Symposium + Walkshops
September 5–7, 2025
Berghotel Alpenblick, Tenna, Safiental (CH) + hybrid
A transdisciplinary symposium on walking as an artistic practice, spatial experience, and epistemic method in the spirit of Lucius Burckhardt.
2025 marks the 100th anniversary of Lucius Burckhardt, the founder of promenadology (also known as strollology, science of walking). Yet this occasion is much more than a historical commemoration. In a present marked by ecological crisis, urbanization pressure, and digital spatial reconfiguration, his thinking gains new urgency. Burckhardt’s approach to take walking seriously as an epistemological practice can be read today as an invitation to critical world perception. WALKING becomes a method to question those designs that appear “natural,” and a practice through which space, bodies, and power relations become visible.
For Burckhardt, the walk was not an end in itself, but a means to challenge perspectives. According to his thesis, we do not see the landscape—we see our expectations. In a world shaped by fast planning processes, algorithmic navigation, and global acceleration, promenadology offers a decelerating counter-movement: a thinking in motion, a moment of pause through walking.
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Thinking in Motion
Video recording of a talk that introduces WALKING, a symposium exploring practices of walking as modes of perception, spatial inquiry, and collective reflection. Situated in relation to Lucius Burckhardt’s Spaziergangswissenschaft, WALKING brings together positions from landscape architecture, art, research, and curatorial practice to examine how environments are read, constructed, and contested through movement. The presentation
+2 Ways of Walking
Is walking a subversive act? For the authors of WAYS OF WALKING, it can be. Some walk across forbidden lines, violating laws to seek freedom. Some walk to bear witness to social injustice. Still others engage in a subtler subversion, violating the social norm of rapid, powered transportation to notice what fast travelers miss. WAYS
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