walking & loiterings with intent…
“Daily strolls belong to that class of overlooked practices that apparently cannot be co-opted by the commercial economy and that are, in the view of scientific knowledge, insignificant.”
Research impulse: I love this quote from Jean Augoyard’s 2007 book Step by Step, Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project. The notion that everyday practices, in this case walking, can be overlooked as not worthy of scholarly attention is increasingly contested. However, there is also something subversive about practices that are overlooked and that remain under the surface, as walking does still for most walkers not in the practice of intentional walking.
Walking intentionally and with attention can be an interruption in itself: an interruption in the increasingly fast pace of global travel, communications and commodification. My walking work looks to interrupt our assumptions and perceptions of our surroundings, the beings within it and the wider environment in order to create opportunities for meaningful encounter and exchange.
A brief video introduction to my walking research practice, made in Cardiff and Haverfordwest, 2018
I’m interested in walking’s potential as a different way to access creativity and provoke dialogue and this leads me to work and walk collaboratively with others as much as possible. I create opportunities and improvisations with a specific interest in how we inhabit and engage with our neighbourhood and local environment. These invite participation from anyone walking and moving in a neighbourhood, a field, a street… and provide an opportunity to engage people in conversation – from topics as mundane as the weather to personal histories, and discussions on architecture, urban planning, transport and consumerism – and play. They also bring together unexpected and unpredictable groupings of people who might not normally converse with each other.
Above: Walkers on the Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
Our everyday walks from home to the shops, work, school, mosque, church and pub are replete with inscriptions of the body, movement, reactions, interactions and encounters – most of which we generally absorb and process in an unconscious manner. My work seeks to interrogate this ‘unconsciousness’ and to bring to the surface our awareness of these shifts and transformations through a series of interruptions and interventions, thereby unearthing the often‐ignored narratives that the city produces and is produced by and exploring how relationships are articulated, developed, fragmented, broken and re‐stitched.
Inspired by the work of David Seamon and Jane Jacobs, and drawing on the work of artist practitioners such as the Situationists, Walkwalkwalk, Francis Alys, Wrights & Sites, and Doug Aitken I examine how our neighbourhood landscape is inscribed and written through ‘place ballets’ of movement, rest and encounter and how these choreographies may be altered through practices of interruptions and interventions in our everyday walks. Walks are usually made in small groups, as part of a workshop or ongoing research project or as part of a festival or conference.
Above: Cross-walk crack, Walking in Detroit, September 2017
From 2014 and building on previous years of walking practice begun in Detroit, continued throughout Western Europe and the UK I have developed research that emerges from the core practice of walking as artistic medium. Four of these, Desire lines, Chip Walks, Whatsapp Walking and Re-sounding the Landscape are presented below, firstly:
1. Detroit and desire lines
Research impulse: Desire Lines: What a beautiful concept. Saying the words conjures up a multitude of images and feelings - bodies, flow, fluidity, lust, geometries, tracing...almost infinite possibilities of imaginings. For me desire lines also signify deviations and interruptions - from the constrictions of the urban planning grid, and from psychological pressures of time and conformity: making paths where we want to go, literally and metaphorically, making our own way, in our own time. However, for others, and specifically in Detroit, these paths are born out of necessity and a lack of municipal infrastructure for large swathes of the population.
Above: Desire line, Walking in Detroit, September 2017
Simon Pope calls a desire line running through former common land in Kennington Park, London "only one of many acts of resistance" (2000:70) Walking desire lines, alone, in pairs and small groups in Detroit, we thread new ways through the grid, out of rhythm with the streamlined assembly line and fast lane to the suburbs, slowly, open to the vagaries of weather and variances in topography, to chance encounters with people and animals. We resist the tempting flow of commerce and industry, along paths made through fields and abandoned lots, where a startled pheasant takes off in noisy flight. These are the desire lines that are trodden into the vacant lots by the everyday steps of women, men and children going about the everyday business of getting where they need to go. A clearly visible, yet hidden, trace of human movement and mobility, that is not counted and statisticised but one that is implicated with meaning and power, poverty and freedom.
Above: Desire line, Walking in Detroit, September 2017
I have been following these desire lines since the start of my walking practice accompanied by other walkers, travellers, pedestrians, amblers, ramblers, drifters and loiterers. Emerging conversations have developed into other projects and artworks, and between 2014 and 2018 I continued to walk Detroit desire lines more intentionally, re-tracing my footsteps, repeating favourite walks and re-finding the paths we had walked during the earlier Walking Project meeting new people, walking with colleagues old and new; encountering the strange within the familiar. There were also new paths and I was bearing witness to and documenting the changing cityscape by walking through it, obsessively taking pictures, as if trying to stop inevitable and inexorable change. Land and nature shift constantly, in ways that concrete and metal do not. Cities creep into nature, nature creeps into the cities. Detroit is undergoing yet another regeneration, yet again mostly benefitting those that can afford the trendy apartments and new builds within the city centre and midtown. Yet the sidewalks that disappeared into thin air twenty years ago were still not finished, the city maintenance department had still not repaired the overgrown pavements that force pedestrians into the road. More were grassed over, others completely cracked apart, sparkling with shards of broken glass. Regeneration was partial, as is the perspective on it. People are still having to live on the wrong side of the tracks.
In 2016 I was invited to exhibit visual work from my walking practice at the Manchester People’s History Museum curated by Morag Rose and the Loiterers Resistance Movement (LRM). This gave me a chance to gather all the material from walks and walking-related projects between 1999 - 2016. The result was a multi-layered visual presentation of walking narratives, conversations, and excavations from fifteen years of this everyday practice-research. Yet it was ultimately unsatisfying in its lack of being able to convey the immersion and intensity of the embodied experiences.
Art exhibitions tend to be two- or three-dimensional with viewers and spectators separated from each other, simultaneously our different senses are separated during such visits. Keenly feeling the limitations of this after visiting the exhibition, I became interested in developing other methods to re-create the past before our eyes, in situ, rather than in books, on film and in exhibition halls and galleries.
Walking Detroit desire lines once again in 2017 with artist and academic Bill Tite, from Ohio, IT developer and theatre director, Erika Block, from Ann Arbor and Jean Wilson, longtime Detroit activist, over on the East Side I came upon yet another grassed over mound of earth, more ruined buildings that had been razed by the city into small hills across the city landscape, looking like ancient earthworks and burial mounds. Except that for me it wasn’t just another mound of earth - this earthwork contained the remains of John’s Carpet Bar, an old Blues Bar and weekend music gathering place on the East Side. I had strong memories attached to this place. It was nothing more than a lean-to garage, lined with carpet where John served chicken wings on plastic plates in between picking up his guitar and playing the blues with the band. He only had a few teeth left and like so many other inner city Detroit residents, couldn’t afford health insurance. When John died, the bar fell into dilapidation, the house was set on fire and subsequently razed by the city, leaving only a mound of earth, growing grass and the ubiquitous sumac trees. But I could still see the Carpet Bar, remember the rickety porch entrance and smell the mix of mouldy carpet, chicken wings and grass. But Bill and Erika could not, they’d never been there, and I couldn’t describe it fully, couldn’t quite remember the location of the intriguing sign “John’s Carpet Bar - don’t go away mad”…couldn’t remember the name of the band…I wanted to be able to give them the real flavour but I was coming up short…..I tried writing…
Song for John’s Carpet Bar
It was just that: a bar created from his garage (in the loosest meaning of the term) that he’d built onto his house with wall to ceiling carpet. Carpet that moulded to the mud floor and curled away from the corners where tacks or glue no longer held it. We had dressed up - nice shirts, trousers, from Value Village, we’d had our hair cut by Curtis out on DeQuindre, previously Black Bottom. We looked butch, older, out of place, but we’d come to hear the blues and to dance. The band was already playing, a bass player, guitar, and drums. Now and then John would go up and play, when he wasn’t serving beer, whisky or chicken wings which he brought from out back on small polyester plates. When I say the band was playing, they did a lot of beginnings, playing around, improvising, then when they’d break into a full tune we’d get up from the white plastic tables and chairs and dance, slightly awkwardly, the carpet making it difficult to look cool and slide your feet easily from one move to another. There never seemed to be too many others on the dance floor or at the tables and those that were there were from the neighbourhood. Things would peter out, the musicians would stop, John would take up the guitar, the electrics faltered, lights flickered. Plastic cups fell to the floor. The musicians were black, we were white, lesbians, looking for Detroit, for one kind of Detroit.
Sunday late mornings on were busy - there was a large abandoned grassy lot on Frederick, opposite John’s Carpet Bar, low wide cars slid to a stop along the sidewalk, people meandered along to sit on improvised seats, at tables, on picnic blankets, benches, cable wheels, they brought barbecues, big coolers, deck chairs, umbrellas. It was summer, buzzing with bees and the excitement of conversations, laughter and handslaps. The corn tamales guy had been setting up for a while, the mc was taking names of who was going to perform and making a running order. More people came after church, looking smart in Sunday bests, well turned out. The sun got hotter, people staked their claims to the shade of a catalpa tree. Anyone could ask to perform and be put on the list. Anyone could get up and sing or dance and there was always someone, a little or very drunk, with few clothes on, who would be up there, in front of the band, swaying, singing, a bottle or plastic cup in hand, laughing. Children running around, people eating, food smoking, We were all there to hear the blues and make the most of a summer Sunday in a leafy neighbourhood in the Motorcity never mind that it was so close to the incinerator, or that the toilet was nothing but a couple of pallets with some waffle board tacked on; it had a sign, saying ‘toilet’. I was a white girl from over the pond. Nothing to be doing in this city except to wonder what was going on, who was doing it and why.
Above: I came across this installation, not attributed to anyone, but I suspect it might be the work of Detroit artist Tyree Guyton. Walking in Detroit, September 2017
Even that didn’t serve to create a full picture. This experience sparked ideas of creating virtual spaces in the landscape where memories, narratives and images from those sites can be experienced by passers-by and walkers, residents and visitors. I wanted to be Dr. Strange in the eponymous movie, where he turns back time. But I didn’t want to change history, I just wanted to be able to communicate and see how time, events and people change spaces and places before our very eyes.
At that time Erika Block was working on creating 3D virtual environments, drawing on the work of Carl Sagan and his memory palaces. In 2018 we started working together on the idea of creating collaborative, immersive 3D environments that could create and access knowledges of place through physical and virtual neighbourhood walking, leading to deeper, more meaningful understandings of place. These would be called WalkIEs - Walking into Immersive Experiences.
Walking into Immersive Experiences (WalkIEs) combines the possibility of recalling information efficiently and intuitively with and through an artistic practice of walking. A WalkIE will virtually reverse time with a hand gesture or mouse click as we walk through landscapes and neighbourhoods, into different historical eras. It will enable us to see how spaces, places and sites have changed and been transformed over the years. We will be able to experience how rapid or slow change has been, see how demographics and neighbourhoods have shifted and perhaps we will understand more clearly how and why our present has been shaped in the way it has and what we can do to shape the future in more informed and immersive ways.
The originality of this project lies in combining the two elements of performative walking interventions and the development of 3D environments, to create a public participatory, activist archaeology of sites, events and artefacts. Such excavations have the potential to unearth hidden voices and confront injustices, errors of perception, racism, homophobia and classism with potential to shift perceptions and real experiences of agency and status. This offers us new ways of interacting with and exploring the past, present and future, with innovative technologies deepening understandings of our environment and creating new meanings and contexts through interactive, immersive experiences. This work is still in process yet has been strangely paused during the pandemic, although it is actually about creating virtual experiences which are creating day after day with each other…..
Desire lines continue to inspire me, leading me along less travelled low ways and byways, knowing that I am retracing and following in the steps of others who have gone before and creating paths for others to follow after me.
References
Aiken, Doug (2007) Sleepwalkers, New York: Museum of Modern Art/Creative Time
Augoyard, Jean-Francois (2007) [1979] transl. by David Ames Curtis Step by Step, Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project, translated by Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Debord, Guy (1955) Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography France: Published in
Les Lèvres Nues #6, 1955
Jacobs, J. (1962) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, London: Jonathan Cape
Pope, S. (2000) london walking: a handbook for survival, UK: ellipsis
Seamon, D. (1976) a Geography of the lifeworld: movement, rest and encounter, London: Croom Helm
Wrights & Sites (2006) A mis-GUIDE to ANYWHERE, UK: Wrights & Sites
www.francisalys.com
www.walkwalkwalk.org.uk
Continuing to build on walking practices in 2018:
2. Chip Walks
Research impulse: Notions of retracing, rewalking and reiteration thread their way through my walking practice: Resonating with projects such as Dee Heddon’s re-performing and re-tracing of Mike Pearson’s ‘Bubbling Tom’ and the idea of re-doing and re-making other peoples’ walking ‘scores’ I accompanied walker and academic Blake Morris, as he walked his way through scores in the book ‘Ways to Wander’. I chose walkwalkwalk’s Chip Walk where a bag of chips becomes a tool to explore places walkers are in. Blake happened to be walking it on my birthday, in August, and I would be on the Greek island of Lesvos - what better way to celebrate than to go from taverna to taverna eating chips.
During that spring and summer on Lesvos, questions to do with resilience and sustainability also started to emerge as I worked with Cookie Arnone, an artist-activist who was coordinating different kinds of projects, from building a womens’ centre to organising paper and paint for arts workshops at One Happy Family (OHF), a resource day centre for refugees in Mytilini (capital of Lesvos). OHF is a long but walkable distance from Moria Camp and is organised largely by refugees themselves with support from European NGOs.
Photo left: Chip Walk score from the book, Ways to Wander by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann
When we discussed resilience we were thinking of it in a sense of creating the “capacity to retain a degree of integrity, self organization and self awareness by engaging a process of finding value in the constant flux of everyday life.” (Douglas, Fremantle, Delday: 2004). Situations where people can regain or find this resilience become crucial in these life and death circumstances as experienced in Moria camp and creating and participating in artworks offer such opportunities. Felski suggests we might begin to do this by “addressing the practical and experiential logic of everyday modes of orientation rather than seeking to transform or transcend them” (2002: p. 617). Thus a familiar walk with additional elements took root as an idea.
Above: Chips on the Chip Walk, Prespes, July 2019
Because what then, was my birthday Chip Walk with Blake? It felt frivolous and strangely irresponsible: I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that I would be walking small distances between eating places in the village where I lived, Skala Eresos, getting food easily, celebrating with friends whilst others not that far away in Mytilini would be walking eight kilometres from the Moria refugee camp to the not-for-profit taverna, Home for All for a free evening meal. It might be the only meal of the day for them in a camp filled to more to four times its capacity and where a two-hour wait for sub-standard and sometimes inedible food was the norm. Moreover, it is still the norm that many people all over the world walk miles to get food and water each day.
To highlight this fact and to continue to raise awareness of the desperate situation for refugees in Moria camp I decided I had to walk a different kind of Chip Walk. I organised a Lesvos Chip Walk to start at Moria camp and end with a free meal at Home for All.
Above: Accompanying wearable artwork - foam chips for walkers, Lesvos 2018
Above: Handwritten poster advertising the 2018 Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All.
There was a chip van just outside the gates at Moria camp where I could buy us chips at the start of the walk then there would be food at the end of the eight kilometres at Home for All. We advertised the walk and asked people to join us; it would be hot and dry, but we received enthusiastic responses and started out with 62 walkers, refugees, asylum seekers and NGO workers and volunteers from all over the world: from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Tibet, Greece, UK, France, The Republic of Congo, the Netherlands, Germany, many of whom had crossed the sea in tiny plastic rafts to Lesvos from Turkey.
Above: Posters and chips for the Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
People were so enthusiastic to start the walk that they left before the chips were cooked. Three of us waited to get four large portions of chips, more as a token to symbolise the essence of the walk than anything else, because even when we caught up with everyone people did not attack the chips with the gusto that I have come to expect from UK chip eaters. By contrast, the chip brooches I had made from cutting up yellow car sponges were much more enthusiastically received and worn.
Above: Foam artwork chips and fresh potato chips on the Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
The brooches were my attempt to document and add a further aesthetic aspect to the walk, where “Metaphor can shine light on particular aspects of an issue, make unexpected depth visible, or bring into focus what is yet unclear or previously unexplored”(2003:7). It was important to me that the walk was still an artwork as well as an activist intervention and making sponge chips was just as an important part of the process as buying the hot chips from the van outside the camp gates.
My research practices of walking, clowning and unlearning are interwoven through the concept of interruptions: interruptions of assumptions and expectations, of logic and habit, of seriousness and play and of everyday movement which link all these elements. The Chip Walk became an additional interruption in an intentional everyday kind of walk and one that brings together people around a common purpose, buying and eating food. Noticing and perhaps discussing the surrounding environment might happen almost as an aside, in a deceptively easy and simple way. In this way the chips might be considered almost a playful misdirection, in magician's terms, where other issues emerge almost by chance, through incidental conversations, imaginings, local knowledge and the re-surfacing and re-telling of memories as the Chip Walk moves on.
Above: A celebration of walking together with and for each other, Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
The walk gave each of us a chance to walk and talk with different people, at different paces and at different levels of engagement. Some people were already friends, some worked together, had become friends in the camp or had crossed the sea together. All wanted to engage in conversations and discussions - many about family, about their situation in the camp, about their desires and dreams for the future - where they wanted to be and what they wanted to be doing: not living in the camp and not being sent back to where they had fled from. We were creating what Grant Kester (2004: 3) calls dialogic art where we take “the traditional art materials of marble, canvas or pigment” and replace them with “socio-political relationships.”
Above: More than sixty-two of us walked and talked: Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
Along the way we talked, introducing ourselves to each other, hopefully creating what Kester (2004: 6) suggests is “an open space where individuals can break free from pre-existing roles and obligations, reacting and interacting in new and unforeseeable ways.”
Above: Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
The Chip Walk enables us to interrogate the commonalities of circumstances (people gathering together for simple, everyday activities of walking, eating and talking) and of disparities that exist in these worlds apart - between incomes, accessibility to work and housing, in addition to issues of gentrification, sustainable building and urban planning. The two main contexts that we have practised this work in: Lesvos and Hackney, are worlds apart yet the action of walking and eating and talking, following a score for an artwork, creates in each location a temporary community with ‘rich opportunities to engage people in the examination of issues of societal concern’ (Romney, 2001)
Above: Eating together at the (now) not-for-profit taverna Home for All at the end of the Chip Walk from Moria Camp, Lesvos, August 2018
Above: Making sure people who drive past us know why we are walking: Chip Walk from Moria Camp to Home for All, Lesvos, August 2018
Such walks emphasise the significance and relevance of walking for social justice and change in public, and together. Rebecca Solnit writes: “Crowds out in the street do have power, and they sometimes do change what goes on in governments.” She suggests that rather than view these walks as extraordinary events, we need to consider them as “an extension of the ordinary. The exercise of democracy begins as exercise, as walking around, becoming familiar with the streets, comfortable with strangers, able to imagine your own body as powerful and expressive rather than a pawn.”
We continue to conduct further iterations of this convivial and participatory artwork: In July 2019 Clare Qualmann (of walkwalkwalk) and I made a simultaneous Chip Walk in East London and in Prespes, Greece for the Walking Encounters/Walking Bodies/Walking Practices conference.
I spent 2 days scouting the village of Prespes for possible chip sources and found three tavernas who were happy to supply us with take-away portions. I also explored ways of organising a route but realised that the chip shop experience is uniquely British. The tavernas in Prespes were very close to one another giving us little distance and time to walk, talk and digest between portions.
The owner of the taverna I was staying at peeled potatoes early on in the day, keeping them in a bucket of water before cutting them later by hand for cooking.
I also made more chip brooches with the intention of selling them for 1€ to raise money for Home for All, the taverna in Lesvos that feeds the refugees for free.
Photo left: Chips in preparation for the Chip Walk, Prespes, July 2019
Rather than walking from chip shop to chip shop, we waited, and waited for the chips. I became anxious, the point of the intervention was to walk and talk while eating chips. Yet conversely, people found the ambiance relaxing - in the middle of the hectic business of conference networking here was an opportunity to slow down, talk in a more relaxed way with old and new colleagues, residents and visitors alike. The chips came in the end, from several tavernas at once
Photo right: Talking, not yet walking, waiting for chips for the Chip Walk, Prespes, July 2019
Above: Chips and walkers talking on the Chip Walk, Prespes, July 2019
We later walked through the village loosely following a route I had prepared, the chips had filled us, making us walk more slowly. We stopped and chatted to people along the way, and were asked by an elderly resident what we were doing. She then proceeded to tell us a long story about childhood evacuations during the Civil War, resonating with walks conducted by other colleagues in the local mountains which are still scattered with trenches and remains of lookouts and gun placements.
Continuing with the Chip Walk, for Walking's New Movement conference in Plymouth 2019 Clare and I conducted a shorter chip walk sampling chips around the Barbican area of the city, having discussions with chip shop workers and taking note of the regeneration of buildings and structures that has resulted in a particular mix of architectural transformations of the area. The chip walks forefront food as a lens through which to connect walking, urban regeneration, conviviality, migration and research methodologies for social change.
These subsequent Chip Walks and the recounting of the Lesvos Chip Walk have enabled me to raise money (by selling sponge chips for 1 euro each) which I have been able to give to Home for All, contributing to the purchase of a pizza oven which now provides more free dinners for more refugees (still no chips!).
Above: Chip brooches sold for 1€ to Walking Encounters/Walking Bodies/Walking Practices conference participants. Proceeds bought a pizza oven for Home for All. Prespes, July 2019
Clare and I subsequently performed another iteration of the Chip Walk, this time in the Barbican area in Plymouth for Walking’s New Movements conference. We engaged in discussions with chip shop workers and took note of the regeneration of buildings and structures that has resulted in a particular mix of architectural transformations of the area. The chip walks forefront food as a lens through which to connect walking, urban regeneration, conviviality, migration and research methodologies for social change. Clare and I wrote a book chapter for the book Walking Bodies, Papers, Provocations, Actions, published in September 2020 Here we interrogated and problematized our Chip Walks further. However that is not the end of the Chip Walk! We are planning another walk in Lesvos with activists, artists and refugees…
The element of repetition, the re-iteration of previous walks, enables us as walk artivists to consider the similarities and and differences between walks. Repetition is not a means to subordinate individuality or uniqueness but rather a way of making sense of patterns of culture (Felski, 2002). Additionally it enables us to look askance at our processes and methods, refining, re-interrogating our practices, in exchange with others. Repetition is an opportunity to transform and shift, interrupting, relooking and re-experiencing.
References
Douglas, A. Fremantle, C. and Delday, H. (2004) The Dynamic of the Edge: practice led research into the value of the arts in marginal spaces ‘Sensuous Knowledges 1’ international conference proceeds. Bergen: National Academy of the Arts 2004
Felski, R. (2002) Felski, R. Everyday Aesthetics, The Minnesota Review, Winter/Spring 2009 pp. 71-72, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns7172/credos_felski.shtml accessed 4 April 2010
Heddon, D. (2014 ) Performing the Archive Following in the Footsteps, August 2014 Performance Research 7(4) DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2002.10871893
Kester, G. (2004) Conversation Pieces, Community & Communication in Modern Art, USA: University of California Press
Pearson, M. (2006) In Comes I, UK: University of Exeter Press
Romney, Patricia. 2001. “Dialogue: The Spirit of Wonder.” Animating Democracy web site: http: //www. AmericansFor The Arts. org/animatingdemocracy/.
Solnit, R. Democracy should be exercised regularly, on foot The Guardian Thursday July 6, 2006
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We have been interrupted.
Suddenly we are no longer able to meet together and walk as we used to, walking and talking, making conversation, piecing together fragments of observations about our surroundings and other, seemingly unrelated thoughts as we meandered through neighbourhoods near and far.
We have been interrupted by the biggest Unprecedented Interruption (since the Second World War) (they say)
This massive, current interruption to all of our habits and familiarity, everyday moments, neighbourhood rhythms, where everything has been completely turned inside out, upside down, has made so much appear strange and alienating. The pandemic has curtailed those walks in groups where we moved easily from one person to another, walking and talking in 2s and 3s, clumping together over a found object, listening and watching a fellow walker make observations to the group, following an idea or direction of another. During the first weeks of the 2020 lockdown, walking alone was one of the few permitted activities that I could be sure I would do everyday – without endangering others – either those I passed outside or anyone in the tiny household I am currently living in consisting of my 93-year old mother and her full-time carer.
More than ever, in 2020, an everyday walk was a means of re-finding the familiar, no longer seeking the surprising or the strange.
But the weeks have passed, my new situation has become routine, I have formed other habits. The walking, that was an escape from the household has also become an escape into the everyday and mundane, experiencing the little extraordinary moments and encounters within the environment as I walk the increasingly familiar pavements, public footpaths and bridleways in this small country town. And I am still finding ways to walk with others. Just as we now zoom for meetings and conferences, for end of week drinks, quizzes and bar mitzvahs, WhatsApp has become increasingly important as a means for me to walk with others. What follows is the documentation emerging from my walking practice-research using WhatsApp during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
3. WhatsApp Walking together and apart.
Above: Students’ pictures taken during the Whatsapp Walks March - October 2020
Research impulse: I had begun using my phone to create text message walks about 15 years ago, when I was living in Detroit and wanted to connect with other friends and walking artivists further afield (I had a Motorola clamshell - it was very snazzy). Let’s go for a walk together [I would suggest] and you will need your cell phone. My idea was to get to know our neighbourhoods differently and to share thoughts, images and sounds after we’d walked. We would text each other instructions to carry out: Go out of your house and turn right, carry on for 100 yards then take the next turn left. Pick up something from the pavement in front of your right foot. Walk backwards for 1 minute. Stand on the next corner, close your eyes and listen. It was another way of experiencing the unfamiliar in the familiar – and surprising how many times an instruction would take me into a completely unknown part of my neighbourhood. It was a bit like using the first fax machine – miraculous to see the instructions appear then to do them at the same time as others but in a totally different global location. However, it was clunky to set up groups, some people didn’t get all the text instructions for one reason or another, there were frequent delays, and you needed a camera as well, and switching from camera to phone, from pointing and clicking to typing was time consuming. Then you had to wait until you got home to upload photos and sound files. But the smartphone became mainstream and changed everything.
Above: Students’ pictures taken during the WhatsApp Walks March - October 2020
From 2014 I began to trial a variety of methods to document walks and drifts with University of South Wales students - Storify was a great platform – to which we could send tweets and images – but it then disappeared to be replaced by Pearltrees which isn’t at all the same. Google photos is also a possibility for post-walk upload (or if you have enough data and bandwidth you can do it on the move) but each person needs to caption their photos separately from taking the photos.
I started using WhatsApp in 2016 with a class of MA Drama students at USW a few years ago, when we took intentional walks as part of their Reflective Practice module. We created one WhatsApp group and 3 physical groups, with 4 – 5 people in each one. Starting from the Cardiff Atrium foyer all together, each group was to walk for 40 minutes (20 minutes out and 20 back). Each group would take it in turns to send an instruction for everyone to carry out. These ranged from: “Turn left and then cross over the road” to “Twirl your way along the street for 100 metres” to “Take a photo of a window on the third floor”. The trick was to leave each group enough time to complete the instructions and to give enough space to improvise if the instructions were impossible to carry out (if there were no buildings with windows, for example). We took photos as we went but discussion, conversations and laughter were predominant, so documentation was shared when we got back together. With such group walks the focus becomes more about being together in public space and noticing public responses and reactions to us on those walks - just the sight of a group of people intentionally walking for even 150 metres together is unusual, it sends out different visual signals than a group of friends out together for a stroll.
The usual choreography of the area, how people move around the spaces and each other, is interrupted and disturbed. Of course, executing arguably strange actions such as hopping on one foot then the other until you come to the next street is likely to elicit raised eyebrows and some rolled eyes. For drama students the everyday performativity was quite an eye-opener and post-walk discussions centred around feelings of (dis)comfort in ‘doing weird stuff’ on the street, to what degree they felt they were performing and how we use costume as a disguise and to boost confidence. Only in our post-walk discussions did we become more focused on what we had seen and heard.
Above: Students’ pictures taken during the WhatsApp Walks March - October 2020
During the 2020 lockdown I decided that we could still continue with our WhatsApp walks, each of us in our various lockdown locations, taking turns to offer instructions. One student was shielding and walked around her garden with her partner and two children, another walked around her flat, whilst the rest of us moved further afield. The walk lasted just over an hour and with a group of 13 individual walkers our WhatsApp thread was peppered not only with instructions coming thick and fast, photos and sound files, but with comments and side conversations. I’ve become very sensitive to the fragility of balance of power between the ‘artist’ and audience, and here, between lecturer and student, in what is a participatory and collaborative task. As individual walkers everyone needs to be in control, but I need not have worried. With WhatsApp I had way less control than I would have if I were physically facilitating a group walk. Everyone had a phone so the project was literally out of my hands for most of the time. It was amazing to see the amount of documentation (7 sides of A4), thoughts and energy that we generated within that one hour and it lifted our spirits in the early weeks of lockdown.
Above: Students’ pictures taken during the WhatsApp Walks March - October 2020
However, on initial reflection I didn’t feel I had been able to pay enough attention to the actual walk and my surroundings – I was too focussed on the instructions: taking a photo of something orange, or of objects that weren’t obeying social distancing rules (in my case it was postal vans parked outside the sorting office, in another’s it was flower pots in a garden, for another water meter box covers on the pavement ) or I was trying to come up with a silly dance, finding the next turn right or left. It wasn’t great for being at one with my environment…..yet, when I looked again through our conversations, the photographs and sound files, most of us had paid close attention at various points, picking out small, inconsequential objects, or noticing something about their body as they walked, also noticing incidental details in others’ locations from the shared photographs.
Interestingly, the side commentaries and tangential conversations which happen during a physical walk were all documented here. We have a wealth of material in the form of photographs, videos and audio files which we can revisit, explore and critique in addition to examining the flow and content of our conversations. Reflective Practice indeed. Thank you Donald Schoen!
Everyday walks typify and embody the ‘taken-for-granted’ aspect of our daily habits and patterns with which we organise our movements within and through the lifeworld. We have (Unprecedented) opportunities for creating new habits and routines. Playfully interrupting these can make us more aware of our surroundings, increasing our powers of listening and observing, maybe getting us to question and be more curious about our lifeworld. Using WhatsApp whilst we walk together and apart provides another way to explore the possibilities.
Above: Students’ pictures taken during the WhatsApp Walks March - October 2020
Photos in the section above taken by University of South Wales MA Theatre & Drama and 1st year Performance & Media students. Used with permissions.
References
Schoen, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action, USA: Temple Smith
Whilst images and visual stimulation dominated the early years of my walking practice, moving to West Wales shifted my attention to sounds in and of the landscape. Building on years of sound experimentation and composition the following research emerged as a fourth expression of my walking practice-research:
4. Re-sounding the Landscape 2014 - 2016
Research impulse: Playing the landscape developed from the actions and process of walking through the environment, paying attention to sounds as well as visuals. It wasn’t until I was on a 2009 walk (or misguide) with mythogeographer Phil Smith that I created a new interruption. I discovered some public art that made produced beautiful musical notes, when struck with a length of tree branch. Three tall bakelite cylinders, standing in a grassy area of Manchester’s city centre, looked like part of an electricity generator, and resounded as bells when I ‘played’ them with tree branches. This was the start of creating further interruptions in public space, with the idea of interacting with public art, that is normally only looked at, in new ways - by listening to its sounds in open space. The works and ideas mutated and morphed through playing street furniture (lamposts, bollards, railings - thank you and respect to Francis Alys) to re-sounding buildings and larger structures.
Above: Tools for re-sounding the landscape, ESA Research Network Sociology of the Arts 9th midterm conference, at the University of Porto, Portugal, September 2016
In 2014 I was invited by musician and academic, Pete Stacey, to create a soundwork in my village, Llandysul, Ceredigion as part of the Mapsain/Soundmapping project funded by Community Music Wales. I knew the place to start: the decommissioned telephone exchange. Together with musician, Heather Summers, and performing as hSquared, I created a re-sounding of the building using our hands, xylophone beaters of different sizes, sticks, twigs and metal b-b-q skewers. We spent an hour testing and then recording sound, documenting with photos at the same time in create a visual dimension to the piece. We then edited the sound in Logic, and put it together with the photos in iMovie. The work “Calling You” was presented as part of the exhibition hosted at The Powerhouse, Pont-tyweli, Llandysul from 24 - 28 August.
I was becoming increasingly attuned to the sounds within the rural landscape of West Wales, which was rarely quiet, contrary to popular perceptions. Welsh sheep in particular seemed to be in constant communication with each other. I realised that in the re-sounding of the decommissioned telephone exchange I was finding another way to interrupt the cycle of forgetfulness and abandoning of the past to move forward that is such a strong force within the anthropocene. My intention is always to interrupt this cycle, unearth the past and its forgotten voices, review it, connect it to the present and future, to make visible the invisible and hidden (with permission). Close to the house was the local primary school which was now closed, with students moved to a larger more modern building. In 2015 hSquared created another re-sounding work at/with the school, developing it further by including other sounds occurring in the immediate surrounding environment at the time (overhead jets, chain saw, shovelling manure…) and later interweaving local schoolchildren’s voices, thus creating a richer sound composition evoking past and present. “School’s Out!” was accompanied by a visual documentation with photographs. This was then shown to audiences at the former school which was then being used as a community cultural centre.
In June 2015 I was invited to to present School’s Out! at the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) 15th Congress: Utopias, Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st century, in Zagreb, Croatia. The sound panel was “interested in looking at the sonic-ethnography as an authored narrativisation of an empirical experience, in opposition to an articulation of transcendent principles, which ascribe conceptual causes to the unfolding of life. ”School’s Out” in its problematizing notions of the ‘rural idyll’ and contemporary rural life and traditions resonated fully with this brief.
In September 2016 I was invited to create a ‘sound jam’ (a series of sound works) with participants at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities/ESA Research Network Sociology of the Arts 9th midterm conference, at the University of Porto, Portugal.
From 8 - 10th September I facilitated workshops with a group of conference participants, improvising with and re-sounding the buildings and constructions of the conference area, using a variety of beaters, sticks and sounding tools, both found on site and brought with me. We recorded audio and visuals of the workshops.
Above: Participants in the Re-sounding the Landscape workshops and Sound Jam, ESA Research Network Sociology of the Arts 9th midterm conference, at the University of Porto, Portugal, September 2016
Above: The landscape as participant in Re-sounding the Landscape workshops and Sound Jam, ESA Research Network Sociology of the Arts 9th midterm conference, at the University of Porto, Portugal, September 2016
I was then invited to prepare a finale ‘ceremony’ for the conference, with the sound workshop participants after the plenary. Together we read a manifesto we had composed, and ‘played’ the central outside conference area, finally inviting all conference participants to play and re-sound the area with us.
Re-sounding the landscape enables us to pay attention to our environment in new ways, using new tools, new sounds to interrupt our perceptions and assumptions about what and how we hear and listen, and about the way we behave and interact in and with public spaces.
