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100 Circles
Lenzie Moss is a designated Local Nature Reserve in East Dunbartonshire, near the city of Glasgow, UK. It is a boggy and marshy area with a history of peat extraction. The Moss now serves as a vital habitat for diverse wildlife, including water vole and bog rosemary, and the green hairstreak butterfly, alongside areas of silver birch woodland. My name is David Overend. I moved to the edge of Lenzie Moss in the summer of 2023 and began to regularly take the 25 minute walk round its border, sometimes daily. I have walked with friends, my children, and once with an expert on water vole habitats. Mainly I have walked alone: as a break from work; to start the day with some fresh air; in search of kestrels and deer. Every time I complete the circle, I notice, learn or experience something new. The walk has become something of a ritual, a way of marking the change in the seasons. Since I started to follow this route, I have had the feeling that there is more to discover and that this repeated circular walk might lead me somewhere. So, I am walking it 100 more times, each time with a different person from the local community, or a visiting artist or researcher with some interest in peatlands. As I share these encounters on this blog, I hope that a co-authored text will emerge, bringing a series of walked dialogues to a wider readership, and perhaps finding a way for the Moss to tell its stories. If you would like to be part of this project and join me for a walk round Lenzie Moss, please get in touch.
Related
100 Circles
Lenzie Moss is a designated Local Nature Reserve in East Dunbartonshire, near the city of Glasgow, UK. It is a boggy and marshy area with a history of peat extraction. The Moss now serves as a vital habitat for diverse wildlife, including water vole and bog rosemary, and the green hairstreak butterfly, alongside areas of silver birch woodland. My name is David Overend. I moved to the edge of Lenzie Moss in the summer of 2023 and began to regularly take the 25 minute walk round its border, sometimes daily. I have walked with friends, my children, and once with an expert on water vole habitats. Mainly I have walked alone: as a break from work; to start the day with some fresh air; in search of kestrels and deer. Every time I complete the circle, I notice, learn or experience something new. The walk has become something of a ritual, a way of marking the change in the seasons. Since I started to follow this route, I have had the feeling that there is more to discover and that this repeated circular walk might lead me somewhere. So, I am walking it 100 more times, each time with a different person from the local community, or a visiting artist or researcher with some interest in peatlands. As I share these encounters on this blog, I hope that a co-authored text will emerge, bringing a series of walked dialogues to a wider readership, and perhaps finding a way for the Moss to tell its stories. If you would like to be part of this project and join me for a walk round Lenzie Moss, please get in touch.
These alternative do-it-yourself walk-tours are specific to different cities. Starting off with a series of conversations with a number of locals, the artist gains knowledge about their day-to-day experience of their city. Gleaning information from these conversations, together with onsite-research walking, the artist maps-out a number of hidden and/or neglected spaces, significant to personal and collective memory, so as to create a fictional-narrative based on a mix of fantasy and reality.
The narrative forms basis for a sound-walk that takes the shape of a do-it-yourself walk-tour and invites the participant/walker/wanderer to enter a one-to-one relationship with that city. Through a combination of recorded found, ambience sounds and a voiceover narration, one is guided through different neighbourhoods, streets, spaces and places. This project purposefully moves away from the city touristic centre and focuses on the outer districts/areas which more often than another are neglected by authorities. During such one and a half to two hour walks one passes through streets and places that are not always so common, but are significant to the daily lives and memory of the local inhabitants. Each DIY walk is also complemented with a series of illustrated maps, presented in the form of a booklet, which help indicate the way as well as when to play or pause the audio. From time to time the audio is paused so as to get a live experience of the place here and now.
Through this mix of fantasy and reality it is up to the participant/walker/wanderer to decide how to interpret the narrative, whether to take it as a fact, a metaphor or a dream.
The project has been realized in two cities:
The Cities Within, 2016 — Vienna, Austria
Focusing on the Leopoldstadt and Favoriten districts, this project was part of the Artists in Residence programme of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and KulturKontakt Austria, and supported by the Cultural Export Fund of Arts Council Malta.
The Beach Beneath My Streets, 2017 — Haarlem, The Netherlands
Developed for the exhibition Daydreaming Subverts the World at Nieuwe Vide art space, this walk explored overlooked areas of Haarlem and examined the influence of the Situationists on contemporary artists.
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