The Walking Encounters Conference organised by the University of Western Macedonia took place in Psarades Greece in early July.
The week-long conference attracted large number of international artists, researchers and academics to a beautiful but remote location in Northern Greece, surrounded by mountains and beside a huge freshwater lake.

Among the many and various workshops and events was
Jenny Staff’s walk: Invisible to Visible

It was the re-walking of a solo pilgrimage undertaken in summer 2020 in Lancashire, England, at a critical point in her life. Jenny collected the number of physical steps using a pedometer as a way to document this walk. The piece was a shared collaborative walking of this pilgrimage, writ large onto the village square in the center of Prespas, taking up the whole space. Seven women walked together drawing a huge circle in chalk as they walked in silence to complete the 19,273 steps of the original pilgrimage together. delineating a huge circle, layer upon layer, through the repetitious act of walking. A powerful act of creating a pause, bringing geographies together, making them visible, in an ephemeral, transient reclamation of space and time. On either side of the walk were two poems, passed to Jenny by her granny, which explore courage, hope and self-awareness. They were read line by line in Greek and English, again connecting one landscape to another through a common vision.

Kel Portman’s video is a response to the act of ‘walking with intention’, capturing the essence of the circular, performative walk as meditative practice. The rhythm of walking emphasised by the use of stop frame and the sound of chalk on cobble stone as the repetitive chalk marks slowly become visible. Constant movement, before and after, walking together, held by their movement and creation of a temporary visual space made in a portion of shared time. Framed at the end with the final poem of hope gives a nuanced interpretation of the piece.