Through our new WALCAfé series, WALC invites you to explore how Walking Arts plays a vital role in well-being, both individually and collectively, physically and mentally.
Our first conversation will focus on Walking Arts and Mental Health. We are delighted to have with us four speakers who bring diverse insights from research, therapeutic practice, community engagement, and public health perspective: Leon Clowes (UK), Tricia Enns (Canada), Alexandra Rodriguez (USA), and Alba Sauleda (Spain).
Alex Rodriguez is a Public Health PhD candidate at the University of Florida, and through the UF Center for Arts in Medicine, she has contributed to national and international research, including centring arts engagement as a health behaviour, defining arts participation for public health, and co-authoring a WHO report on arts and health in the US. In addition to her research, Alex is a Think Tank Board Member for the American Journal of Public Health and developed UF’s Honors course, Leveraging the Arts to Promote Public Health. Learn more here
Leon Clowes is an artist and researcher. Via practice research at London College of Music, University of West London, his PhD examined the use of autoethnography to self compassionately draw from difficult lived experience. In this talk, Leon will refer to reflect on the making of Empirical Evidence of the Existence of Angels and how this might be opened out to co-create work with other people in addiction recovery. The piece is built from 11 days and 11 hours of walks around central London while only two months into his addiction recovery journey.
https://www.instagram.com/leonclowes
Alba Sauleda is an artist-researcher, PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona, whose work investigates artistic methodologies through the lens of mad studies. Aiming to propose new imaginaries of madness, she connects the aesthetics of walking arts with the history of psychiatric practice. Through assemblage poetics and spatial displacement, her research seeks to generate reflections that challenge institutional reliance on forced hospitalization and uninformed treatments.
https://www.instagram.com/sauledaalba/
Tricia Enns (she/they) is a designer, educator and artist currently calling Tiohtià:ke/Montreal (Quebec, Canada) home, although they tend to be a little bit nomadic (when life allows). As a cis-fem-person with a queer body (and heart) and living with chronic pain Tricia has, more recently, been exploring questions of connection, care, and (be)longing. Her practice often uses creative cartography, debris, video, deep listening, electronics, sound art, handmade paper, other textiles, walking, scores, and zines. Their practice draws on participatory approaches to complexify what and how we know. Learn more at triciaenns.com.
This collective dialogue will explore:
- How does personal experience become a driver for community engagement?
- Questions of access: Whose bodies are recognized in public space, and how can Walking Arts open new possibilities for those living with mental health challenges?
- How can Walking Arts be integrated into therapeutic and health systems?
- What kinds of creative outcomes can emerge from walking practices?
This is not another conversation on walking’s positive impact on health. This is an open dialogue that asks: Who has access to Walking Arts, and how can these practices be made available to those who need them most?
This free online event marks the beginning of the WALCAfé series. The second episode, in January, will explore Walking Arts and Physical Health, while the third will be shaped by dialogue and feedback from participants in the first two conversations.
We warmly invite you to join us in this exchange and discuss together the future of Walking Arts & Health.
Hosts
Supported by
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.
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