Art reaches its full potential when it engages with societal issues, empowering communities beyond traditional art’s focus on objects and images. In this context, the artist acts as a community member, sharing personal experiences. Landscape, Place, and Space are crucial in shaping communal and nomadic practices. Europe’s rural communities, facing abandonment and destruction, can be revitalized through community-based art, with walking as a key practice. The WALC network, created by seven European partners in Greece’s Prespa region, aims to transform walking into a community-based practice, fostering social development in areas impacted by war and decline.
The WALC network aims to expand community-based practices from Greece’s Prespa region to a global audience through an ongoing outdoor art project with both physical and digital spaces. This initiative will bring together walking artists, ecologists, scientists, citizens, refugees, and immigrants to support rural sustainability. The presentation will feature discussions with curators and artists, followed by a roundtable with WALC partners from various countries. The event will conclude with an invitation for organizations, groups, and artists to join WALC’s journey, offering opportunities to participate in the residency program or collaborate remotely.
The presentation will unfold in three parts, beginning with a discussion featuring curator Lydia Matthews (Athens/New York), artist/researcher Clare Qualmann (Walking Artists Network / University of East London), and nomadic artist Jez Hastings (UK), followed by a roundtable moderated by curator and activist Nina Felshin (US). The roundtable will include WALC partners Clara Gari (Catalonia), Natacha Antao Moutinho (Portugal), Sylvie Marchand (France), Anna Luyten (Belgium), Andrew Stuck (UK), and Yannis Ziogas (Greece).
The talks will conclude with an invitation from WALC artistic coordinators Yannis Ziogas and Geert Vermeire, encouraging other organizations, schools, groups, collectives, and individual artists to join the journey.
Hosts
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.
Related
Libraries as Gardens – sound walk in Athens
The National Garden of Athens hosts an interactive audio project featuring global participants sharing stories and readings about their favorite public gardens during the pandemic, accessible via a mobile webapp or desktop map. This evolving sound walk includes lockdown silence recordings and aims to create a geolocated audio archive of personal and public garden experiences before, during, and after COVID-19.
• Ascending into Trenches
Yannis Ziogas I wander in places visible and invisible. I find objects, I trace experiences, I foresee conditions of creativity. Where do I locate myself? I have been in places […]I have wondered in conditions and situations[…] And now I am here. Where is that here? Who do I find in this here?
Visual March to Prespes: walking with concepts and images
Our interactive, one-day seminar on The Visual March to Prespes: Walking with concepts and images will be held on Friday the 9th of January 2026 from 18:00 to 21:00 in the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (ISET) and streamed online. The Visual March to Prespes is a process that is taking place in the Prespes area
• The Blue Parade (what the body knows)
The Blue Parade is a participatory walking artwork created by Stefaan van Biesen and Annemie Mestdagh for the “Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies” meeting in Prespes, Greece. The piece consists of a portable, ultramarine-blue textile structure carried collectively through the landscape as a “nomadic library.” Participants walk together, collect small objects from the environment, and place them in attached PET bottles, creating a mobile archive of local memory and identity. The act of carrying the canvas fosters awareness, cooperation, and a temporary community, turning the walk into a sensory, reflective ritual that highlights embodied knowledge, shared experience, and themes of journey and displacement.
Will this be available to watch later as a recording?
Bit late, but, yes. The video is linked in the sidebar.