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
Yiannis Christidis and Efi Kyprianidou's experimental digital media project investigates how the repetitive bodily act of walking fosters mind-wandering and focused reasoning. Drawing on Charles Bukowski’s *White Dog*, the work explores walking's role in mental flow states that redirect attention outward or facilitate self-reflection, with implications supported by recent psychological and neuroscientific studies.
Linaceae
This short fiction explores the city of Brighton through the perspective of a neuroqueer person with PTSD, who perceives people and spaces as associative colours. The narrative is paired with a soundscape recorded during a walk around Brighton and Hove, with an accessible version available without sound for those with sensory sensitivities.
A Secular Pilgrim: Discussing the Efficacy of Pain and Suffering in Endurance Walking.
This Audio Paper documents a 160 km walk along the North Pilgrim’s Way in North Wales and The Two Saints Way between Cheshire and Lichfield, exploring the performative and embodied aspects of pilgrimage. The discussion focuses on the significance of the route itself, examining themes of meditation, repetition, pain, and the interaction with nature in both secular and sacred contexts.
Walking as Artistic Practice
We are excited to have Ellen Mueller as our guest for this Cafe. For the last few years, she has been compiling a comprehensive resource on walking art and sharing it through her blog and through her own teaching resources. However, she is now the author of recent book from SUNY Publishers that brings together
• On Cybernetic Capitalism
We welcome back Bob Parks. Bob was one of the pioneers of performance art in England in the 1960s, and on the US West Coast in the 1970s, and eventually has seen his practice evolve into a mixture of performance and walking art, subscribing to the idea that Walking Art is Performance Art on wheels, with the capacity to bring in the whole world's population.
Flaneurs, Fascists, and People Smugglers (Small Boats, Long Walks)
What goes on at Europe's borders, out of sight and out of mind? Simon Cole always loved the film Casablanca. Then 2020s life began to imitate 1940s art. Let's tease out treasure from the corridors of historical uncertainty.
Into the Night: An Evening of Nocturnal Wanderings
A gathering on the night before the longest night. This is the nocturnal world, the place we walk illuminated by constellations of twinkling skies and powerful planets; the locale where our perambulations offer other ways of dwelling and sensing our being in the world and its myriad human and non-human presences. Join us as we stroll together, physically and conceptually, sharing our stories, experiences, feelings, senses and night-time reveries. An evening with the moon and Fay Stevens.
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