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210 pages

English

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Description

A curated collection of papers, provocations and actions from the 'Walking's New Movements' conference held at the University of Plymouth in November 2019

Sujets

Walking

Informations

Publié par	Triarchy Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781913743109
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2020 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, UK
www.triarchypress.net
This collection Copyright Triarchy Press Limited, 2020
Individual contributions Copyright the named author(s), 2020
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs:
Print: 978-1-913743-09-3
ePub: 978-1-913743-10-9
pdf: 978-1-913743-11-6
Front cover image: photo by Rebekah Dean.
Back cover image: drawing by Sarah Scaife.
Printed in the UK by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
tp
Contents
Introductions
Magical Aesthetics: walking with eight legs
Sarah Scaife
Walking in Tree Time
Duncan Hay, Leah Lovett, Martin de Jode,
Andrew Hudson-Smith
Dancing-Walking with Trees
Vicky Hunter
Walking with Elephants
Cathy Turner
Being Horse: walking as an impossible beast
James Frost and Sonia Overall
Pigeon Steps
Gabrielle Hoad and Megan Calver
Crow
Matt Fletcher
Walking away? From deep mapping to mutual accompaniment
Iain Biggs
Web Walking
Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith
The Artist-Scholar Walks: Passage to Else-Where
Ishita Jain
How do our bodies act as instruments of sensory navigation?
Emma Bush
Suriashi as a ceremonial, subversive act
Ami Sk nberg Dahlstedt
From Working to Walking
Chlo Lund
InspiralUndergrowth
Rachel Gomme
The Sight of the Walker
William Sharpe
Walking Diagrams
Helen Billinghurst
Visiting Sutton Pool
Monali Meher
Object Place Walking
Jody Oberfelder
A Route Unscrambled
Gary Winters and Claire Hind
Words from Walks
Hamish Fulton
Quipu
Elspeth (Billie) Penfold
The S Project
Carly Butler and Gudrun Filipska
White Man Walking: Settler Ambulation in Colonised Spaces
Ken Wilson
Walking-with whiteness
Richard S. White/Walknow
The Meaning and Importance of Refusals
Sarah Harper
Access Denied? Walking Art and Disabled People
Morag Rose
Mind the Gap
Philippe Guillaume
The Documentary Drift: Lutyens, Cockington and Poetry
Sam Kemp
It started with a film and ended with a walk
Sam Christie
Chip Walks
Hilary Ramsden and Clare Qualmann
Noble King, Walking with Correspondence
Simon King and Corinne Noble
Chasing Mists
Anna Sanders-Falcini
On Mythogeosonics
John Bowers and Tim Shaw
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introductions
Phil:
In our welcome to delegates at the Walking s New Movements conference in Plymouth in November 2019, introducing a programme of presentations for the following three days, we acknowledged a lack of any clear pattern to the subject matter of the various provocations, performances and papers. We wondered aloud if something more coherent might arise as a result of the events, question and answer sessions, social encounters and general interactions to come. When, a few weeks later, we came to discuss how we might invite a selection of presenters to write up their work for this book, we faced a similar confusion.
An obvious approach to selection would have been to assemble contributions around a combination of themes. Yet, for all our excitement at the multiplicity of experiences and information-exchanges that we had shared in, we retained only the vaguest sense that anything as coherent as a theme had emerged from the conference. It was only when we received the draft submissions for this book that something like the appearance of a movement , however partial, began to form. Not in the sense of a social movement, but rather a coalescing of quite separate ideas that seemed drawn to each other, perhaps superseding the agency of their human proposers.
This entanglement is far from an all-encompassing one. Many of the contributions to this book sit far outside its parameters and are largely untouched by its threads. However, the shift is evidenced by any reading of the chapters to follow, and may be even significant, particularly as it seems to represent something of a change of direction in walking arts. At the same time it needs to be said that the Walking s New Movements conference, as noted by some of the contributors whose chapters follow these remarks, was not fully representative of those engaged in walking arts, research and activism, let alone of the diversity of the societies from which delegates were drawn. So, this pattern, if that is what it is, is at best the product of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. Its meaning, let alone legitimacy, has more to do with timeliness than representativeness.
So what is this pattern?
It seems to be partly constituted of a shift towards embodiment; to a walking body at the mercy of the terrain rather than one bathing in the sublime or masterfully sponging up ambiences. The relative and material nature of that at the mercy is made clear in some of the chapters below; it is not something that many walkers now seek to transcend, but rather to negotiate. The dynamic pattern at play here is partly fuelled by a fracturing in psychogeography; with the unhuman geography becoming more highly prized than the human psycho part. In a complex movement, the diminished psycho collapses into a less introspective body; one whose senses are better defined as tentacular agents seeking out material affordances than soakers up and literary articulators of affect. Within this shift, the integrity and identity of walkers bodies is far from sure; indeed, they are by no means necessarily human or free of hybridity. Instead, the walk is more likely shared than individual; even when walking alone, the walker is not lone in the way that it was sometimes assumed they were in the recent history of walking arts.
A number of the chapters that follow attend to the unhuman others that walk with the human. In some, an account of this extended webbing of various walkings is expressed in ecological terms; in others, as a kind of animism; in a few, as both. Colour codes and fictional, even mythic, characters figure in practice and theory. This does not seem to be any kind of return to the occultism that enthused some of the situationist-influenced groups in the US and UK in the last few decades of the twentieth century; now, perhaps, there is more of an awareness of the dangers of nationalism that come with some versions of irrationalism and nostalgia. Instead, this is more of a somatic and immersed pushing back against scientism and positivism in the face of climate catastrophe. It seems to favour intuition and tacit knowledge; the value of body to body learning and transmission by repertoire as much or more than by archive; and the value of being bodily immersed and entangled with alien consciousnesses as a means to arts, research and activist practices. While familiar influences, such as Guy Debord and Rebecca Solnit, continue to be cited, stepping forward now are the more recent string figure and tentacular writings of Donna Haraway, the materialist entanglements of Karen Barad and the myth-science of Simon O Sullivan, while older generations of thinkers who prefigure some of their neo-vitalism, vibrant thing-power and fictioning - such as James Hillman, Henri Bergson, John Berger and even Charles Fort - make less predictable appearances.
It is far too early to say how far this fractional change will play out in walking practices more generally. A few months before the November conference, the bright red costumes of the Red Brigade were first seen on Extinction Rebellion actions; their distinctive slow-motion and enigmatic processions adding something urgent, unfathomable, extra-functional and para-theatrical to demonstrations in the face of crisis. It would be presumptuous to make too close a connection between the Red Brigade s interventions and the loose coalescing of themes in some of the chapters that follow; but if they are both responses to the same extreme circumstances by equally unusual and uneven means, then the future of the walking movements looks far less predictable, far less reasonable and far less moderate now than it did before November 2019.
Claire:
The paradoxical nature of the fleeting moment is its impact. A gathering of people with a diverse range of walking practices, who meet, learn, debate, walk and socialise across a short space of time is not to be underestimated, especially if there is an opportunity to bring a variety of different disciplines into one space. Whilst we reflect upon how valuable the sharing of space and togetherness is, walking arts - what has been, what is happening now and what may come - feel like a political necessity, not just for one s own practice, but for the future of community, embodied practice and transformation.
When we feel or know something is important, even if we experience it for a brief moment, our gut instincts inform us that we need to make the most of it, not only for the experience itself, but remember it, recall it, repeat it, be inspired by it, because, it can pass us by. Many of us may understand what walking arts are, but do we know them collectively? What is happening under our feet? We asked, in our call for papers, what is happening in walking now and where are the new initiatives, changes of direction and novel terrains emerging? We wanted to think about what it is that changes when we divert walking and offer an opportunity for a diverse range of artists, academics, writers and researchers to come together to share their practices and thinking. We were curious if anyone was troubled by present trajectories, assumptions, dominant narratives, movements or complacencies within walking arts practice and as a result a series of 10-minute provocations - shared outside of the normal panel style presentation - worked as interludes between those panels. They