Tag: Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking

Hilary Ramsden, “Walking & Talking: Making Strange Encounters Within the Familiar”

The article right underneath Simon Pope’s “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,” was Hilary Ramsden’s “Walking & Talking: Making Strange Encounters Within the Familiar,” which seems to be an example of the kind of transformative walking projects Pope is calling for at the end of his essay—walking that would transform participants through encounters with other people. Indeed, Ramsden begins with an account from a participant in a research project, A Walk around the Block, in which she was asked to talk to a stranger (54). “This participatory, practice-led arts research explored whether playful interventions within habitual walks could provoke new understandings of the ways in which we perceive and relate to our neighbourhood and neighbours and, amongst other things,” Ramsden writes, “potentially create opportunities for unfamiliar encounters and encounters with strangers leading to a heightened openness to communication and dialogue” (54-55). Walking in one’s neighbourhood—which Ramsden sees as mundane and possibly even boring—“would become a laboratory for experimentation with opportunities for a range of different encounters and a means to create a conduit between intuitive, embodied micro and vernacular knowledges of the quotidian habits of our life worlds,” on the one hand, and on the other, “more macro intellectually based formal knowledges” (55). For Ramsden, “[t]his conduit or liminal space of not-knowing, is a time for questioning, curiosity and openness to hitherto unencountered feelings, thoughts and provocations which might lead to increased communication and dialogue with others, unknown or not” (55).

The autobiographical background of this project included experiences—living in council estates, trying to understand the genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda, and later living in Detroit—which led Ramsden “to question notions of neighbourhood cohesion, understanding and tolerance,” which encouraged her to explore those ideas “through play and improvised movement interventions” (55). Her research questions for this project were: 

Can intentional acts of walking be a different, and more embodied way of engaging people in dialogue in order to provoke changes in attitudes and assumptions? Can playful interventions within a habitual walking routine provoke changes in attitudes to and perceptions of neighbourhood and neighbours that might lead to increased communication and dialogue? (56)

She wanted to know “whether a resistance to the unfamiliar and the strange might be shifted or ‘nudged’ through physical interruptions of habitual patterns to create an openness to increased communication and dialogue between people of diverse backgrounds and life worlds, through a communal process of walking together,” although the initial work focused on individuals rather than groups, because of the complexity of organizing groups of people to walk together more than once, and because she thought before group walks could be used to increase communication and dialogue, individuals should already have had “an experience of the potential of playful walking interventions to heighten their awareness and openness” (56).

She describes her methodology as a “meshwork” that drew on the geography of place, conceptual arts practices, and qualitative methods of inquiry (56). In particular, Ramsden used the work of David Seamon, Francis Augoyard, Situationist walking practices, clowning techniques, and “contemporary theorists and practitioners concerned with the city” (56). She notes that the term “meshwork,” which I’ve seen in a lot of writing about walking, comes from Henri Lefebvre—another reason to read his work, I suppose (56). She describes walking as a research methodology, outlining a genealogy of walking art practices that reaches back to Richard Long and even earlier—useful for her primary audience of geographers—and suggests that what is most unique and compelling about contemporary walking practices is the way that walking is simultaneously the artistic material and the transaction between artist and audience (57). She notes that “walking has become a touchstone and point of departure for a myriad of explorations and academic research” (57). The contemporary artists she describes here experiment with form and content while being preoccupied “with the mundane and the everyday,” and their work is participatory and collaborative, “introducing a wide range of individuals and groups to an examination of relationships to the surroundings woven through walking” (58). Following Tim Ingold, she suggests that pedestrians can be seen “as co-creators of their surroundings—and in the case of this particular research, of their own neighbourhoods” (58). 

Ramsden’s research departs from contemporary walking art, she suggests, because “it takes the everyday walk as a research space or laboratory,” and because her approach is based on movement inspired by the practice of Moshe Feldenkrais and by creative play and improvisation, and because “participants in the research became collaborators and authors of their interventions” (58). She considered her participants regular or daily walks to be aesthetic practices in which new habits of noticing and reflection might be developed (58). “The uniqueness of a regular walk to the shops, the bus stop, school or work is that, being a familiar practice, it almost invariably enables the walker to switch off from paying attention,” which “offers a discrete time-space within which to experiment and move back and forth from paying attention to switching off, potentially creating a conduit, a liminal space of moving-between, and making connections between small nuanced changes in the everyday and more abstract conceptual thought processes” (58). Her participants stated that not paying attention was what drew them to walk regularly rather than drive or cycle (59). “Introducing interruption into this walk in the form of performative interventions would necessitate a repeated yet temporary bringing to the surface of a more focused attention in order to provoke questioning and reflection on provocations emerging from the walk and the interruption,” she continues, so her methodology “seeks not only to refocus our perceptions but also through these interruptions to trouble the sensibilities with which we perceive” (59).

Ramsden also suggests that her approach to interruption is unique, since it comes from the movement work of Moshe Feldenkrais, who argued that a change in movement was linked to a change in attitude, and that at any one time our activities take place on four levels: thinking, feeling, sensing, and moving (59). “A shift in any of these has potential to produce shifts in the whole self, thereby bringing about change,” she writes, noting that movement is the most immediate and concrete ground for such changes (59). So she introduced “this movement-inflected concept of interruptions within the parameters of the everyday walk” (59). She also drew on play, clowning, and the Situationist détournement to create “performative interventions which asked participants to follow cues or ‘enticements’ within the parameters of the everyday walk, to act outside expected or normative patterns of behaviour” (59). The point was to generate experiences of surprise, unsettling her participants without upsetting them, interrupting their familiar, everyday patterns in order to provoke a sense of estrangement and defamiliarization, allowing participants to look at their surroundings in a new way (60). In addition, because the participants themselves are the researchers and artists, authorship becomes participatory and collaborative, and “the volunteer walking is instrumental in her/his own practice of intentional, improvised walking” (60).

The theoretical basis of the project seems to be taken from David Seamon’s A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter, which I haven’t read. “The encountering we do on a daily, albeit, semi-aware level on a regular walk that brings us into contact with neighbours, animals and objects, locates and contextualizes us in a familiar lifeworld,” Ramsden suggests (60). The slowness of walking enables us to notice these encounters (61). Seamon calls the “network of interwoven threads of daily routines” a “place ballet,” and the collective rhythms of their choreography “creates the vibe or rhythm of a neighbourhood” (61). That rhythm can create a sense of routine as well, against which improvisations can occur (61). Ramsden’s participants “were required to encounter familiar surroundings more attentively and in unfamiliar ways—for example, by focusing on one colour, or by wearing a different pair of shoes, by walking backwards, by going out of their way to talk to someone” (62). These encounters were supposed “to provoke questioning and reflection, developing a receptivity to encountering the unfamiliar and potentially leading to communication and dialogue with others and possibly a change in perceptions, habits, and assumptions” (62).

Ramsden wanted participants to feel free to experiment and play, intending that they “might consciously experience a sense of connection between a so-called everyday cognitive state and moments of wonder” or astonishment (62). She also wanted “to create opportunities for the creation of a ‘not-knowing’ affective space as a temporary, ludic time-space, where thinking beyond, questioning and communication might be possible” (62). The phrase “not-knowing” comes from the work fo Jane Bennett, and it suggests “a state of mind and/or feeling which might emerge firstly, from a process of paying increased attention and/or secondly from the jolt of an interruption, provoking questioning or eliciting responses that differ from habitual patterns” (62). 

Participants walked somewhere they would regularly walk. Most were recruited in Bristol, but some were recruited in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both cities are walkable (62). Most participants were women, white, middle-class, relatively educated, and comfortable with writing (63). All were provided with Walker’s Packs containing maps of their neighbourhood, paper for note-taking, and a set of eight interruptions from which participants could choose (64-66). Those interruptions, which Ramsden lists in their entirety, were “to provide the opportunity for risk-taking and experimentation,” and they ranged from low-risk activities to activities involving a higher degree of risk (66). Participants could make notes or drawings or take photographs (66). Afterwards, Ramsden interviewed them (66).

In her discussion of her findings, Ramsden notes that participants found the walking as a welcome opportunity to pay attention and develop awareness (68). They noted that “they tended to go in and out of noticing and encountering, being able to maintain a high level of attention for short periods of time only,” confirming Seamon’s notion of a continuum of attentiveness (69). They found being absorbed in the exercises to be pleasurable (69). That pleasure came from “concentration and engaging with detail” (70). One interruption, which asked participants to talk to a stranger, was chosen by more than one-quarter of the group, and it meant “breaking the familiar rhythm and pace of our walk and going out of our way, perhaps literally,” although participants found it empowering (71-72). Participants said they became more receptive to and aware of their surroundings, and that this change continued after the project ended (72). However, some participants found the burden of awareness to be tiring (73). “Participants began to see their surroundings and people within them with new eyes, from the perspective of engaged observer, slightly outside the categories they habitually inhabited, yet sufficiently familiar within the parameters of their everyday walk,” Ramsden writes. “As such they were developing a receptivity to encounter, within the everyday” (73). The process, in some cases, shifted the habits of participants (73). “This kind of improvisatory and performative practice of interrupting habits and assumptions employing an everyday walk in a neighbourhood offers unique and significant strategies for developing awareness of our neighbourhoods and surroundings,” she concludes. “It goes further by requiring participant walkers to question and reflect on their thought processes thus developing the potential for individual change and openness to the unfamiliar and strange, with a view to increasing receptivity for communication and dialogue” (74).

So Ramsden’s project is in interesting example of using solo walking practices to engage people in ways that might change their habits of attention and assumptions about a familiar space and activity. It might even be the kind of transformation Simon Pope was calling for in his essay, “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,” which I just posted about. It struck me, when I read Pope’s essay, that he seemed to be looking for work that was already happening, and Ramsden’s project is an example, I think, although I could be wrong. There are other examples of similar projects in this stack of articles, and I’ll get to them in time. Perhaps even tomorrow!

Works Cited

Pope, Simon. “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking.” C Magazine, issue 121, 2014. https://cmagazine.com/issues/121/walking-transformed-the-dialogics-of-art-and-walking.

Ramsden, Hilary. “Walking & Talking: Making Strange Encounters Within the Familiar.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 18, no. 1, 2017, pp. 53-77. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1174284.

Seamon, David. A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter,Routledge, 2016.

Simon Pope, “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking”

Before I start reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I thought I would tackle one of the articles from my giant stack of things I thought I should read. This time it’s Simon Pope’s “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,” published in C Magazine seven years ago. Pope begins by suggesting that “[t]he recent history of walking as contemporary art owes much to a previous generation’s prepossession of theories of ‘space’ (in expanded sculptural practices) and ‘place’ (for avant-gardist, resistant tendencies)” (Pope). However, he wants to identify “a different historical lineage that brings us closer to current preoccupations with participation, dialogue and encounter” (Pope)—in other words, a lineage that situates walking within social or relational aesthetics. 

However, Pope then turns in a surprising direction: to Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and their walks and bicycle trips, which they considered to be sculptures:

Whether walking in precisely predetermined circles on rough upland terrain, or walking for a set number of days and nights, or walking without talking, these artists adhered to the artistic preoccupations and conceptual determinants of the day—working within spatial, temporal and behavioural constraints to produce work in a sculptural tradition, albeit on a hugely expanded scale and presented starkly, in a informational or bureaucratic form. (Pope)

But walking was part of “the radical pedagogy” of St. Martin’s College of Art in London; the best known walking workshop organized by faculty there “saw a group of students bound together with a cord” and “instructed to negotiate their way back to the art school through the streets of Soho” (Pope). For Pope, “the work made by Fulton and Long individually does not reflect the nascent participatory or collaborative approaches that are inferred in their student work,” such as Long’s 1968 performance in Amalfi, Italy, in which he shook the hands of passersby (Pope). Pope argues that this work—which Long has dismissed as mere student performance—“suggests that there are other social modalities—even in the work of those artists associated most strongly with the spatial and sculptural concerns of walking—which could define a lineage of ‘walking work,’ which would include theoretical and practical concerns closer to our current preoccupations: participation, conversation, and dialogue, for instance” (Pope).

For instance, Pope discusses André Cadere’s walks between galleries supporting Conceptual and Minimalist art and artists, which he suggests “were anything but a disinterested meander” but “a means to precisely explore the political dimensions of the artist’s world” (Pope). Like Long’s handshaking performance, Cadere’s walking prefigures “the contemporary artist in participatory mode” (Pope). The social, Pope suggests, “is in the making, produced with every footstep and with every handshake,” rather than something that exists a priori as a reality, as “an extant, smooth ‘social space’” (Pope). “Walking is in now way free from either the overt disciplining or naturalized cultural mores that influence artists’ and others’ lives; it is in no way a technique that will guarantee access to—and equal exchange within—the public sphere,” he continues. “The messiness of the world and the constant need to build and rebuild it in relation to others, to negotiate it and parlay it into being, is at the heart of ‘walking work’ in this mode” (Pope). This messiness is the “‘anthropological’ space that Michel de Certeau discusses as something distinct from “the abstract, the totalizing and the ‘geometrical’” in his essay on walking, according to Pope; de Certeau’s account suggests a certain “crush and clamour of pedestrian life,” “an enforced proximity out of which springs familiarity,” although perhaps not empathy (Pope). Walking does not necessarily allow us access into the lives of others, although it suggests the possibility of sharing, of walking with (Pope). “It is the physical attitude of bodies and their spatial arrangement that suggests something of their relational attitude,” Pope explains. “Walking alongside becomes a means to negotiate a flow—of conversation, of movement” (Pope). It also “becomes symbolic of an ideal type of relation, where moving together, shoulder-to-shoulder, conveys the potential for mutuality, parity or equality” (Pope). 

Yet not all examples of walking art involve walking side-by-side with another: take Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), or Marina Abramović and Ulay’s walk along the Great Wall of China. The first example “alludes to a malevolent, sinister—or at least indifferent—attitude to others,” while the second suggests walking as a test of artistic and personal commitment (Pope). “Perhaps we could imagine a world of different relationships, beyond aloof, impermeable monads, marching in-step, colliding, coinciding or skirting around each other?” he asks. “Could we imagine a ‘walking work’ where artists and/or participants are less intact, inscrutable or unscathed following their encounters with each other?” (Pope). That kind of work “would require more of the artist than simply walking with others, suggesting an acknowledgment of vulnerability and an openness to the influence of others that runs contrary to art’s recent history” (Pope). I wonder if the collaborative walking of psychogeography might suggest that kind of vulnerability and openness to the influence of others, although Pope might respond that psychogeography isn’t an art practice like the examples he has provided.

In his conclusion, Pope cites Tom Finkelpearl’s praise (in a book I haven’t read, although I believe I have a copy) of Paulo Freire’s emancipatory approach to pedagogy, an approach which “levelled the hierarchies otherwise taken for granted: student and teacher journeyed together, learned together” (Pope). By analogy, there would be no division between artist and audience, either; instead, there would be “an expectant and eager fellow-traveller” participating in a dialogue that allows them to see the world as in a process of transformation (Pope). “Exploring this potential for participants to be changed in themselves, as well as in the relations between them could align the work of walking artists with a spectrum of concerns that have broader currency, bringing them into conversations with other artists to explore the concepts of encounter, negotiation, participation and dialogue, which their own history of practice exemplifies so readily,” he continues, citing Paul Carter’s discussion of agoraphobes and their “hyper-sensitivity to the potential for innumerable new encounters” within open physical and social spaces “and the anticipation of relational openness that induces this panic”—a panic that Carter thinks is due to a fear of transformational events (Pope). “We can wonder at the fate of walking art had Richard Long, striding into the brilliantly sun-lit quayside southeast of Naples, continued with such bold, public encounters—a stranger on the road; a fellow traveller,” Pope concludes. “It is perhaps the very openness to the possibility of being changed by encounters with others—anticipated by the agoraphobe—that we need to grasp and which might take us farther along the path not taken” (Pope).

This is a short, dense essay, and while I’m not sure there’s any point criticizing Long for not engaging in social aesthetics, I think that there are lots of examples of walking art that involve the possibility of being changed by encounters with others. I mean, isn’t the recent history of walking art filled with that kind of work? And what would happen if one expanded the definition of “others” to include more-than-human others? What would happen then? Something surprising, I would expect. We could ask David Abram about that idea. I’m sure he would have something to say about it.

Works Cited

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, second edition, Vintage, 2017.

Pope, Simon. “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking.” C Magazine, issue 121, 2014. https://cmagazine.com/issues/121/walking-transformed-the-dialogics-of-art-and-walking.