Is walking a subversive act? For the authors of the book Ways of Walking, it can be.

During a walk · listen · café broadcasted live from Girona in Spain, during the International Encounters “Walking Arts and Relational Geographies” editor Ann de Forest and author Nathaniel Popkin open a discussion about the subversive act of walking with the audience, online and on location. The authors Justin Coffin, Kabria Rogers, and Kalela Williams will be joining in online from Philadelphia. The walk · listen · café will hover over the walking stories and essays in the book Ways of Walking, that brings together 26 writers who reflect on walks they have taken and what they have discovered along the way.

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. In an age that prizes speed and efficiency, these essays acknowledge that the deliberate pace of walking runs counter to society’s drive to produce, accomplish – arrive. That necessary slowness also sharpens perceptions and heightens attention to one’s surroundings, to intricate ecologies and layered histories, to small delights and gross injustices. The particular urgencies of our time demand such close witness and scrutiny.

Collectively, the essays in Ways of Walking invite readers to ponder the questions that any good walk can stir up, encouraging them to leave the enticements of the metaverse behind, and join in the long parade of humanity moving forward, one step at a time.

A review about the book Ways of Walking.

Thanks to our collaboration with Nau Côclea, we have been able to make this event free.

Hosts

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Ann de Forest

 

Nathaniel Popkin

 

Supported by

Contemporary Art Center Nau Coclea

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