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2015

White Cane Amplified

Carmen Papalia

Carmen Papalia

Artist and Disability Activist (Canada) 
Copyright: WalkingLab
Captura-de-Tela-2025-11-13-as-21.45.43-copiar.jpg
Still from video documentation
East Vancouver, Vancouver, BC, Canada

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White Cane Amplified is Carmen Papalia’s improvised work where he navigates a city using a megaphone instead of a cane, performing the social function of the white cane, asserting agency, and highlighting the challenges of communicating his needs.

White Cane Amplified is Carmen Papalia’s improvised process in which he replaces his white mobility cane with a megaphone as he navigates an unfamiliar route in the city. White Cane Amplified is one in a series of related projects in which the artist temporarily adopts a new system for his mobility in an effort to reclaim a sense of agency while distancing himself from institutional support services. A demonstration, primarily, of failure, White Cane Amplified depicts Papalia performing the social function of the white cane, speaking into a megaphone as he stumbles to find the words to communicate his nuanced and emergent needs.

Papalia has shown White Cane Amplified as part of exhibitions in New York, Dublin, Chicago, San Diego, Toronto, and Vancouver.

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Information available on Walking Lab’s website.

Credits

- Collaboration with Sara Hendren’s Adaptive and Assistive Technologies Lab at Olin College of Engineering.
- Papalia’ enacted White Cane Amplified for WalkingLab in July, 2017 in Vancouver.

APA style reference

Papalia, C. (2015). White Cane Amplified. walk · listen · create. https://walklistencreate.org/walkingpiece/white-cane-amplified/
Submitted by: Dani Spadotto

pedestrian acts

By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.

Added by Asli Ozgen-Tuncer
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