This book arrived some time last year, but I didn’t read it right away. Why not? I don’t know. Perhaps because I attended the conference at the University of Plymouth in November 2019 that it documents, or because I’m the author of one of the chapters. But since I’m reading books about walking as an art practice, it was time to take it off the shelf and start reading.

Walking Bodies is a heterogenous text, bringing together accounts of walking projects, theoretical essays, manifestoes, scripts and walking prompts and various forms of photographic and textual documentation of walks of many different kinds. That mixture suggests something about the richness of contemporary art walking practices—at least as represented at that conference—and of their political ambitions. I’m not going to discuss every chapter in this summary, but they’re all worth reading or, in the case of the photographic chapters, viewing. Instead, I’m going to focus on the chapters that have some bearing on my current research project.

All three editors, who organized the conference as well, provide introductions to the book. Phil Smith is first. He notes that at the beginning of the conference, the organizers “acknowledged a lack of any clear pattern to the subject matter of the various provocations, performances and papers,” and that they wondered whether “something more coherent might arise as a result of the events, question and answer sessions, social encounters and general interactions to come” (v). Afterwards, when they sat down to think about this book, they felt the same way: “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” (v). It was only after chapter submissions had been received did “something like the appearance of a ‘movement,’ however partial,” begin 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” (v). For Smith, the book suggests “something of a change of direction in walking arts,” even though it includes only “a fraction of a fraction of a fraction” of the work of the conference’s participants (v). The pattern Smith sees 

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. (vi)

“Within this shift, the integrity and identity of walkers’ bodies is far from sure; indeed, they are by no means necessarily human or free from hybridity,” he continues. “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” (vi). 

For that reason, some of the book’s chapters “attend to the unhuman others that walk with the human,” and sometimes “this extended webbing of various walkings is expressed in ecological terms,” while in others, “as a kind of animism,” and in still others, as both (vi). This webbing isn’t the interest in the occult that is characteristic of some forms of psychogeography: “Instead, this is more of a somatic and immersed pushing back against scientism and positivism in the face of climate catastrophe,” which “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” (vi). New influences on these walking practices have appeared—Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Simon O’Sullivan—while others have faded in importance, Smith notes (vi), and while it’s too early to say what these changes will mean for walking practices—particularly in the context of the climate disaster that is unfolding—Smith wonders if the Red Brigade, first seen at Extinction Rebellion actions, and the essays in this book might not be “responses to the same extreme circumstances by equally unusual and uneven means”; if that’s the case, “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” (vii).

Next is Claire Hinds. She reflects on the impact of the fleeting moment of the conference, and the way that walking arts “feel like a political necessity, not just for one’s own practice, but for the future of community, embodied practice and transformation” (vii). She suggests that the 10-minute provocations, shared outside of the normal panel-style conference presentations, which “were an exciting range of mini-manifestos and artworks for new ways of walking,” may have been the most important aspect of the conference, and that’s the reason some of them have been documented in this book (vii-viii). The inclusion of those provocations meant that the event felt more like a festival than a conference (viii).

Hinds contends that artists don’t have answers; rather, “they are provocateurs and their works set acts in motion” (viii). The art works that are included in the book “are not simply documentations of walking arts experiences”; instead, “they are prompts asking us to consider changing the way we engage with place and indeed space. They are instructions inviting us to respond, to act now and challenge the way we are living our lives” (ix). She hopes that “this book will be more than a document of a conference. It tells a story of walking’s relationship to creative forms of writing and mark making, where texts, scripts, scores, poetry and the visual arts illuminate the diverse tapestry that is walking arts practice” (ix).

Finally, Helen Billinghurst begins by noting the organizers’ attempt at keeping the cost of the event low, because of the “austerity and precarity” that “currently loom large for many artists and academics” (ix). They also hoped to highlight and flatten “hierarchies of privilege and exclusivity” by pointing towards “convivial and inclusive alternatives for walking, knowledge-sharing, making and doing” drawn from ideas like Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” or Donna Haraway’s “string figuration” as “a way to relay patterns and make connections in ongoing processes of sympoiesis” (ix). Billinghurst suggests that the resulting conference “evolved into a complex and perplexing body/mind assemblage: jostling, probing, playful, sensual, somatic, occasionally adversarial, sometimes subversive. A human and unhuman hybrid that walked backwards and forwards, looked to the future and leaned into the past” (x). Simply by “levelling the playing field in economic terms,” she writes, “a platform was created that afforded a wider range of bodies and voices to participate and connect with each other” (x). Some of “the rich variety and generosity” of the conference “is now reflected in the chapters and pages of this book” (x).

The book’s first chapter is Sarah Scaife’s “Magical Aesthetics: walking with eight legs” (1-10). Scaife tells us that her visual art practice “tunes in to the vibrations between being-in-the-body, listening and mutual space” (1). “I set out to both emit and receive vibrations; the work emerges through this echo-location,” she writes. “Behind conversations with other people leis another, more private series of dialogues with the more-than-human” which take place through walking “from a place of intention and request, walking in soft absorbency, alert to the polyphony of the cosmos. On these walks I listen and the world speaks to me” (1). This chapter is a reflection on her own presentation but also on “some strands” she perceived during the conference” (1). 

Scaife’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2017 meant that walking took on a new significance; research shows that regular walking boosts the immune system and helps people recover form cancer, and she was able to walk every day during her treatment (1). She is interested in “how a magical, art-walking practice” enables “acceptance of the unknown and inevitable changes which will come; authenticity in expressing thoughts, feelings and emotions; and agency, a sense of autonomy in making choices where this is possible and taking an active part in the journey as it unfolds” (2). Scaife locates her art, theoretically, in “the domain of ‘Magical Aesthetics,’” which she describes as “an aesthetic of hybridity, participation, dialogue and the making of meaning” (2), and she invites her readers to join her in reimagining a walk she made a couple of weeks before the conference, one in which the self and the world present themselves “as tangled multitude” (3).

Scaife cites Emma Bush’s paper at the conference, in which Bush noted that spiders “make sense of the world through eight legs,” through the vibrations they feel in their web; walking also takes place in a web of connection (4-5), as a correspondence to her own practice. She describes her walks as “sign walks,” often walks within walks, made alone or “with one or more human others,” in which they find “an existing beginning and end in the landscape which offers a rite of entry”—a gate, a wall, a place where a path runs between two closely spaced trees or over a stream—and there they “pause and quietly set intention” (5). “From that moment we enter into heightened noticing, a changed perception,” she states (5). After 20 minutes, they step out of the sign walk again, “with appreciation for all we have met, returning to our ordinary sounds” (5). It’s an experience of flow, the state described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as an state where one experiences few distinctions between oneself and one’s environment, or between stimulus and response, similar to the way non-human animals move through the world (5). “The world that we live in, as experienced through the human sensory body, seems different to the world as known through the body of a spider, or a whale, and yet it is the same world,” Scaife writes. “How are we to make sense of this?” (5-6).

“Magical aesthetic practices offered me the possibility of ‘phoenix growth’: the new growth that rises after a tree has been severely damaged and perhaps fallen, confirming my sense of a deeper dimension of what it is to be alive in the more-than-human world” (6). Her walks, “understood as a magical performance process, have an aftermath,” she continues:

I may archive the walk in the sense that I document signs in a journal, perhaps research the implications of particular signs which I encountered and consider how they relate to the season or the phase of the moon. An object found on the walk—a stone, a berry, a found human-made object—might be added to my private collection temporarily, or for years, and perhaps be used in a different context. There is a time of reflection, of making meaning through the signs. (7)

When she walks with intention, she recognizes these signs: “somehow the creaturely, the elemental and even the discarded shows itself and I just know!” (8). Such “walking in dialogue has an effect on my well being. . . . It is a considered and developed practice. It is walking as a form of listening” (8). She suggests that walking enables her to participate in the generation of different worlds, different communities (9). Her conclusion takes the form of a brief poem: “Through walking we accept the life, death, life cycle. / Through walking we express trust, participation, and gratitude. / Through walking, we perform hope” (9).

In their chapter, “Walking in Tree Time or a walk with the woods” (11-20), Duncan Hay, Leah Lovett, Martin de Jode, Andrew Hudson-Smith ask “what it might mean for walking arts practices and research to recognise trees as walking subjects” (11). That question leads to others:

How can the movements of trees over years and centuries be understood in terms of walking? What does ‘walking in tree time’ reveal to us about our own, human pace, perspective and interactions with the world as walking subjects? Is it possible to conceive of ways for trees and people to walk together and, if so, what techniques are available to artists for bridging the gap—practically, imaginatively—between human and arboreal walking practices and temporalities? (11)

These are the questions raised by their interdisciplinary research project “The Internet of Trees,” which investigated the potential for using “Internet of Things (IoT)” in public spaces (11). The “Internet of Things,” they write, is defined as “a tendency whereby the increasing cheapness of networking, sensing, and artificial intelligence technologies allows more and more objects and devices to become connected to the internet” (12). This process allows “objects not conventionally associated with connectivity”—street furniture, buildings, trees—“to interact with each other and with people” (12). “The corollary of this is that we are not surrounded by objects which are communicating and acting in ways which may be invisible, out of our direct control, and beyond the perceptual limits of human experience,” they write (12).

Their project’s primary outcome was The Listening Wood, a poetic walk on Hampstead heath created by Lovett and a team from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. The project “invited visitors to slow down and attend to the ancient and veteran trees of Golders Hill Park and the wider Heath, employing IoT technologies and SMS text message to disseminate fragments of digital poetry relating to each of the project trees and the landscape they occupy” (12). The Listening Wood required Lovett to spend time observing, drawing, photographing, and walking under the trees, and with their custodians, the park’s arborists (12). “Stories about the veteran pear tree, the weathered sweet chestnut and the steadfast, ancient oak, told to the researchers by the Head of Trees, David Humphries, and his team profoundly challenged our preconceptions about arboreal lives, shifting the direction of the project and shaping the poetic dimension of the installation,” they write (12). The Listening Wood is not as a completed project but rather “an opening and a provocation to the reader to think about trees—and walking—differently” (12). In the project, they set out “to discover the potential for walking with trees and de-centre human practices of walking and open up to indeterminate and nonhuman ways of being and relating to the world” (12). In particular, they are interested in “how radical walking practices might be informed by and contribute to debates in the environmental posthumanities which seek to re-negotiate the concepts of nature and the human” (12-13).

A central concept to their research is “phoenix growth,” which “can occur when a tree falls or when a storm-damaged tree loses a branch. At the cellular level, the grounded branches send out roots and re-orient themselves as trunks, becoming new trees” (13). The authors consider this growth a form of walking, a redefinition that “calls into question tacit assumptions about what it means to walk, what sort of entities might be able to walk, and what it might mean to take a walk in the woods” (13). They note that forests expand and spread (13). However, “to describe phoenix growth—the movement of an individual tree—as walking implies, if not necessarily purposive motion, then at least something willed. To walk is to be active, to move through the world either under one’s own volition or another’s compulsion. Walking implies, in short, a form of subjectivity” (13).

Different temporalities exist for trees and humans, they continue: we may not register the movement of trees as movement, while our own steps, for trees, “if they register at all, must appear as momentary flickers in arboreal lifetimes” (13). “These differing temporalities make the relationships between trees and humans oblique, the forms of subjectivity that they each might hold for themselves and for each other difficult to imagine,” they write (13). “With human walking and tree walking appearing as incommensurate practices, how might we begin to think of walking with trees?” they ask (13).

They suggest their practice is influenced by “serious engagement with Indigenous North American ontologies and methodologies,” and they cite Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman’s notion of “walking-with” as “a form of solidarity, unlearning, and critical engagement with situated knowledges” that “demands that we forgo universal claims about how humans and nonhumans experience walking, and consider more-than-human ethics and politics of the material intra-actions of walking research’” (qtd. 13-14). “Walking-with, then, engages with marginalised and erased knowledges to bring about new forms of sociability with the other than human, the nonhuman and the inhuman. It seeks to acknowledge the alterity of human experience and nonexperienced time, to recognise the multiplicity of being and time,” they suggest (14). Walking-with “allows for the recognition of nonhuman entities, including trees, as actors with their own distinct peripatetic practices and experiences of walking” (14). 

They also cite Donna Haraway’s notion of “companion species,” species “which are bonded in ‘significant otherness,’” such as human and dogs, comparing this idea to walking-with, since each “relies on acts of empathy and imagination,” on coming into kinship with nonhuman entities (14). “Making kin is . . . a choice and an act: kin does not only describe a genetic, familial relationship; kin also includes those with whom we choose to make common cause, whose lives are bound up with our own, and to whom we are responsible,” they suggest (14). A number of artists—including Jeremy Hastings, Cathy Turner, and Miranda Whall—“have walked with (and in some cases, walked as) donkeys, elephants, and sheep, respectively to de-centre the human in peripatetic artistic practices. These are modes of walking with (or walking-with) which seek to imagine the significant otherness of humans and animals” (14). It may be challenging to make this imaginative leap for domesticated creatures, like dogs or sheep, and it is much more difficult “to imagine the significant otherness of trees and humans,” but the arborists on Hampstead Heath “are in a process of making kin” with the trees they care for: “In their work the arborists are accountable to human needs: the requirement that the Heath be a place of leisure with enough of a modicum of ‘wildness’ to satisfy the bunkered urbanite; to be safe, to be clean, to be beautiful. But they are also accountable to the trees and the meshwork of biological systems they support and are supported by” (14-15). Balancing those needs is delicate and messy, but those are characteristics of “the substance of making kin, of navigating the threads of accountability entailed in sharing a world with other beings” (15). It is also “a form of work” which “de-sacralises the natural. Rather than a sanctified or transcendent space outside of the human (to which we look for salvation), nature is the ground of human and non-human ‘becoming-with’” (15). “The insights of the arboreal team—of tree subjectivity and tree walking—are gleaned through their unusually intimate knowledge of those trees, developed over many years,” they write (15).

“Tree time stretches out beyond the lifespan of any single human being,” the authors continue. “Human lives and human actions can have drastic effects on the lives of trees, but an individual human (if perceptible at all) barely registers in sylvan sense apparatuses” (15). Although they appear stationary, trees have agency: “As much as we act upon them, they act upon us” (15). They wonder if trees use humans as a way to propagate themselves: “There is an eeriness to this thought: that the agency we think we have over the natural might in fact be a part of patterns larger than we (as individuals, at least) can discern” (16). “If tree time and human time are to become commensurate, it must be as inference patterns, the points of convergence, where the rhythms of tree lives and human lives intersect,” they contend (16). Shakespeare’s Macbeth shows how “[t]races of an enchanted world-view cling to Renaissance culture,” with trees walking, and the Witches acting “as mediators between supernatural entities and the world of people. This is a populated universe in which humans are not the only actors” (18). However, this perspective changed with the Enlightenment, when “the humanist subject was placed at the centre of a modern world emptied of other and multiple selves” (18). 

“The Internet of Things, in making objects speak, re-enchants the world; but technology is often thought of as a distraction and as unwanted in spaces that we choose to delimit as ‘natural,’” the authors state, moving to a description of their specific project (18). “Not only does the digital interpenetrate human relationships to politically exploit and monetise them, there is also a sense in which these technologies are hungry for both attention and time,” they continue. “The all-absorbing pull of the screen is felt to prevent meaningful interaction with the world” (18). This technology is also unsettling, both fleshy (the product of rare-earth minerals, assembled in factories by workers) and ethereal, since radio waves are “undetectable to the human sensorium” (18). It also privileges “the instantaneous over the slow” (19). However, The Listening Wood “used technology to encourage people to walk the Heath and unlock poems with keywords inserted into the landscape. The team tried to repurpose the technology in this way to encourage a reflective, slow engagement with arborial lives” (19). The poetry “became the mediating element between the different material and temporal realities of humans, trees, and technology” (19). According to the authors, 

the poems received by visitors to the Heath were less messages from a particular tree, and more a frequency or channel that could only be tuned to in their presence, through being with each tree, in the same place. The appeal to poetics and chance figured as attempts to resist the conversational tropes typical of “chatbots,” to work with the limitations of the software and lay bare the instrumental nature of the message exchange. (19)

The text messages became metaphors “for much greater and more meaningful forms of human, nonhuman and inhuman interaction. It is in the space given over to the imaginaries of the audiences that the trees and technology were able to enchant one another” (19-20). In the project, “IoT and mobile technologies gesture towards new opportunities for walking and walking-with as means of transcending the limitations of species-being, leading to unexpected encounters and ways of imagining relationships between the human and more-than-human” (20). Vicky Hunter’s “Dancing-Walking with Trees” (21-33) reflects on a tree-sound-walk workshop Hunter led with walking artist Rosie Montford and dancer and dance scholar Leslie Satin in September 2019 (21). The workshop was part of the Museum of Walking’s “Sound-Walk Sunday” programme, organized by Andrew Stuck (21). (The Museum of Walking is an online organization that organizes walking-art events [21].) The workshop “extended the sound walk format to incorporate movement, drawing and dance activities alongside listening as modes of doing and thinking that might bring individuals closer to an awareness of environmental issues” (21). It took place in Chichester, along that city’s “tree trail” route, beginning at the city’s university; participants engaged in “drawing, moving, pausing, and reflecting on experiences, sights and sounds gathered along the way” (21).

“Informed by new materialist theory, I will describe what took place, how we worked and reflect a little on the human-nonhuman intra-actions encountered en route and the potential for this type of walking/dancing/moving practice to invoke human-environment relations in particular ways,” Hunter states (21). She includes the work of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Stacy Alaimo, Iris Van der Tuin in the term “new materialism” (29), and notes that the term “intra-action” comes from Barad’s work on new materialism and is “a neologism that signifies ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’” (qtd. 21). Intra-action “moves beyond a customary conception of interaction which ‘assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’” (qtd. 21-22). 

Hunter wants to think about what this approach might bring to walking arts practices and scholarship (22). “My approach to the walking event and to the research that informed it stems from a form of movement practice that I am calling ‘site-based body practice’ in which different actors, material and entities come together and contribute to an entangled process of ‘becoming-with’ one another in a co-constitutive manner in which,” she states, quoting Donna Haraway, “‘all the players evoke, trigger, and call forth what-and-who-exists’” (qtd. 22). “Exploring how bodies, sites and materials might ‘dialogue’ with one another through the medium of sited dance and movement practice I am concerned with pragmatic questions,” she writes, noting that those questions include “how is the body’s design and function reflected in the environments in which it engages? What synergies of form and function exist?” (22). What would happen “if we prioritise bodily knowing over interpretation and analysis and what might site-based body practice reveal regarding human-environment engagement?” she asks (22).

Hunter has engaged “with a range of sites from urban arterial routes to wide open spaces and watery sites and beaches” through “movement improvisation, broadly defined as spontaneous embodied and kinetic responses to bodily engagement with a range of site-based phenomena and materials” (22). Her practice “explores how material and functional analogies between bodies, structures and materials can be initially explored and subsequently developed beyond the analogous into an embodied realm” and aims “to expose the body’s in-built structures and processes as devices through which intrinsic synergies between bodies, and sides might be illuminated and explored” (22). While she’s not interested in anthropomorphizing nonhuman elements, she is concerned with the parallels that can be drawn and the way “that such alignments and synergies might be worthy of closer inspection” (22). Specifically, she works with movement scores that are “designed to lead participants and myself towards specific intra-actions between bodies and sites”: 

Participants are presented with a score in a specific location that draws their corporeal attention towards particular site elements such as textures, forms, materials, tempos and rhythms. Once a process of tuning-in to the site has commenced, spontaneous movement responses are encouraged to emerge, these might include expressive gestures, pedestrian actions, running, dumping and dancing or stillness. (22-23)

“Walking acts as a partner or collaborator for this type of somatically informed movement practice,” she continues; its familiarity “renders the less commonplace practice of dancing (or moving in an expressive manner) more accessible and potentially less threatening” (23). 

During the Chichester event, walking helped get participants “out and about and away from passive environments and mediatised modes of engaging with the world towards hands on, corporeal engagements with sites and their material components” (23). “Such modes of doing and thinking inevitably involve unscripted and spontaneous encounters with real world phenomena, materials, people and things” and require “improvised responses and openness to being in the moment, whatever that might encompass, from which new discoveries might emerge” (23). Walking doesn’t serve the dancing and movement practice; instead, it’s part of a hybrid (23). The workshop “constantly negotiated the various elements of walking, drawing, moving, talking, listening, and dancing in an entangled state of flow” (23). Participants came from local arts and environmental groups; most were regular walkers but were new to movement practices and the hybrid workshop format (23-24). On the walk, “[t]ransitions between selected trees were conducted in silence to enable the movement, listening and drawing tasks to percolate and resonate with each individual on their own terms” (25). The movement tasks were intended to help participants attend to “the trees’ shape, placement, textures and features,” as well as “to bring about awareness of an embodied sense of self in relation to and emerging from each tree-body encounter from which a sense of co-existence might be proposed” (25). 

Participants responded to the trees they encountered in different ways, drawing a score that recorded those responses, but they also responded to stones and bricks; at the end, they reflected on their experiences, “writing key words, thoughts and reflections on a series fo cards that were collected and subsequently placed within our drawing score employed in the second part of the workshop on campus” (28). “The design of tasks and activities employed in the tree walk drew on new materialist perspectives that challenge us to look closely into entangled human-world relations and consider what the immediately perceived life-world compromises,” Hunter writes (28). This site-based body practice “requires concentration and focus on the intra-action at hand as opposed to the telegraphing of gratuitous expressive gestures or unrelated codified movement vocabulary that bears little relation to the nuances or subtleties of the body-site exchange,” she continues. “Tuning in to the affective vibrancy of the body-site exchange and the emerging moving with its complexity requires careful attunement and attention” (29).

The theories Hunter calls new materialism question “the nature of matter itself, what we perceive and consider as human and non-human matter, what counts and what matters and, through doing so enables the fostering of new ontological dispositions towards the world and worlds at large,” she contends:

From these perspectives, the world, the body and their material actants are equally conceived as materially amorphous, unfinished and always on the move. Trees move, dance and communicate with each other and with the human actors who pass by, pause, linger and engage with tree time and space. This mobile perspective informs my reflection on the body-world intra-actions encountered through site-based body practice and facilitates the articulation of nuanced understandings emerging through the movement explorations born from kinaesthetic and corporeal mattering. (29)

When the workshop participants returned to the university campus, where they moved into a dance studio and tried to reflect on the walk by moving their bodies through a series of exercises: “This part of the event was designed to sediment the walk experience in some way, to imprint the experiential encounters within our embodied memory” (29). The bodies of participants became the event’s archive (29). They used the score they had drawn during the walk “as a device to instigate movement exploration” (30). For Hunter, the transition “from the real-world exploration outside the University campus and into the enclosed environment of the dance studio provided a physical and temporal space in which to process the affects and resonances of the walking practice” (30).

Hunter wonders why such events need to be documented, “why the ephemeral and phenomenological could not be left to lie, to sediment, to permeate and percolate within the body-self of the experiencer who had to physically be there, to attend and tend to the event, to acknowledge the walk itself, and its activities” (31). “The residual nature of this type of experience can only be known from the inside, from the doing and being and that, for me is more than enough,” she suggests (31). However, participants asked to be sent photographs of the event, and she wonders “whether they were prioritising the visual record over the embodied and actually not trusting the corporeal over the ocular” (31-32). That’s a problem, since the workshop and other forms of site-based body practice are “concerned with what dance and movement can do here, how it might bring us closer to environmental phenomena as a form of intervention or extra-daily practice” (32). “How might it encourage us to notice the world around us and gently foster a sense of environmental awareness and ethical responsibility?” Hunter asks (32). She hopes this work “can encourage a form of messy exchange wiht the natural world and embolden us to reach beyond hermetically sealed sensibilities that discourage modes of touching unsanitised textures, surfaces and materials prevalent in both nature spaces and urban environments” (32). By “dueting with trees, plants, textures and materials,” participants engage in “playful, sensuous and haptic exchanges within body-site intra-actions from which temporary worldings are formed,” she concludes. “Through these ephemeral moments of exchange we emerge with new-found knowledge and perhaps appreciation of often overlooked or ignored environmental features. We come to knowledge of other bodies, human and more-than human through their vibrant materiality that moves us, moves with us and shapes our perception of the world” (32).

Cathy Turner’s “Walking with Elephants” (34-44) is, as the title suggests, about walking with elephants. That’s pretty distant from my concerns, but Turner begins with a useful discussion of psychogeography. “Walking art, with its roots in dérive and flâneurie, conceptual art and nature writing, is necessarily self-conscious about the simple activity of walking,” she writes. “It is perhaps indicative of the sedentary and alienated nature of European culture that this everyday action is experienced as redemptive or resistance, as the newly-liberated psychogeographer unpicks the urban fabric [and] reenchants fictionalised spaces” (34). She cites Phil Smith’s 2016 essay “Walking and Subjectivity,” in which he describes walking as an escape “from the spectacular media of late capitalism” but warns of the individualist alure of “disrupted walking” (qtd. 34). In his 2015 essay “Psychogeography Adrift,” though, Christopher Collier wonders about the political efficacy of walking, even group or collective walking practices; the problem, he suggests, “is the tension between the desire to provide ‘structural antagonism’ to Capitalism, while also being situated outside a leftist programme as a negative withdrawal, even a hidden and internalised alternative space” (34-35). “The negative and resistant quality of the dérive is in tension with any form of programmatic political organisation,” Turner continues. Moreover, while the subjective significance of the performative experience is undeniable,” she argues that “the dérive’s self-identification with subjectivity cut loose from societal structures is dependent on illusion, and often on privilege” (35). Class and gender privilege is often implicit in walking practices, as is a geographical bias: “Walking art emphasises the anarchic and disruptive, and has been historically disinclined to make wider reference to labour, care, procession or pilgrimage,” forms of walking that “are present in parts of the world where urban dwellers are so predominantly pedestrians that this status is not significant in itself” (35), such as India, where her research for this chapter took her.

Nor has walking art considered “other creatures who walk with us” (35). This leads to Turner’s main question: “what can be learned from the culturally sanctioned walking that occurs in contexts where mythic and artistic spaces are entwined with others which are more problematic and even oppressive”? (35). Her focus is on elephants, “specifically the walking that occurs in relation to the Vrischikolsavam, and eight-day Hindu festival at the Sree Poornathrayeesa Temple in Tripunithura, Kerala” every November (35). With her research network (researchers from the University of Exeter, UK, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, India) she studied the elephants and their keepers involved in the festival (35). The festival involves a procession, twice each day, lasting more than three hours, in which elephants walk, “accompanied by the jubilant music” of more than 200 performers (36). “It would be neo-colonial appropriation to consider this as ‘walking art,’ but there is art in it, and there is walking in it,” she writes (36). 

“This essay proposes that such a festival, drawing on traditions of Asian elephant domestication from 4,500 BCE, and perhaps 600 years of elephants in this temple, demonstrates the way that creative, communal and coercive spaces may be simultaneously produced through walking,” Turner contends:

When spaces of spiritual/artistic practice, spaces of spectacle and everyday spaces overlap to this extent, it is hard to see any aspect of this walking as resistant or radical. On the other hand, we should also note the creative, spiritual and communal expression apparent within such institutional, but extra-daily contexts, and that while their more coercive and exploitative aspects might need to be dismantled, their is much to be learned about spatial transformation, the integration of community and the bond with the non-human, in positive as well as negative senses. (36-37)

She cites Donna Haraway’s discussion of “companion animals” and the relationships between them and humans (37). However, the relationship between humans and elephants is neither stable nor straightforward in the context of this festival: sometimes elephants are considered to be lesser beings, sometimes as equals, and other times as gods that need to be venerated (37). For instance, during the festival, one elephant carries the effigy of the Vishnu in circles around the temple (38). “What does it mean, to circumambulate?” Turner asks. “This is not the A to B walking of purpose, nor the deliberate evasion of purpose that is the dérive, nor the sustained walking of pilgrimage, though closes to that” (38). Instead, it is a revolving of the world around the god (38).

“The festival itself is this practice writ large—more elephants, more music, a slower pace, a more relentless and ecstatic obligation,” she continues. “Slowly the elephants move in the temple precincts. Slowly the crowd backs with them. And slowly, such slow walking and its unaccommodating music produces the temple as world” (38). While the meaning of the event is likely lost on the elephants, the practice is shared, “a practice in which the command to process is unavoidable, for both human and companion animal, albeit differently obligated” (38). What the elephants make of the event is not known; whether they enjoy the music or not; there have been instances of elephants running amok, although some elephants seem to enjoy being looked at fed sugar cane (38-39). “Despite this, there was consensus in our interviews that ‘the elephant would not choose the festival.’” she notes. “That there is restraint and tolerance is, perhaps, all one can really ask of a god” (39). 

Restraint is different, however, from being restrained, and often elephants are treated cruelly and exploited; measures to reduce the cruel treatment of these animals have had unwanted results—for instance, transporting the animals by truck is stressful for them (39)“Given such scenarios, one could view the Keralan festival parade as a simulation, merely a procession of captives where wounds are disguised and backstage areas hidden,” she states. “This could be described as a commercialised space of spectacular show, where a festival equals profit to the detriment of elephants and mahouts alike” (40). On the other hand, improvements to the treatment of elephants have been made, even if they are insufficient (40). In addition, the “mahout-elephant relationship, when sustained and developed over years, is remarkable as a familial bond, often as great or greater than that of the same-species family, and taking more of the mahout’s time” (41). Before elephants travelled by truck, for instance, mahouts and elephants walked together, and trust between them developed (41).

“The spaces that seem to be emerging through this festival-related walking include: a practiced space of restrained otherness in the walk around a sanctum; a spectacular, staged, commercialised parade space of hidden pain and occasional cruelty; a social street spaace where co-personhood and trust can exist,” Turner writes (42). These spaces are simultaneous, not separate, but co-existent, “partially entangled and convergent with one another”: “The artistic (musical) component blurs, on the one hand, int ritual, and on the other, into the everyday, while also contributing to the spectacle (in all senses). To adapt any one of these spaces, or these modes of walking, or the artistry of each, is to adapt them all, and that must be done with the care of a surgeon, whose cut endangers the whole body” (42). This entanglement makes attempts to reduce cruelty difficult: “The challenge is to unpick and subvert objectifying and commodifying practices, while understanding the knock-on impact on delicate naturecultures, and not to presuppose an ideal state of unsullied wildness, or that innocent humanity can be obtained by restoring all elephants to wild forests, and retraining the mahouts” (42). That restoration is not feasible, and it would lead to losses of “creativity, knowledge, community and even the inter-relationship between species. It would be contemptuous not to listen to all those involved, including paying close attention to the elephants” (43). Turner cites Arjun Appadurai in her conclusion: “To return to walking art, this example demonstrates what Appadurai describes as ‘the production of locality,’ entailing the ‘imaginary work’ of ‘ordinary persons’” (qtd. 43). “If we are serious about re-imagining our world through walking art and psychogeography, we must take account of the ways in which it is already walked, creatively, recognising the performative significance of walking even in conservative settings,” she writes. “Spectacular spaces are entangled with communal ones. We are entangled with others, human or otherwise. These entanglements are the products of inescapable histories and political realities.” These entanglements mean that there “is no independent, quasi-heroic walking. Therein lies both our tragedy and our opportunity for acknowledging the multiplicity and paradoxes of walking, by seeking mutual understanding and collectively-realised alternatives” (43).

I remember Iain Biggs’s paper at the conference, and his chapter, “Walking away? From Deep mapping to mutual accompaniment” (63-74), suggests the idea of deep mapping as a model for the walks I have been making (or at least that I made last summer). Biggs is interested in listening to “those whispered and marginalised voices that only join us in conversations that would otherwise be made impossible, or else drowned out, by the strident demands of categorical analysis” (63). Such listening, in non-Western cultures, “constitutes a psychosocial or spiritual practice,” understood as “a walking with the ancestors” or “with the dead” (63). “This ‘somewhere-else’ is significant here as the ground onto which those of us who are drawn to multi-directional and other open walking practices are likely to stray; through psycho-geography, mytho-archaeology, deep mapping, or any related performative practice,” he suggests (63-64).

Biggs notes that his presentation started with Hugo Ball’s decision to walk away from Dada over the ambitions of Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia to turn it into an art movement (64). He describes their position as “radical nihilism, pandering simultaneously to the most toxic and most trivialising aspects of the culture of possessive nihilism,” which Ball rejected because he “believed in the ultimate unity of all beings and the totality of all things,” along with “the need to live with the dissonances and contradictions that follow from that belief” (64). Biggs argues that his involvement “in a walking-based, open, deep-mapping relates to Ball’s concerns in two ways”: “Firstly, open deep mapping requires adopting ways of working that lead one towards that sense of unity and totality by, ironically, working with the particular dissonances and contradictions inherent in a particular place or region. Secondly, as indicated, it requires putting distance between yourself and the assumptions that underpin the whole complex machinery of the art world” (64-65). 

In 1999, Biggs began a 14-year-long “open deep mapping project” about Belfast, one “that follows one of the tributaries of trauma that fed into that city’s fear and anger” by engaging with “the long-standing Anglo-Scottish Border culture of endemic violence later exported to Ireland” (65). That project took him to Scot’s Dyke along the English-Scottish border (65), a site of terrible violence in the 16th century (65-66). “By excavating and contrasting narratives focused here and elsewhere along the Borders, I cold uncover a deeply engrained legacy of anger, trauma and fear,” he writes (66). He wants to think about “the consequences of the large-scale denial of the undertow of violence and trauma that haunts so much of a land viewed through rose-tinted or heroic lenses,” a denial with “very real sociopolitical consequences, not least by sustaining the status-quo in terms of the ownership and usage of land” (66). The work of Robert Macfarlane, and of nature writing in general, participate in that nostalgia and sense of heroic individualism, he contends (66), and he insists on “the need to keep in view the violence and trauma that haunt the land” (67). 

“The most critical point here, however, is open deep mapping’s distancing itself from the culture of possessive individualism,” Biggs continues. “Something achieved by setting aside the assumptions that flow from the monolithic, heroic ego, redressing the Cartesian splitting of self from other, mind from body, the perceptual from the imaginal, the material from the spiritual” (67). “Open deep mapping enacts, that is, a desire to embrace and celebrate an ensemble self. A self that is aware of its own multiplicity and that of the multiverse to which it finds its various selves or persona related at every level” (67). In addition,

Open deep mapping is fundamentally peripatetic, grounded by a walking, listening body getting to know a place in as many dimensions as possible. It’s also, of necessity, intellectually peripatetic, wandering freely across disciplinary and conceptual borders in order to ask unexpected and unorthodox questions in spaces-in-between. Its practitioners also tend to be psychically peripatetic—to resist any long-term identification with any single genre or praxis by accepting the necessity to regularly “move house.” (67)

Biggs sees deep mapping “as a walking-with a multitude of voices of both the living and dead; a walking-with that animates differently a particular place or, increasingly, set of relationships between places. A walking-with that’s alert to voices that dominant narratives have forgotten, marginalized or repressed. Alert to them so as to re-articulate their pressing and unanswered questions in the here-and-now” (67). 

Biggs cites the work of Mike Pearson, especially his collaboration with Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (2001) as a powerful influence on his deep-mapping practice (68), which brings together photographs, text, and maps (69). The maps he creates are attempts “to address and visualise, by analogy, the cognitive dissonance I experienced as an academic/artist/researcher with a walking-based practice and as a carer for someone too ill to walk more than a few paces” (68)—his daughter (70). That work emphasizes “the need, in open deep mapping, for lateral thinking, for looking for connections where they’re not expected—some would say don’t exist” (70); it comes from “listening to a range of narratives—of power, fear, loss, and anger—and to their counter-narratives” (70). “Those engaged in critically alert, psychosocially engaged, ensemble practices like open deep mapping must act nimbly while moving in many dimensions if they’re to avoid being co-opted by the disciplinary status quo for its own instrumental ends. Ends that always threaten to water down or undermine its primary concerns,” he argues (70). In addition, he suggests that deep mapping educates us “in what Bruno Latour calls Terrestrial politics,” that it teaches us “that a place, region or country is not exclusive, nor is it differentiated by closing itself off”; instead, deep mapping enacts “Edward S. Carey’s claim that places, despite their frequently settled appearance, are in effect essays in experimental living that are undertaken within the context of a constantly changing culture” (71). Deep mapping demonstrates “why Terrestrial co-habitation requires us to think the global through our embodied engagement with specific places. Places experienced as inclusive—as opening themselves up to multiple, diverse, sometimes contradictory, relationships, attachments and connections” (71).

Open deep mapping is “a multidirectional activity involving observing, listening, walking, conversing, writing, exchanging, selecting, reflecting, naming, generating, digitizing, interweaving, offering and inviting” (71). However, he fears deep mapping is becoming a discipline, the opposite of what he wants it to be, and so he wonders if he ought to walk away from deep mapping if it becomes “reduced to supporting mechanisms for a conceptually driven worldview caught up in serving the culture of possessive individualism” (73). Nevertheless, if deep mapping instead contributes “to ensemble practices predicated on mutual accompaniment,” then it is worth preserving (73). “Open deep mapping has led e to see the desire to ‘mutually accompany’ others as helping to make that commitment possible”—a commitment to Hugo Ball’s belief in “the unity and totality of all things,” which would call on us to “find new ways to live with the sometimes-overwhelming dissonances and difficulties that flow from any such commitment” (73).

In “Web Walking (75-82), Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith propose a new strategy, Web Walking (75)—it’s a manifesto, I think, describing and calling forth a new practice. They begin by reflecting a long walk they took, from Plymouth to Dunstable, a town west of Luton, along the Icknield Way (75)—one of the walks discussed in their subsequent book, The Pattern. “We are on an adventure we have spun out from a labyrinth in Plymouth to a web that stretches as far as Cardiff and, the other way, to Cambridge,” they write (75). Is this a form of mythogeography? An extension of mythogeography? It’s clearly related to mythogeography, because they have been noticing details along the way, particularly details with mythological or occult associations (75) and developing “a way, a collective and convivial way, without dogma, to access certain things, often old things—patterns, values, objects, connections, desires—and throw them forward into the future” (75).

Web walking incorporates performance and collective engagement, it seems: “Through a practice we’ve come to call ‘Web Walking’ we want to map such affordances in privileged points such as Ashwell and a Glastonbury spring we bathed in or at the Uffington white horse where we imagined a ceremony of red on white, while volunteers crushed chalk and a red kite hovered over our heads,” they recall. “We want to avoid separating off the explicit nodes that still connect us to a certain ‘magical mode’ and reconnect them to a wider pattern that includes the places where capitalism is bottoming out” (75). One such place is Dunstable, and they describe the lack of vitality in that town in vivid terms (75-76). “From Plymouth to Cambridge we have seen and felt the same sadness, isolation and division,” they write. “We have picked our way through smack dens to heritage sites and along needle strewn paths in woodland. We have watched the harried looks on people’s faces, trespassed into the pits ripped out by mining companies and ceremonialised in the killing fields where the last wild wolves were slaughtered” (76). In the face of longstanding and accelerating epistemic, economic, and ecological crises—“of populism and authoritarianism, failing globalism, misinformation and digital invasion, misogyny, fundamentalist reaction and species extinction”—they “want to propose a new emphasis for walking” (76).

“Changing the default mode of our ‘drifts’ from solo walks or group wanders focused on affect and ambience, to make walks of conviviality and togetherness for a collective world building,” they continue: 

Dérives based on experiencing are vulnerable to apocalyptic thrills and the consumerist charms of the eerie; to go beyond the affect, we want to repurpose psychogeographical walking as a means of connectivity, not just with each other and the past, but with the future and with the unhuman. We call this “Web Walking.” Putting hyper-sensitised walking at the heart of a multi-modal practice that fires out threads and routes and lines of communication to form webs, which in turn, attach themselves to a wider Pattern. (76)

“Web Walking starts with a familiar site-specificity, with attention to materials, to scuzz and grime and soil, to the plastic in our gut,” they continue. “We need to love that fucked-upness, if we’re going to do anything about it. Like good Butoh dancers, get our noses in the mud; moving from the grot to re-enchantment without dogma; unearthing the signal within the signal in the abject landscape” (77). “These hidden signals, curled up in tiny dimensions within consensus reality, are messages through time from when life was in a so-called ‘magical mode,’” they write. “We want to understand them, then throw them forward as a challenge to futuristic techno-exterminism’s claim to be the only possible and inevitable future” (77).

Billinghurst and Smith desire to “make art that unveils patterns that shift through different planes. To be sparing in our use of representations, but rigorous in our specificity to the qualities of found materials, and enthusiastic for diagrams that show relations” (77). Their tangible art work—representations of the webs they discover?—takes shape across disciplines: “actions, drawing, painting, written and spoken word and installations, drawing threads together into a web, which we then throw out to others—to other people, to other things, to other webs” (77). For instance, their “Plymouth Labyrinth” project used the story of Ariadne and her red thread “to investigate the way a city weaves together” (77). They wrote poems and made paintings; dancers created site-specific performances (77-78). Elsewhere, later on, they added white thread “and entangled these two colour codes, asking walkers to walk between the blood red hunting lines of desire and the bony deathliness of the white,” because between these extremes “there is a connectivity in the moment of crisis” (78). “By letting things have their own life, and their own death, we saw them combine and fix themselves in different webs, flows and diagrams”—and this was the beginning of Web Walking (78). 

During their walks, they found “wolf packs, hidden forests, arks, giants, and the Syrian founder of Albion” at old mines and new suburbs (78)—a description that sounds not unlike mythogeography. They connect to mythos and stories of place “by skulking around in places where few people care to go, or care about. And listening to what we are told there. And we talk endlessly—about the walk, the places, we share memories, theories, and fictions . . . and we are silent . . .” (78). “We inhabit stories as we walk, we put ourselves into fantastic or futuristic narratives that challenge the fixity of where and when and what we are” (79), and so Web Walking mixes together fiction and nonfiction, imagination and the reality of what is there, without drawing those boundaries (79). “We walk, we connect, we spin yarns,” they state. “With feet on the ground and eyes open, through observations and encounters with people, animals and unhuman things, we construct complex models of how things connect ecologically, socially and economically” (79).

Donna Haraway’s work is an inspiration for Web Walking, which is an embodied form of thinking (79). Billinghurst and Smith worked on a long-term walking project throughout 2019 (79). “In this spirit of connectivity, we invited all the people we walked and workshopped with to send us a postcard with a drawing or a poem or whatever, and then in the exhibition we used the corridor of the gallery to link its different rooms with long threads to which we attached the over one hundred postcards we received,” they write, describing the Plymouth Labyrinth exhibition (I think) (80). “We drew from the myths and images that had stepped forward during our walking to create a red room with a scrying mirror, like the body of a spider, from which legs of silken thread worked around the room and escaped through the window to join another web on a roof top. Ariadne had been joined by Arachne” (80). The stories, images, ideas, and theories constituted a web: “Threads from which we then span out across more of the country—walking to Cambridge, Dunstable, Glastonbury, Cardiff, Ashwell, Bristol, Exeter, Wells, Scilly Isles, Avebury, Cheddar, Draycott, and so on, extending the lines of our wandering, each time connecting to more and more threads, and drawing them together to make new webs” (81).

All of this a preview of their new book, The Pattern, which they hope people will use “to connect their own threads to the threads of others, to make their own pantheons and fire out their own lines of desire and flight, to connect one web to another” (81). That new book “is very much a practical handbook,” but it also describes “moving warily towards something we have chosen to call ‘the pattern,’ a tattooing of the land that we have found to be far more intense, connected and intricate than is generally acknowledged” (81). The magical mode of Web Walking “is the life of connectivity—of human and unhuman—pre-dating any division between subject and object in culture, pre-dating human exceptionalism. A mode in which an increase in being free is done, paradoxically, by entanglement with other forces so that agency is magnified by connection” (81). 

Smith and Billinghurst believe “network of ‘privileged points’—places where there was an especially intense exchange and entanglement of ancient humans with their cosmos, where this entanglement was compacted and landmarked for repeated use,” exists, and that neolithic sites, holy wells, and contemporary places of ritual or connection are examples of such sites (81-82). They state, “we are threading together old and contemporary ‘privileged points’ as lines in a larger pattern, a map of a future that is alternative to the mode of the present one” (82). “This pattern is experienced most intensely at sites that were once foundational to the magical mode; but we can add to them, because the old places were never just human constructions, but also natural and random affordances,” they write (82). The network that connects these sites “is like a spider’s legs without a single organising body, like an orrery without a sun in the centre; it constitutes a way of reverencing things without the need for dogma. A way to live and walk in hyper-connectivity as well as hyper-sensitivity; a way to learn how to live with the plastic in our guts alongside excited invasive species” (82). They are searching for “a connective and immersive ‘mode,’ slipping the binaries of human and unhuman, self and cosmos, me and you” (82). They don’t expect Web Walking to solve the problems of cruelty, desire, or community, but like the myths and fairy tales that describe those problems, they “seek a mode that rubs thin the subjective-objective and self-world distinctions. Which makes the route the agent of the walk; makes a stranger just as responsible for a place as the residents, makes the crow our partner and our witness, makes the squid an ideal and an ecstasy, makes the world a web in which we are always in loco parentis and always children” (82). 

In “How do our bodies act as instruments of sensory navigation? A study through ‘shared acts of sensing’” (99-112), Emma Bush states that she is interested “in using performance walking to invite the senses to become more alert to ‘thing power,’ the unceasing motion and responsiveness inherent in objects including those usually considered inert or dead” (99). Her recent works “place ‘shared acts of sensing’ in a central role with a shift towards a more participatory embodied way-finding” (99). She began a research group, “warm-up,” in 2017, to explore “embodied approaches to place, and extended modes of sensing by using a variety of methods”; up to a dozen people from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds gather together for day-long events (100). That led to Night Walk, “an ongoing project which offers an opportunity to experience ‘shared acts of sensing’ on a coastal walk to Elberry Cove, Brixham. Through a gentle play of communal experience, we arrive together in this place at night-time, using our bodies as sensory instruments to navigate the darkness and to notice what is already there” (100).

Bush cites Linda Hurcombe’s contention that the traditionally defined five senses miss the fact that the sensory system is holistic, “‘where sensations perceived by one mechanism act as cues for the receipt of other sensations and where inter-sensoriality is recognised” (qtd. 101). “Shared acts of sensing” is her term describing “collective acts of looking, listening and more broadly the orientation and perception of the senses. Focusing on particular ways of framing communal observation these are performance acts aimed towards a radical permeability, offering insight into embodied encounters between ‘self’ and ‘other’” (101). “I am interested in making time for ‘arts of noticing’ through direct material sensory experience and framing this participation as central to the life of an artwork,” she writes (101). The “embodied trans-sensual fluidity proposed here in attending to matter, the body and sensation” will encourage the senses to combine into a web (101). The purpose of this paper is to define the term “shared acts of sensing” (101).

“I work with an approach that creates pockets of time, or spaciousness, and potentially frees us from our habitual patterns of observation—using tools from performance, including non-linear story-telling, gesture, and repetition to guide attention and to make an invitation,” she contends (102). Stasis, rather than movement, is part of this practice: “To stand still and simply look at the sky, a snowdrop, or a stone wall for five, ten or fifty minutes is an unusual act. To do this looking, really looking—especially in a group, is something we don’t often do, perhaps because we do not have time or capacity, perhaps because we are so often lost in thought and a large part of our lives is now constantly screened or mediated by technologies” (102). In this way, her practice “is concerned with making spaces for intimate encounters with materiality, meeting points between self and other, in a way that relies on sensual lived experience and remembering how to refine our receptivity” (102).

Bush explains “shared acts of sensing” in a series of points (103). First, she emphasizes “sensory contact with materials and thus a direct ‘lived experience’ of materiality” (103). The collective observation and attention “will be guided by a clearly marked temporal and spatial frame” (103). The observation will be performed by a group of people in the same place, at the same time, doing the same task (103). Most of the experiences of observation will take place outdoors (103). “Language will operate through instruction or score as a mode of storytelling, priming or guiding aimed at inviting participants to particular spaces of collective encounter,” she continues. “The language used will be a blend of fact and fiction and will suggest, emphasise, and frame notions on which the continuity of the walk lies” (103). The “shared acts of sensing” will reacquaint participants “with familiar territory by re-examining our experience of place and our relationship with our surroundings” (103). They will also “alter our experience of time” through practices such as slow walking “and thus could be viewed as techniques for time travel” (103). The practice leaves space “for the un-known or in-expressible element” of the experience (103). Part of the encounter she seeks to facilitate  “cannot be pinned down or tamed into a definition” (104).

Bush acknowledges that it’s good to be skeptical “about just how much of these activities is shared and who with,” and that converting such experiences into language “is obviously flawed,” although still valuable (104). The sharing of experience “does not imply an equivalence of experience—what we notice and how we notice it will vary and those differences in what draws or attracts our attention are revealing” (104). “A shared sense of time opening up or slowing down can create space in which sensory attention is given room to notice small details or events; the constant flux of change about and within us is given the opportunity to arise,” she states. “Shared acts of sensing can give rise to a space in which our perception is invited to slow down, to look anew without preconceptions and indeed to attempt to see ‘as if for the first time’” (104). 

Bush cites Henri Bergson’s notion of pure perception—an impossible attempt to get close to a spontaneity of vision or sensory perception; it is impossible “because we come with our histories, memories, our ‘life-worlds,’ placing a filter, between us and all that we meet, or come into contact with” (104-05). Her suggestions for looking at a flower, for instance, suggest not naming or categorizing the plant (as a nettle, in her example) but merely taking time to look closely at the plant, to “[h]old it, smell it, touch it, listen to it,” to “let the object and the information it contains present itself to you. Notice varied colours, shades, lines, textures, markings” (105). “We look and we look again, we draw the details, try to describe in words, we listen with our touch and our eyes, then we use a hand lens to magnify the details 10 times more. We let the information come to us, present itself and wash over us,” she states. “Going out like hunters, we try to become more porous and open to our more-than human selves” (106). Her performance training plays a role in sensitizing her to sensory data (106): “This mode of observation offers insights from the viewpoint of a world in which agency is more evenly distributed allowing for an approach which acknowledges networked processes of perception which can reside in, deflect from and be triggered by ‘object’ and further encourages a decentralising of the object/subject dualism” (106). She also wonders whether “sensory observations might guide us to consider our individual selves as multiple, our bodies as collectives” (108).

The “serious play” she engages in has rules: 

A group of human bodies will be organised and placed into a considered formation—with a chosen distance setting them apart, in a chosen position e.g. standing, sitting or lying down. The intended formation provides a tension or a resistance for the activity, a set and setting outside our habitual experience, functioning a design which holds and gathers the experience. This modelling provides a formality or a disciplined structure and for some participants is part of a strengthening framework which may bring a more relaxed merging into the activity and/or a frustration or resistance. The tension perhaps exists in the pull between the orderliness and constraint of formality alongside the (sometimes) welcome relief offered in moments through a movement towards stillness and a listening to all that is sounding in silence. (108-09)

Shared acts of sensing enable the creation of a temporary community through shared intention (109). Shifting from the language of sensation to verbal language through “the overarching framework of the walks”: using storytelling, instruction, rhythm, and atmosphere to guide “each participant deliberately back towards somatic experience through cues which foreground sensation, touch and materiality” (109-10). Framing and experiencing these events as live performances “offers heightened focus internally and this operates in connection with the affect or ‘idea’ of being witnessed,” which acts as a “crystallising of presence, giving heightened intensity to the shared activity” (110). “We may consider shared acts of sensing as artworks in their own right, although small scale interventions they are also offered as acts for the ‘environment’ (field, city, garden, town square) in which we are co-present fully aware of the possibility of the reciprocal gaze. In this regard ‘performing’ plays provocatively with the notion of reciprocity or exchange across human or non-human actors,” Bush concludes. “Shared acts of sensing can give a sense of temporary community, solidarity, or shared common ground which heightens focus and gives rise to an expansive sense of belonging with the matter of the world” (111).

In “The Sight of the Walker” (137-49), William Sharpe also examines the senses—in particular, senses other than vision:

When art is made from the action of walking, the sight of the walking, in a double sense, is often a focal point. What does the sighted walker see—conceptually, visually, in terms of both insight and/or eyesight—and what does an audience see—again conceptually, visually—when it looks at a walker walking? And is this visual information overvalued? Or could the sight of a walker change a life? (137)

While visual representations of walking “can be compellingly beautiful,” they are incomplete: “Because the ever-altering engagement of body, mind, and environment necessitates a hopelessly complex imagining of interior and external stimuli just to evoke the sensation of taking a few steps, images cannot convey the totality of the walk” or of the walker (138). “The spectator must fill in what’s absent, an act that creates the pleasure and frustration of viewing walking images” (138). No doubt that is true of images of any human activity, for that matter. A representation never includes everything; it always leaves things out.

Sharpe argues that, “[f]or millennia, images of walkers have played a central role in representational art,” but that in “contemporary walking art, art that regards the act of walking as artistic in itself,” the concern has been with the “immateriality” of walking: “Each step vanishes as the next one comes into being. One cannot grasp the totality of a walk from a single point of view or a single point in time and, as Hamish Fulton asserts, one cannot erase the line made by a walk” (138). Are “visual artifacts generated by the walk . . . incidental or integral to the art-walk ‘itself’”? he asks (138). “Does the ‘art’ reside in the walk, the walker, or the documentation?” (138). 

Sharpe is also concerned “about ocular-centrism, about the inadequacy and selectiveness of visual images, have led many walk-makers to focus on senses other than sight”: sound walks, tactile walks, unsighted walks, smell walks, memory walks (138). He contends that “the sight of the walker, what the walker sees, has been an incessant subject of writing about walking since ancient times” (139). “If there is a new movement in visualising walking, it must find its way amid the push-and-pull of current theories and practices, where sight and the other senses jostle for attention,” he argues. “Critiqued or admired or puzzled over, visual images and encounters continue to play a vital role in walking art. . . . This is particularly true in the case of artists who want to make more visible two interconnected groups of ‘watched walkers,’ the disabled and the surveilled” (139).

Next, Sharpe establishes a genealogy of walking art: it begins with the Surrealists and Situationists, but emerges as a form in the 1960s along with conceptual art, performance art, land art, and “new definitions of sculpture that not only required involvement from the spectator but also interacted with natural and human-made environments in site-specific ways” (139). “In a world cluttered with lasting masterpieces, the process-oriented art of happenings and performances sought to create something spatially ephemeral and ecologically advanced, works that might take up just a moment in time and only the space needed to hold an idea,” he suggests (139). “Walking art offers its proponents a choice: do I make my body visible in this work, as a painter might, so that my audience may have a sight of the walker, or shall I shape my work in such a way that the audience, perhaps as participant, sees something else?” (139). These questions not unlike those Blake Morris asks in his definition of walking as an artistic medium (Morris).

Sharpe notes that walking is an everyday activity, and so walking art “defamiliarises the world we know. The artist imposes an unusual, thought-provoking itinerary or bodily constraint or underlying conception that signals difference, that marks the walk as art, not life” (140). The act of documenting a walk “forms part of the estrangement” (140). Documentation is also part of walking art’s genealogy: 

Immaterial though it may be, walking art emerged in part from the actions of artists tied by training to a visual arts tradition, one that produces objects to look at, from gallery-ready textworks or photos and films, to retrieved objects, casual drawings, and illustrated books, that artists employ to record the passage of their bodies through time and space. Whether art walks are done privately or presented as public performances, material traces and pictorial images of them convey part of the artistic experience, but never its entirety. In an art of process, an art involving mind, body, and landscape, the image will never be enough. It will always be suggestive rather than complete. (140)

Images or other forms of documentary representation tend to act as placeholders or “evocations of actions now completed or that may never have had an audience” (140). “In contrast to the unseen ‘heroic’ efforts” of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, who made “arresting images from unwitnessed walks,” other artists “with a performance orientation enacted striking works that produced indelible images,” showing “that it’s not the length of the walk but the strength of the idea animating it that counts in making provocative, illuminating art. A strong alliance between concept and image has been essential to their success” (140). He offers Marina Abramović and Ulay’s The Lovers (Great Wall Walk) (1988), Francis Alÿs’s Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997), and Mona Hatoum’s Performance Still—Roadworks (1985-1995) as examples (140-41), along with Hamish Fulton’s slowalks (141). “Given the staying power of certain images, these documented sightings of creative walkers may, for all their shortcomings, actually have more political, social, and/or aesthetic impact than the ‘real’ walks they have emerged from,” he writes (141).

However, in the last two decades “a growing number of practitioners have argued that walking art needs to challenge ocular-centrism, to pay less attention to objects that can be visually consumed without engaging other senses” (141). Those artists “seek to explore a body intermeshed with the landscape and with other people,” and the resulting “emphasis on walking as a collective, activist form of art,” along with “less certainty about the value of tying the meaning of the art walk to representative images,” has led to “a de-centring of the image, through a greater emphasis on haptics, sound, memory, and orality” (141). This “corrective, anti-ocular position” is necessary, but it “does not sufficiently recognise the somatics of looking,” the way that the seeing eye “activates the rest of the body’s senses,” such as “kinaesthetic empathy, an effect that can produce physical sensations of fear, desire, revulsion, anger, sorrow, and so on” (141-42). 

“Today more than ever, the sight of the walker is related to the words that surround or appear in the image, since walking images rarely circulate without language to sustain them,” Sharpe continues. “Psychogeography, which could be said to bridge the perceived gap between sight and sense, is a heavily textual mode of walking art, since its rambles seem most amenable to documenting in semi-novelistic form, most saliently in the work of Iain Sinclair” (142). Of course, so many proponents of psychogeography reject the literary form of that practice that Sinclair’s work represents. In any case, psychogeography, while it claims to be about feeling, “is often directed by sight since that sense operates over longer distances and pulls the walker toward far-off enticements” (142). Reinventions of the dérive, such as Phil Smith’s mythogeography, “delight in visual discoveries, ripples in the space-time of history, community, and physical situatedness” (142). “Smith’s walks present themselves to the audience as a series of unanticipated discoveries of texture, feeling, thought, and organic matter that are notated visually with a quirky eye for detail but that, in their post-walk presentation, are most eloquently elaborated in texts whose sinuousity mirrors the twists and turns of mind and body through a space densely packed with material encounters,” he notes (142). Smith writes that the various kinds of documentation of walks is designed to encourage others to engage in exploratory walking as well, rather than to be marketable commodities (143); and yet, Sharpe suggests, “even a shared walk needs company; it does not communicate its artistry by itself” (143). In other words, a walk requires other media to communicate its structuring design (143).

“The walking medium is not monolithic: it can touch, smell, taste, and hear, engaging time and space and its own thoughts,” Sharpe continues. “Visuality forms an inevitable part of this communication, as walkers see, while others see them, and the camera eye, human-pointed or fixed in a surveillance stare, sees both. Whether it is ‘captured’ ‘only’ in memory, or whether is is represented in various media, the walk is ‘seen’ on many levels” (144). “Two kinds of walking art—disability art and surveillance art—are concerned with new movements in a literal way as they question the meaning of public space”—they are concerned with a desire “to make their subject matter visible, and visibly felt” (144). As examples of disability art, he includes Carmen Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle (2010-), Noëmi Lakmaier’s short film One Morning in May (2012). In addition, he considers William Pope.L’s performance The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 years, 1 Street (2001-2009), which “makes visual in an indelible way the ‘out-of-placeness’ and paradoxical invisibility of black people in America,” to be a metaphorical example of disability art (144-45). “The flip side of being overlooked and yet pushed from public life by being stared at when entering it, is being constantly monitored and silently recorded,” he continues (145), citing as examples of one form of surveillance art projects that use GPS tracking systems, such as Jeremy Hunt’s My Ghost (Sixteen Years of Mapping My Life in London With GPS) (2016) and Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton’s Running Stitch (2006) (145). “But these are technologies that walkers use,” he notes.” What of technologies that use walkers, often without their permission, either to entertain them or to point out their vulnerability to darker devices?” (145). “Like disability art, surveillance art seeks to turn the tables, to make visible the repressive gazes that threaten watched people, bringing those gazes into fuller human contact with the spectator” (145): his list of surveillance art includes Christian Moeller’s Nosy (2006), Camille Utterback’s Abundance (2007), Marie Sester’s Access (2003), Dries Depoorter’s Jaywalking (2016) (146). In addition, Jill Magid’s Trust (2004) connected disability and surveillance: she walked through Liverpool with her eyes closed, guided by a surveillance camera operator (146). 

Cameras and watchers “subvert one of walking’s most heralded attributes”: the notion of solitary walking as self-discovery, as a space of freedom from imposed social roles, as in the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (147): “Today’s Rousseau must assemble instead an array of defamiliarising techniques, an artistic wardrobe of masks and disguises, to get free of a gaze that presumes to know all the walker’s secrets” (147). “Where walking’s new movement will lead, as we step into a future invisible to us, is anyone’s guess. It may be that an ever-more feeling form of walking perception will thrive in the coming years,” Sharpe concludes “But touchingly or remotely, the art of walking will have to deal with the fraught and ever-shifting sight of the walker” (148).

Hamish Fulton’s “Words From Walks” ([167]-[82]) is a description of his walking practice, in the form of a lengthy work of text art, a leaflet ([167]). It offers “a few points regarding my general outlook” ([167]). “Walking art is the bringing together / of two entirely separate activities,” he writes ([169]). “I transform ideas / into physical experiences. My self-imposed rule is: / If I do not walk I cannot make any art” ([169]). Thus, he continues, “I am an artist who walks, not a walker who makes art. / Not every artist enjoys walking / and not every walker is tolerant of contemporary art” ([169]). Fulton distinguishes between walking and art: “An ‘artwork’ may be purchased, / but my walks / cannot be sold or stolen” ([169]). He recognizes that not everyone is physically able to walk ([169]). Fulton also notes that he makes a variety of walks—that they are diverse in length, terrain, duration ([170]), and that he also engages in solo and shared walks, which build experiences rather than objects ([170]).

Some of Fulton’s text reminds me of the distinction Morris draws between walking as an artistic medium and walking as a prelude to work in other media: “I walk on the land, not in the ‘landscape.’ / I do not take walks, I make walks. / ‘Walk texts’ are about past events. / Walking ‘in the moment,’ / is walking now. // AN OBJECT CANNOT COMPETE WITH AN EXPERIENCE. / A completed walk is like an invisible object” ([170]). “Walking Is The Constant The Art Medium Is The Variable,” Fulton continues ([170]). His text works are made “exclusively / from walks that I have personally experienced” ([171]). He sees his text works as narratives: “Make a walk, write a text, read it to an audience. / By word of mouth. The spoken word. Oral history. / Memory is selective. / The retelling of stories. / A good story well told. / Verbal interpretations for the meaning of visual symbols. / Picture writing. Sign language” ([171]). In any case, as far as his practice is concerned, “A walk may exist purely as a walk, / but my ‘artwork’ / cannot be created without the walk” ([172]). “An Artwork Cannot Re-present The Experience Of A Walk,” he notes, acknowledging Sharpe’s critique as a reality ([172]). He also seems to anticipate Morris’s argument: “Walking Art. / Neither of these two words / specify an art medium, / thereby suggesting openness and potential / for anyone. // The separation of experience and object.” ([172]).

Fulton advocates walking without a smartphone ([173]): “Walking / is the interconnected experience / for a wide spectrum of possibilities, disciplines and research” ([173]). All of his walks are woven together through his invisible footsteps ([174]). In 1973, he “made the single most important decision” of his creative life: “To Make Art Resulting Only / From The Experience Of Individual Walks” ([175]). He rejects the label “Land Artist” ([178]): “LAND ART CONTRADICTS WALKING ART” ([178]). I’m not surprised by that rejection; Richard Long also eschews the label “land art.” 

Towards the end of his leaflet Fulton returns to the division between experience and representation: “An Object Cannot Compete With An Experience” ([178]). “When I say that ‘the walk is the art,’ / I simply mean / that ‘the walk’ / is my contribution to contemporary art,” he concludes ([181]). Indeed, he is a pioneer, and his work is important, even though many contemporary practitioners reject the notion of solo or durational walks altogether.

In “Walking-with whiteness: story carriers, affect aliens and reluctant heritage” (204-13), Richard S. White/Walknow begins by acknowledging his embodied privilege: “Engaging critically with walking practices as an able-bodied white English man, I recognise that for me race, gender and ability are as embodied and normalised as walking” (204). Throughout the chapter, he cites Garnette Cadogan’s essay “Walking While Black” as “a reality check on the unspoken privilege bound up in my experience of walking as a white man” (206). White’s practice is both political and corporeal: “Questioning the normalisation of injustice through the immanence and instability of walking is the wobbly corporeal foundation of my creative practice” (204). This paper describes “an iteration of a walking-with approach [to walking] through a short case study of a project I hosted in Bath, ‘Sweet Waters,’ ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership. I consider how a walking arts engagement with heritage might attend to whiteness and the normalisation of privilege” (204).

Sweet Waters was a series of participatory performance walks in Bath and along the River Avon. The focus of those walks was the ongoing effect of slavery on Bath: 

The cycle of walks involved durational and location-specific interventions generating affective responses, curated to disrupt and question official heritage accounts. Whereas in Bristol the slave trade and the ownership of captured and enslaved Africans has become part of a contested sense of place, in Bath, although manifested in the Georgian architecture, these past injustices are seen as unconnected and happening elsewhere. (205)

That history “forms part of what I describe as a ‘reluctant’ heritage, a heritage that is painful or shameful, in which something of the past has become obscured or hidden in the present” (205). He is exploring “a walking, questioning, doing, process attending to that reluctance and in this context specifically addressing issues of racialisation and whiteness” (205-06). White wants to move “beyond passive embodiment towards considering gaze and power, and the agency of matter” (206-07).

During Sweet Water, walkers “were invited to become agents in a slow reveal of the seductive normalisation of white supremacy as a legacy of slavery and slave-ownership” (207). For instance, they walked to a tower above Bath, funded and used by slave-owner William Beckford; the source of Beckford’s fortune has been glossed over—but it came from sugar plantations in Jamaica (207). The walks “passed the former residencies of slave-owners and the remains of mills where goods were made for the ‘Africa Trade,’ we walked along the river to Bristol where those goods were loaded on the slave trading ships” (207). Along the way, “curated provocations”—“readings from archives and contemporary statements from slave-owners”—were presented; participants were invited to share their thoughts in writing and on social media; each walk began with introductions and “an attunement exercise alerting the senses, engaging attention and focusing thoughts” and ended with “a group sharing” (207). 

“In this walking and questioning approach, the developing somatic sensibility and its ethical context, an iteration of walking-with emerges,” White suggests (207). He describes Springgay and Truman’s notion of “walking-with”: “Walking-with is an ethical practice of building solidarity, respecting dignity, valuing the contributions of all, in this way of knowing walking becomes an immanent practice, a speculative act of somatic questioning, attending critically to shared and embodied experience” (208). He describes what walking-with was like during the Sweet Water walks (208-09). The walks “involved walking Bath’s iconic crescents and promenades, stopping and delivering a gentleman’s visiting card at residencies of former slave-owners” and “short performances listing the plantations, numbers of enslaved people owned and compensation paid out” (209). “Fellow walkers on the ‘Sweet Waters’ walks were engaged through walking networks, artists networking and a local natural history festival, most were white, many were local; although not all were middle aged the demographic was perhaps typical for a walking festival,” he recalls. “This was my intended audience as it is this demographic who in some way have internalised the values of, and often embody, white privilege” (210).

Those walks are emblematic of his artistic practice: “At the core of my practice is an interest in registers of walking and an exploration of tactics that provoke involuntary thought. I curate experiences of temporal and spatial dissonance into a walk seeking to generate empathetic responses. I use somatic attunements and such factors as duration, distance and pace to generate alertness and sensitivity” (210). He cites Sara Ahmed’s contention that “historical injustice does not fade over time”—that “the injustice of slave-ownership,” for instance, “manifests today as normalised white privilege. Injustice lives on if we don’t address it, in order to begin the repair work and bring about change we must make the return” (211). The “dissonant juxtaposition” of “an enforced migration with a walk for pleasure in a city and countryside inscribed with the wealth of slave-ownership was an act of making the return” (210-11). For Ahmed, forgetting “is an act of complicity to the persistence of injustice” (211). White is interested in “the possibility of walkers becoming heritage affect aliens empowered to ask difficult questions of a reluctant heritage, to interrogate the silence” (211).

The Sweet Water walks also stirred white discomfort and fragility (211): “At times it felt like we had hit on the raw nerve of reluctance, especially with regard to slavery and the issue of white superiority” (211). “Walking-with in this context developed an embodied experience of confidence and solidarity towards countering white fragility, eroding reluctance to engage critically with this particular heritage narrative,” he suggests (211). Participants became storytellers, 

breaking the ‘dead silence’ of Bath. A supportive space for questioning heritage and responding to the instances of white fragility . . . was established. In this way, through new insights and ways of seeing, walkers took ownership of the story, generating affective attachments to a new co-created heritage narrative. The silence was broken, however temporarily, and the story of the walk and the spirit of questioning is shared, networked again and again. (211-12)

In this way, White concludes, Sweet Waters “was an opening towards a somatic creative activism manifesting new ways of attending to whiteness and revealing privilege” (212). He suggests that “walking-with may offer a non-confrontational embodied approach to addressing other ‘wicked’ problems and complex social justice issues” (212). “At a time of deep dislocation and as an ugly romance with empire and white supremacy emerges,” he states, “I believe that collective and somatic acts of making the return to past injustice are vital precursors to the social repair needed for a just and sustainable future” (212).

Sarah Harper, in “The Meaning and Importance of Refusals: is walking as accessible as we think?” (214-24), reflects on La Grande Traversée, a participatory walking art project in northern France. While she considers a success, she wants to think about “the limitations of the practice, looking at where it failed to engage, why that matters, and what could be learned from it. I will ask whether walking as a participatory art practice can be racially exclusive, and what value we could give to its refusal” (214). She notes that contemporary French culture “puts a high value on participation, and as artists, we can tend to be complicit with that demand, without necessarily addressing whose interests that participation might serve” (214). Nevertheless, refusal to participate is both inevitable and useful—for those who refuse, that is (214-15):

I’d like to focus on the value on non-participation, looking at some of those who did not walk and why, and in doing so re-assess the comparative cultural value of everyday activities, by which I mean what people are already doing before an artist turns up to invite them to go for a long walk, collectively, in the name of social cohesion. Exploring this act of walking together, walking through, and walking past, through the lens of refusal, I will focus on those for whom walking was problematic: physically, psychologically, culturally or for religions reasons, as well as those too angry with the economic desert they were born into to participate in celebrating a major aspect of their heritage with any kind of collective action. (215)

Those who refused to participate in the project are, in this account, more important than those who did, and they suggest the limits of participatory walking as a practice. Harper notes that she takes walking for granted; she starts all participatory projects with walking, “in a slow immersion process,” walking to meet people and explore place (215). “But when does walking, walking past or walking through, become an exclusive rather than an inclusive activity, reinforcing a community of sameness, of like-ness, reserved for those who are financially able, or who have the cultural or social capital which puts pleasure, sport, well-being, or risk-taking easily within reach?” she asks (215). 

The purpose of La Grande Traversée was “to be a cultural strategy to re-activate links between populations who, due to poverty and unemployment, are highly sedentary, many rarely venturing out of their neighbourhoods, let alone their towns. It was to reframe participants’ lived experience with the territory, and re-infuse contested or disaffected sites with expressions of story, history or ownership” (215). However, celebrating the mining heritage of an area which has suffered devastating unemployment difficult, as was “proposing a walking project within a culture of limited mobility” (216). The area is dotted with “ex-mining estates,” built for miners, and since the mines closed in the 1990s, the remnants of the mines—buildings, slag heaps, lift shafts, pitheads—were left to rot or demolished, until ecotourism initiatives turned the railway tracks to the mine sites into cycle paths, “the slag heaps into havens for biodiversity and walking or mountain bike trails, and caved in the underground pit tunnels to create lakes for watersports” (216). As a result, the area is “a walker’s paradise, but social relics of 19th-century patriarchy mean that, after generations of being provided for (and controlled), initiative is lacking on mining estates and people find it hard to do things outside their comfort zones. Many families are third-generation unemployed and have never known a working family member” (216). That unemployment has caused a sharp rise in passive activities—watching television—along with alcoholism and suicide (216). 

The project Harper curated involved walking for pleasure, which “might be an exclusive activity”: problems of length (twelve kilometres at first, but as she searched for an appealing route, it became longer) (217). Also, because “the project’s numerous institutional partners proved only half committed to the idea of an artist exploring ‘the poetics of the everyday,’” they  “wanted to bring this Great Crossing past their expensive new arts centre, or renovated town hall” (217). This meant that the “poetics of the everyday”—“the subtle, poetic rediscovery of sidestreets, corner cafés or unsung front-gardens”—was “sacrificed to tourism and municipal pride, as the route lengthened again . . . to nineteen kilometres” (217). That was too long for an area with the highest obesity rates in France, so to make it easier for people to participate, she included travelling from site to site by tram “into the walk’s protocol,” but the fares were too expensive for “the large, low-income families we particularly sought to engage” and the tram company refused to provide free tickets (217). I would also suggest that a lack of appropriate walking shoes or boots would have been a barrier.

“For each community group I worked with, the decision to walk or not was usually based on the group’s physical capacity to walk far,” Harper recalls. “Groups who opted out on these grounds were invited to be ‘hosts’ along the route, harnessing their existing cultural activities to punctuate the walk with performance” (218). “For the walkers, these theatrical interventions served to revive flagging energies,” she states. “The guide-maps in their hands became visible signs of belonging to this ephemeral community of adventurers, an invitation echoed in the local myths or stories that hosting residents confided to them, or in the soundscapes whispered from trees or letterboxes along the way” (218).

Nevertheless, some groups were excluded: people who spoke little or no French, who spoke Arabic or Kabyle instead—women from Algeria in particular, whose “daily routines were largely restricted to their flats” and a community centre, a group for whom going to another town or taking a tram was unimaginable (218-19). “The project’s focus was too wide to be meaningful for them, their isolation too great, and yet their industry was a key part of the region’s history that would remain unembodied and silent,” she acknowledges (219). “Another group excluded themselves in reaction to their experience of exclusion from society’s workforce”: young, unemployed, third-generation North African immigrants (219). “Faced with their rage, a celebratory walk seemed an inappropriate suggestion”—after all, their grandfathers were miners (219). Instead of walking, those youth made a film, with a rap they created as its soundtrack (219). A third group “that found themselves excluded” was a collective of North African women, who wanted to participate but found it difficult because the walk took place during Ramadan, a time when the daily fast would make walking 20 kilometres difficult (220). The organizers would not move the date of the walk to a day after Ramadan. 

“Care and reparation are central to the relational aesthetic,” and in an aesthetic of care, as James Thompson suggests, decisions about accessibility are “crucial ethical propositions” (qtd. 220-21). However, in Harper’s compliance with the funding and hosting agencies, 

little space was made for those for whom walking out of their neighbourhood was physically or mentally impossible, nor for those whose experience of the territory was one of anger, or rejection, nor for those who would be celebrating Ramadan at the time. With an assumption that “walking together” would be an accessible and cohesive act, the project ultimately appealed to white working families, with social and physical mobility, for whom the weekend could be devoted to leisure, or those whose memories or family ties still rendered the, now historical, mining heritage meaningful. (221)

Those who refused to walk were made invisible (221). What was the value of their refusal? Harper wonders (221). The groups that did not participate had good reasons for not engaging in the project (221). 

“In conclusion, it seems important to ask whether the act of walking is itself racially exclusionary?” she asks (221): “I cannot avoid the reflection that the three groups, whose refusals I have examined, were made up almost entirely of people of North African descent. And looking back over the hundreds of photos that were taken that day, of the walk and its participants, I can see two faces of colour; the vast majority of the 450 walkers were white” (221-22). Therefore, “this act of walking was racially divisional, through racism deeply embedded into the region’s history” (222). In other words, the walk produced exclusion (222). For all three of the excluded groups, “the unfamiliar act of walking a long way, in a group for pleasure, surrounded by others they did not know, with whom there was to be some undefined inter-action, would have needed mediating, accompanying or adapting” (222). 

Harper examines other walking events that were either seen as for whites alone, or where participation by people of colour seemed strange and unusual (222): “The history of the black body so painfully linked to walking under duress, and the contemporary black body still economically bound to walking by necessity continues in non-urban contexts to make it unusual or difficult to imagine black families walking out of choice” (223). She also notes that the participants in the Plymouth conference were mostly white and middle class and older: “The thing about walking is that it is, in theory, so accessible. Anyone can do it. But if its afficionados are so distinctly lacking in diversity, it begs the question, has walking become, or remained, a white practice, something elitist, potentially exclusionary, belonging to the last century?” (223). I’m not at all surprised by this recognition, but at the same time, I don’t think walking is a practice that’s open to everyone, even though, in theory, most people are capable of doing it. In the city where I live, for instance, very few people walk; everyone drives. To suggest walking for pleasure—outside of one route around or near the lake in the large park at the centre of the city—would be considered strange. Is the problem that some people are not engaged by participatory walking-art events, or is the problem the belief that everyone is or should be called to walk? Or does the problem Harper identifies consist of both of those questions?

“It used to feel, a few decades ago, radical, or counter-cultural to reclaim the streets with our feet,” Harper concludes. “To stay relevant, we have to hope that as a movement it embraces, and is embraced by, diverse artists for a diverse public” (223). In the end, she argues against her own practice, “recognising non-participation in order to highlight inbuilt conscious or unconscious bias, and systemic contradictions of intent” (223). People who refuse to walk “are doing something else that has value” and “walking may not be as accessible as we think” (223). So, when people refuse to participate we need to consider “an ecology of mutual doings and beings” (quoting Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson) by “acknowledging the implications of how participation is recognised and by whom” (223). 

In “Access Denied? Walking Art and Disabled People” (225-34), Morag Rose picks up on the question of accessibility. She begins by celebrating the conference as “a gathering of kin”: people who believe “that the ordinary can be transformed and our footsteps can be creative” (225). “However, too often I find myself asking awkward questions about whether I am going to be excluded in subtle (and not so subtle) ways because of how my body works,” she writes. “As a disabled person will I have to ask about access?” (225). Would she be the “conference crank,” a figure not unlike Sara Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy,” “the participant whose awkward questions create the space to discuss who, and what, is being overlooked or marginalised” (225). After the conference, she was left with “a lingering unease” (225). She wants walking artists “to make a few small changes to ensure their work is welcoming to all” (225-26).

Rose discusses the Loiterers Resistance Movement, which she co-founded in 2006: a psychogeographical collective whose manifesto states, “Our city is wonderful and made for more than shopping. The streets belong to everyone and we want to reclaim them for play and revolutionary fun” (qtd. 226). However, her walking, because of her disability, “has always been problematic and contradictory,” and while there “is still pain, and tiredness, and falls,” she also experiences “stubbornness, joy and a deep sense of gratitude” (227). “I haven’t really spoken or written much about being an artist whose chosen medium is my nemesis because I didn’t want to, and I was too busy with other things,” she confesses: 

Trying to reconcile this paradox, without making myself a spectacle, a superhero or an object of pity, has often felt hard and not something I wanted to give time to. My broken feet are not the most interesting thing about me, and having always lived with pain I don’t really want to give it more energy. A truth: chronic illness is boring, really boring. Also exhausting, expensive and dull. Pain is painful. (227)

“I want to encourage walking artists to think about how we can recognise the needs and experience of disabled people and find ways to open up our work,” she states (228). She notes that the archetype of the walker is male, but also “able bodied, wealthy, heteronormative, urbane and white,” all things that need to be addressed collectively (228). “Improving access and valuing different bodies takes effort and means encountering uncomfortable truths,” she states (228). For instance, she realized, at the conference, that she rarely engages with the work of other artists, because she is afraid she will ruin it—because of the way she walks, because of her disability, which is not included in the walks’ designs. 

Rose includes a note she posted on the Walking Artists Network after the conference, asking walking artists to think about how to include disabled people in their work. But her post did more than that: “Please can we all try and be explicit, and honest, about who is welcome and able to participate in our work. It can be really difficult to find out access information for many venues and events, and this labour should not have to fall on our audience” (229). Her description of her experience is, frankly, a shock: “on several occasions I have found myself literally left behind during performance walks because the pace was too fast and nobody noticed or the terrain became very hard to navigate and this was not made clear from the off. I’m sure this is oversight rather than design, but it is, to put it mildly, unfair and unpleasant” (229). In fact, she writes, “I have become reluctant to attend events unless it is clear disabled people are welcome—because I assume otherwise there will be an uncomfortable struggle and my body will be constructed as a problem for others. I will not apologise for my pace or my body. This is, amongst many other things, exhausting and unfair” (229).

“I am not saying all our walks must be for everybody, this is clearly inappropriate and I have no desire to censor fast or long or physically arduous walks,” she continues. “I also recognise the environment we live in is disabling in many ways and we may not always have the power to choose or change a venue” (229-30). Nevertheless, accessibility information needs to be added to publicity, and walk organizers need “to think about whether there are changes we can make that would enable more people to join in or access our work in other ways if they cannot physically be there” (230). Also, walking artists must “be respectful of our audiences and reflexive to their needs. I don’t ever want anyone else to be left behind, abandoned or excluded by creative walking due to someone else’s thoughtlessness and/or bad planning” (230). Rose wants the term “walking art” to be expanded, in order to be as exclusive as possible: “My belief is that if we are making something enchanted out of the everyday it should be for everyone and ‘walking’ can, should, must include sticks, wheels, orthotics and other enabling technologies” (230). 

The response to the post was “overwhelmingly positive” but she was also “shocked . . . to realise the social model of disability is not integral to many peoples’ understanding of prejudice and exclusion” (230). She posted a follow-up, describing her original message as “a call for kindness, thoughtfulness and respect for the needs of different bodies” (231). “The most important thing is to be honest, open, and to listen. Ask people what their access needs are because they know much better than you do,” she wrote (231). She called for the development of a compilation of resources on access “and amplifying/celebrating the work of disabled walking artists” (232); that is under development, and she welcomes contributions from people with a variety of disabilities (232). “I will continue to work with others to make Walking Art as accessible, diverse, challenging and creative as possible,” she writes. “The social model of disability teaches us that the environment is disabling and we face massive structural issues. This does not give us an excuse to not be caring, kind and self-reflexive” (232-33).

Rose ends with three walking projects she finds inspiring: first, Sue Porter and Dee Heddon’s work in the “Walking Interconnections: performing conversations on sustainability” project (2017), which “challenged the lack of disabled peoples’ voices in debates around environmental sustainability”; Carmen Papalia’s Mobility Device, where he replaces his white cane with a marching band; and Alec Findlay’s Day of Access (2019) which called on landed estates to open their lands to walkers (233). “We are all walking in a world that can be hostile to many and where disabled people are too often marginalised, ignored or discriminated against. I urge everyone reading this to pause and think about how we can challenge ourselves to make things better,” she states (233). Walking with others is “a way to take and hold space, building connections and creating communities as we do so. The question I am asking is who are you willing to make space for? Please do not leave any walker behind” (233).

In “The Documentary Drift: Lutyens, Cockington and Poetry” (242-54), Sam Kemp describes his intention to write a collection of poetry, influenced by Phil Smith’s book about a mythogeographical journey across South Devon, exploring “the pastoral contradictions of Cockington, a heritage village in the south west of England,” but when he encountered a collection of letters by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), “the village soon became a fantastical theatre where his questions of language, craft and beauty could unravel” (242). “In this essay I’ll highlight the role that walking played in a bleeding together of a documentary and geographical landscape,” he writes (242).

At the beginning of the project, Kemp walked around the village at different times of day, different routes, different conditions, taking notes (242). “I was interested in multiplicities, how the village cold be both a pastoral retreat and a complicated mash up of commodified rural tropes,” he recalls (243). He has a personal connection to the village: his family runs the gift shop (243). “Simply walking the village as a visitor was a new experience. Up until then, it had always been a place of tension,” he states (243). These complications suggest that it is a “mythogeographical hub,” and he drew inspiration from Smith’s writing on Cockington (244):“Cockington is a complicated place, seemingly still stumbling for a precise role”: a tourism destination that presents a façade of the local and traditional (244). However, he found lots of evidence that “punctures Cockington’s commodified pastoral”: rough sleepers, struggling businesses, death, a “stifled utopia under the car park,” “bizarre finds that don’t fit anywhere” (245). It seemed like he was engaged in a mythogeography of place.

“Yet the more I delved into Smith’s practice and writings, the more I realised I was refusing to allow myself to drift. It was all going too well,” Kemp writes (245). Mythogeography “poses more questions than answers, and I had only been searching for answers. After a year or so of walking the village I had amassed piles of poems, most of them reports on my walks that I had attempted to tie together into a narrative. But the poems were predictable, more critiques than personal accounts” (245). There wasn’t enough theatre in what he was doing: “I wasn’t fully drifting around the village, and so I couldn’t fully drift on the page” (245). “I have struggled with the relationship between walking and writing,” he admits. “The poetry needed to be something more than just a narrative report of my drifts, yet I wanted the loose ethos of the drift to influence the page. My attempts at writing up my walking felt too calculated, almost too easy” (245). When I read those words, I thought of my own manuscript, and wondered whether it came too easily as well, whether it is superficial or rigid. 

Walking with strangers to the village helped: it “began to open up rather than be closed down with critique” (245). “I stopped searching and theorising and began to see the beauty in the place, even the beauty in its contradictions,” he states (245-46). The village became “a haunted yet progressive landscape, a place of genuine beauty disguised by a façade of itself. In short, it unravelled into a place I no longer recognised or understood” (246). Then Lutyens, “my deceased co-conspirator,” arrived: “Lutyens’ constant striving towards a perfect sense of beauty became a catalyst for questions of craft and led to my experiments with visual and sonic page-based drift that were influenced by, but free from, the wonders and limitations of Cockington Village” (246-47). Kemp began writing about a village that was “a palimpsest of past and future Cockingtons,” which exists only in language (247). “In the poems Lut is a complex construction, both hopeful and defeated, reborn and weighted, witty and inarticulate, contradictions spurned from glimpses of his historical character,” he states (248). Kemp’s drifts “took on a documentary landscape,” but Lutyens’s papers are “riddled with complications and confusions” (249). 

The fragmentation of Lutyens’s life, as discovered in the archival material, was not unlike his walks through Cockington: “The disparate nature of the archives forces you to drift across time, leaping through papers that may bear little relation to one another. There is no singular narrative, just as Cockington was a weave of competing places layering and re-laying a sense of place, the archives were the scattered odds and ends of stories” (250). The archival material “became a lens by which to re-construct Cockington Valley, its topography and cultural histories, but also its future”:

Each poem is a gathering of splinters, curated for form a landscape around Lut, a figurehead for the hopes, dreams and disappointments invested in the land. I wanted a sense of a drift through place and space, the latter being that of the documentary fragments of the archives. Walking and stumbling across multiplicities began the project and eventually extended to the page, with the process of researching and writing the village being a narrative that runs alongside the more tangible written and experienced histories. It was important to engage with that multiplicity, to sneak in, but, at the same time, confuse my presence as author. The poems would not just be showing up different sides of this village, but they would form a village of themselves, a new Cockington made up of fragments of sources. (253)

“It was only by letting go of the village in the first place and allowing myself to be led, both by the living and the dead, that I was able to experience its multiplicities,” Kemp concludes. “The act of walking, moving forward with no definite destination, both through a geography and an archive, reminded me that the fragments of time and place are in constant motion. The past is unsettled by our traipsing through it, splintering off into that all-important future” (253).

Hilary Ramsden and Clare Qualmann, in “Chip Walks” (266-74), present an account of an ongoing artwork, Chip Walk, which began as a project by walkwalkwalk and developed into a mapping of every chip shop in a specific area of east London (266-67). “As we walked and ate and mapped the chip shops—talking to the owners and the people who worked in them along the way—we began to consider the shifting food map of the area as an indicator of the gentrification that was then in its early stages,” they write (267). That project developed into a convivial walk, a tour of the area’s chip shops that “involved participants in discussions about food, what we want to eat, where and when” (268), which led to a chapter in Qualmann’s 2015 book, co-edited with Claire Hind, Ways to Wander (268). 

This is where Ramsden comes in: her walking, and her theatrical practice of clowning, “both involve interruptions—of assumptions and expectations, of logic and habit, of seriousness and play and everyday movement and all these elements are linked” (268). For Ramsden, 

the Chip Walk is a further interruption in an intentional everyday kind of walk and one that brings together people around a common purpose, buying and eating food; and noticing and perhaps discussing in some depth the surrounding environment might happen almost as an aside, in a deceptively easy and simply way. In this way the chips might be considered almost a playful misdirection, in magician’s terms, where other issues emerge almost by change, through incidental conversations, imaginings, local knowledge, the re-surfacing of memories and the periodic attention to surroundings at the Chip Walk moves on. (268)

In 2018, Ramsden walked with Blake Morris in his rewalking of Chip Walk, part of a project in which he walked every walk in Ways to Wander (268-69). That walk took place on her birthday, but it felt irresponsible, given that she knew refugees in Greece were walking long distances for food (269). So Ramsden decided to walk a different kind of Chip Walk: she organized one on the island of Lesvos, which would start at a refugee camp and end with a free meal (270). The event met with enthusiasm from NGO workers and refugees from all over the world (271): 

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. (271)

It was a creation of what Grant Kester calls dialogic art, in which “socio-political relationships” are the raw materials (271). “We continue to conduct further iterations of this convivial and participatory art work.” they write (271). Some of those walks have raised money to support a nonprofit that feeds refugees on Lesvos (272).

“What further Chip Walks on Lesvos point to is the creation of a longer, continued story—not only of personal stories from the people in the camps but the creation of dialogue with others—in other places on Lesvos, beyond, to mainland Greece, to other countries and peoples in Europe where there is the potential to raise awareness and money, as well as to fight for justice through the legal systems for people seeking asylum and fleeing oppression,” they continue (272). People who“are lucky enough to be able to walk to the local chip shop to get food with money that we are privileged to earn easily must be able and willing to contribute time, money and energy to fight bureaucracy, to resist complacency and to go beyond our fear of the other in order to assist in making it easier for people to flee oppression and injustice and to live with respect and hope” (273). “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,” they conclude. “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” (274). The repetition of these walks “enables us as walk artivists to consider the similarities and differences between walks” (274). That repetition is “a way of making sense of patterns of culture” and it “enables us to look askance at our processes and methods, refining, re-interrogating our practices, in exchange with others” (274).

The last chapter I’m going to discuss in this summary is Anna Sanders-Falcini, “Chasing Mists: walking to scent and sense the atmosphere of the Hoo Peninsula” (290-301). “Do places have atmospheres and if so, how do they manifest themselves?” she asks (290). She has been “chasing the atmosphere of the Hoo Peninsula”—a place on the edge of the Thames and Medway rivers in North Kent—“for many years” (290). This place “offers a particularly dense, rich and variable source fo information from which to explore the question of whether and how a distinct atmosphere exists and can be defined in a specific location,” she writes. “The variability of the landscape, of large open agricultural spaces, ruins, industry, redundant nuclear bunkers and its shoreline amongst other features, presents a range of atmospheric conditions. In any one of these places, the phenomenon is present fluctuating between degrees of a subtle or more overt nature” (290). When experienced cumulatively, the “separate incidents of atmosphere” become “an overall, singular phenomenon that is powerful and potent. This nebulous force of atmosphere is complex in its geographical context alone, and the problem of making manifest any research findings led me to the act of walking through a psychogeographic methodology” (290).

“In order to experience the atmosphere and to be receptive to it, I have immersed myself in the landscape,” Sanders-Falcini continues. “Walking therefore, has been at the core of this investigation, and as a female psychogeographic explorer, walking has articulated (as my body speaking to me) of how the atmosphere can be evidenced: through its geography, archaeological matter, botany and, more abstractly, through its mapping, as well as elusive and ephemeral materials such as mists and memories” (290-91). She’s particularly interested in smells and scents (291). She has put together a collection of found objects—“forgotten and disregarded matter”—from the Hoo Peninsula as well (291). She calls this collection “The Archive of the Atmosphere” (291-92). Those objects “have become the focus of a series of performances, where, as Louisa Cornford”—a character she has created, an amateur Edwardian archaeologist—I have performed the archive” (292). One of those performances took place at the conference, although I missed it (292).

Some of Sanders-Falcini’s comments are oddly related to walking in Saskatchewan:

Walking entails staying at ground level and because of the flatness of the land in the peninsula, this results in a constant perspective with few degrees of variants. In one sense this encumbers the walker and the flatness literally flattens the experience. This is not to imply that the experience is unrewarding but that the figure is perpendicular to the ground and in being so, she feels the atmosphere at this axis. (293)

“At this level, I am in close contact with elements that might trigger any of my receptors: smell, hearing, taste, sight and touch,” she writes (293). As an example of taste, she harvested rosehips and made syrup from them, taking a teaspoon every day (294). 

Her practice also addresses gender issues. When she first began drifting in the Hoo Peninsula, she “settled into a rhythm of wanderings that continued over a period of years. Entangled were the shadows of an embodied position, vulnerability and female mobility. It was imperative that I walk alone, for to walk with others, though useful, was an unnecessary distraction” (296). She was aware that women walking alone in an isolated place is considered dangerous: “the narrative to this fear is the real suppression of women walking alone and particularly at night that had been historically been enforced by the policing of spaces in the Victorian period and earlier” (296-97). “What I began to understand and experience was that the atmosphere in the Hoo Peninsula was activated by my encounters with it through my solitary position as a female in the landscape,” she tells us (297). Being a woman walking is a form of “covert infiltration of the landscape” (298).

Sanders-Falcini identifies atmosphere through intangible feelings, as well as tangible maps and diagrams (297-98). Walking in the Hoo Peninsula led to research of “its dark histories (prison hulks and disease, for example)” which she could feel through walking before she carried out that research (298). Her research led her “towards the more inhospitable areas of the peninsula” (299), such as the Isle of Grain, an area scarred by industrial activity with a dense atmosphere, where buildings leaked “the ghosts of past histories and lives” (299).

“This article is a glimpse of a larger body of research where I have sought to identify the phenomenon of atmosphere present in the Hoo Peninsula. In this research, I have investigated atmosphere as a phenomenon of ‘feelings in the air,’ that one senses in connection to a specific place, in this case, the North Kent marshes in the peninsula,” she concludes (299-300). “The atmosphere I argue, is present and like a figure lingering in the background appearing to haunt the place. It is palpable. The atmosphere appears both as an all-enveloping phenomenon and as a more intimate, series of phenomena that are localised” (300). This research “has led to the finding that the Hoo Peninsula’s atmosphere is uniquely characteristic, attributable to its location and is experienced only in this location” (300). “Walking led to a cognitive mapping of the atmosphere and through a wayfaring rhizomatic movement I wandered over the marshland through a series of routes that revealed the portals of atmosphere” (300): she uncovered “qualities of atmosphere” through “the objective nature of the landscape” but also places where her body, in a phenomenological way, “sensed the acute atmosphere” (300):

In order to be receptive to it, the feelings of displacement and immobilisation were triggered when I first encountered the Hoo Peninsula as a young woman and these continued to be provoked on subsequent visits to the landscape. The body had to be in a position to absorb thee sources of atmosphere and it was only when I repeatedly absorb these sources of atmosphere and it was only when I repeatedly entered this situation that it began to operate in this intermediary space, becoming inextricably intertwined. (300)

Finally, she reminds us that atmosphere is felt through the senses: taste, smell, and sound; through “the weather, the tides, the ground” (300).

Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking’s New Movements, the Conference tells me two contradictory things. The first is that there are many walking artists, mostly in the UK, whose work is not dissimilar to mine. But the other is that my practice, which has been based (partly out of pandemic necessity and partly by choice) in solo walks, is probably considered outmoded or retrograde by many of my peers. I would argue that those walking artists who reject solo or durational walking probably don’t understand the very different context of walking in Saskatchewan, or the difficulty and danger walking here can present—or the difficulty in establishing a participatory, convivial walking practice in a place where very few people consider walking as part of their lives. Perhaps that’s just defensive on my part, or perhaps the prescriptive undertone I sense in some writing about walking art rubs me the wrong way. I’m not sure. The book also reaffirms the goal I came back from the conference with: to read about the new materialism or assemblage theory or whatever it’s called (the same authors and texts seem to be described in different ways), so that I can communicate with my peers. In any case, I’m happy I finally got around to reading this book. I’m going to carry on reading about walking art. I’m not sure what my next book will be, but it won’t be hard to find one to read, since I have bookshelves filled with them now. 

Work Cited

Billinghurst, Helen, Claire Hind, and Phil Smith, editors. Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking’s New Movements, the Conference, Triarchy Press, 2020.

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020.