Walking Home / Walking in Transition sets the theme for the next International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa (WAC 25).
This WALC Café offers a closer look at what you can expect in July 2025 and zooms in on its themes, context, place, the call criteria and what is offered to interested participants.
The Prespa International Walking Arts Encounters brings together artists who walk in response to a world marked by profound pain, loss, displacement, and environmental crises. In a time of overwhelming uncertainties, walking art may seem futile, yet it offers a vital escape from habitual ways of thinking and acting—creating space for new possibilities.
The encounters are deeply rooted in the local —hosted in Prespes, by a community at the edge of Europe— and rely on listening, sharing, and giving to and receiving from a remote place of overwhelming natural beauty. Yet, the Encounters are equally trans-local, shaped by contributions from people across the globe. The Walking Arts Encounters emerges as much from their questions, themes, and explorations as from local experiments, gifts, and acts of sensuous solidarity.
Through acts of hosting, gathering, and interweaving in everyday life and local community, they nurture new ethical and aesthetic pathways, not attracting attention, seeking power, or aligning with solution-driven agendas, but embracing failure, experimentation, and care.
The International Walking Arts Encounters is more than the sum of this all, an evolving ecology of practices, fluid subversions, quiet rebellions, and sensory provocations, made by people walking together.
And this leads to the invitation, stories and testimonies, shared in this Café. By organizers, artists and local residents, filling out the framework for a new International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa this Summer.
Geert Vermeire and Yannis Ziogas, artistic coordinators, will talk about the artistic context and concepts behind the International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa, and elaborate on what you can expect as a participant during the week-long event this summer.
Aspasia Voudouri, general coordinator of the organizing committee, will present Prespa a place and the organisational aspects of the event.
Anastasia Polychronidou (Greece) and Molly Wagner (Australia), who were at the previous encounters and will return in 2025, will share their experiences as participating artists.
Local residents Nikos Yannakis, biologist and former president of the Prespa National Park Management Organisation, and Thomas Manouris will talk about living in Prespa.
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.
| Video recording for Cafe |
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Video recording of Walking Home / Walking in Transition the theme set for the next International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa (WAC 25). This WALC Café offers a closer look at what you can expect in July 2025 and zooms in on its themes, context, place, the call criteria and what is offered to interested participants. The Prespa International
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