In the winter of 2018-2019, we began walking an old road along the Saint-François River, long frequented by the W8banaki people, and subsequently by the first Scottish and French settlers to the area. Today this formalized road is called Chemin de la rivière in St-Félix-de-Kingsey in rural central Québec, Canada, on the unceded ancestral territory of the W8banaki Nation.

We were inspired to explore this ancient road by an archeological study of the area “Guide de connaissance et de sensibilisation à l’archéologie de la MRC de Drummond” published by Marie Fournier. Over several months we studied the road’s natural, economic and social histories, and studied it on foot, integrating and embodying the place. The terrain is now private wooded lots, residential land and farms; while the road is public space, we engaged in relational work with its residents.

To map the interaction of body-time-place, we imagined a continuous drawing made while walking which would transpose the walked experience onto paper. Our custom-built seismograph device, a hybrid body-object machine, translates the experience of walking the terrain through unobserved automatic drawing on a scroll which is gradually unfurled over time. Devices were exchanged and rewound so that both artists engaged with each drawing surface, layering our markmaking as we layered footsteps on the ground.

We walked and mapped the 10 km road along the river, ultimately making four drawings (each 365 cm in length) of the space created between the physical environment and the person passing through it. We later made the video work titled "corpstempslieu" in collaboration with videographer Dany Janvier.