and political meanings. The artists and scholars on this panel explore both the possibilities and the presumptions of walking as a technique of the body. What is the world assumed by a walker? What world does a walker bring into being? How do the measures of the walking body equally propel thought or facilitate mourning? Is walking a visual or a haptic technology? Can the design of our environments reflect neurodiversity?
Speakers are ( Rui Filipe Antunes (Portugal), Yannis Christidis and Efi Kyprianidou (Cyprus), Hanna Randall (UK) and Simon Piasecki (UK), moderated by Radhika Subramaniam, Associate Professor of Visual Culture, Parsons School of Design/ The New School, New York (US).
Left foot, right foot by Yannis Christidis and Efi Kyprianidou (Cyprus)
Linaceae by Hanna Randall (UK)
A Secular Pilgrim: Discussing the Efficacy of Pain and Suffering in Endurance Walking by Simon Piasecki (UK).
“Walking downtown Lisbon without the presence of the eye” by Rui Filipe Antunes (Portugal):
Presentation (15′)
Associated material – a 37 minutes long mosaic portrait of the walk.
Walk Listen Café @ WAC brings scholars and artists together around their research and their practices related to walking arts in a series of 8 online meet ups and conversations. Prerecorded paper presentations and other media will be available in this post at least 48 hours before the Walk Listen Café starts, and the participants are requested to look into the online materials before joining the Café.
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Video recording Only available to registered users. |
Related
Left Foot, Right Foot
How can experiences found in ordinary moments of sauntering fuel artistic activity? Yiannis Christidis and Efi Kyprianidou are involved in an experimental collaboration using digital media to explore the relationship between repetitive bodily processes, such as walking, and the mental experiences of mind-wandering and focused reasoning. The present artwork aims to critically examine the special
Linaceae
A piece of short fiction that explores UK city Brighton from the perspective of a neuroqueer person suffering with PTSD, who experiences people and spaces as associative colours. The narrative is accompanied with a background soundscape recorded on a walk around Brighton and Hove. For anyone with sensory sensitivity/overload, an accessible recording of the narrative
A Secular Pilgrim: Discussing the Efficacy of Pain and Suffering in Endurance Walking.
This Audio Paper was mainly recorded on the North Pilgrim’s Way in North Wales, and The Two Saints Way between Cheshire and Lichfield in England. I walked initially with with Father Robert Icke, a friend and Anglican Priest and my other friend, Dr Kris Darby, who has also been interested in the performative act of