Related
Poole Park: Pathways to the Past
The People’s Park. By the Park’s People. This sound walk was created as a contribution to Poole Park Celebration Day, held on 29th July, 2021. The audio materials were sourced from online video clips, in which people documented their own experiences while visiting the Park. These were combined with excerpts from interviews with local people, to provide some additional perspectives about the Park and how it has changed over time. Together, this mosaic of sounds provides a unique insight into how people value the Park, and how they use it to have fun in so many different ways.
Visual March to Prespes: walking with concepts and images
Our interactive, one-day seminar on The Visual March to Prespes: Walking with concepts and images will be held on Friday the 9th of January 2026 from 18:00 to 21:00 in the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (ISET) and streamed online. The Visual March to Prespes is a process that is taking place in the Prespes area
• The Blue Parade (what the body knows)
The Blue Parade is a participatory walking artwork created by Stefaan van Biesen and Annemie Mestdagh for the “Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies” meeting in Prespes, Greece. The piece consists of a portable, ultramarine-blue textile structure carried collectively through the landscape as a “nomadic library.” Participants walk together, collect small objects from the environment, and place them in attached PET bottles, creating a mobile archive of local memory and identity. The act of carrying the canvas fosters awareness, cooperation, and a temporary community, turning the walk into a sensory, reflective ritual that highlights embodied knowledge, shared experience, and themes of journey and displacement.
Related
Poole Park: Pathways to the Past
The People’s Park. By the Park’s People. This sound walk was created as a contribution to Poole Park Celebration Day, held on 29th July, 2021. The audio materials were sourced from online video clips, in which people documented their own experiences while visiting the Park. These were combined with excerpts from interviews with local people, to provide some additional perspectives about the Park and how it has changed over time. Together, this mosaic of sounds provides a unique insight into how people value the Park, and how they use it to have fun in so many different ways.
Visual March to Prespes: walking with concepts and images
Our interactive, one-day seminar on The Visual March to Prespes: Walking with concepts and images will be held on Friday the 9th of January 2026 from 18:00 to 21:00 in the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (ISET) and streamed online. The Visual March to Prespes is a process that is taking place in the Prespes area
• The Blue Parade (what the body knows)
The Blue Parade is a participatory walking artwork created by Stefaan van Biesen and Annemie Mestdagh for the “Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies” meeting in Prespes, Greece. The piece consists of a portable, ultramarine-blue textile structure carried collectively through the landscape as a “nomadic library.” Participants walk together, collect small objects from the environment, and place them in attached PET bottles, creating a mobile archive of local memory and identity. The act of carrying the canvas fosters awareness, cooperation, and a temporary community, turning the walk into a sensory, reflective ritual that highlights embodied knowledge, shared experience, and themes of journey and displacement.
Meadow Cultivators is a pair of walking-based land drawings crafted through weeks of intentional walking in two Syracuse, NY (USA) city parks during the summer of 2025 when I was artist-in-residence for the city. Each Cultivator was shaped by hours and days of walking with local youth and neighbors, and trimming grass underfoot as the grass and wild flora around our path grew.
Together we traced lines, spirals, and circles with our feet. With local hay and a grass whip, I reinforced the walking pathways, transforming ordinary lawns into meadows, and temporary drawings of the attention and motions of many steps. Conversations with neighbors, public works crews, environmental groups, and planning committees provided ongoing depth to our shared understanding of land parcels that we all had uniquely individualized relationships with…through walking, caring for, and imagining the land for others.
The work explored how walking as a public act reveals differences in care, safety, and belonging across civic landscapes. In Thornden Park, the grass shimmered gold, and many footsteps released the scent of clover, the space was open and visible. Neighbors crisscrossed the meadow and shared messages about their reflections and observations over many months. The land came to life with their shared stories.
In Kirk Park, walking meant listening more closely, fewer footsteps, the grass grew green and shaded with the hum of traffic, and the weight of stories embedded in the soil. Groups of young people wandered through and used the pathways to create games and bicycle races. Their peaceful and playful movement by walking and wheeling through the pathways captured the attention of neighbors who showed up to see new life in a quiet corner of their world.
Drone photographs document both walks as quiet geometries in motion ephemeral, rhythmic, and alive. By pairing these meadows, Meadow Cultivators invites reflection on walking as an ecological and civic gesture: how moving slowly through overgrowth can cultivate both awareness and community.
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