What walking art notices

This week, I attended the Walk21 Regional Dialogue in Belo Horizonte, and gave short presentation on findings from analysing walking pieces, walking art, in the Museum of Walking, which are connected to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Below, you can follow my presentation. The full analysis is here. The slides are here.

I’m part of the team that runs the non-profit walk · listen · create, a network organisation and the home of walking artists and artist walkers. We connect around 3500 creatives from around the world, and our two main ‘products’, if you will, are two yearly awards for walking art, and the Museum of Walking, which we believe is the largest archive of walking art in the world. 

We have built our archive over the last 6 years or so, which now contains over 10.000 items, of which around 1500 are walking pieces. Most, but not all, from roughly the last 60 years, from the rise of the Situationist International, through FLuxus, and beyond. 

Late last year, I started to construct connections between the material in our archive, to make it more accessible and thus more useful. This also included the classification of our material based on geographic connections. And that, in turn, made me curious as to what our collection made perceptible about the conditions of walking, in Latin America.

Our organisation is registered in Belgium, but I’m based in Brazil. The majority of our contributors are from Europe and the US, but, in part because I originally hail from Iran, I have a personal interest to look at what the Global South contributes to discussions like these.

First, this could not be a comprehensive or generalised study; At the time, we had 76 pieces connected to Latin America, of which 63 were connected to three countries alone; Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

Second, this was not going to be a survey of everyday transport journeys. Instead, these pieces create situations that can help us recognise, from a less-typical perspective, what walkability can mean.

I invite you to take a look at the comprehensive description of the analysis, but, in short, what I did was identify the most common recurring themes in the 76 works surveyed, based on the information provided by either the authors themselves, or the archivists we employed for expanding our archives with historical content.

What I found was that the most recurrent themes, of the dozen or so we identified, were ‘mapping’, ‘power’, and ‘archive’, or documentation.

I’ll discuss a few pieces and come to an overarching theme.

What is carried by the walker

In the piece Cadarço, meaning Shoe Lace, from 2002, Marcius Galan tied his sneaker to a shoelace continuously produced by a braiding machine at Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo.

He walked only as far as the thread allowed, with which he turned movement into a kind of negotiation with time, waiting, and constraint.

One way to look at this, is that the work makes an external dependency physically visible. That is to say, a route can offer space to move, while something else governs the walker’s pace and freedom.

Galan’s constraint is of course constructed and self-imposed, but in our everyday journeys, a number of real life constraints, voluntary or involuntary, influence our pace, scope, and the actual feasibility of walking. 

Galan’s work concretely showed how walking is shaped by circumstance, rather than something only explained by the available physical route.

Permission, risk, and walking together

In the piece Experiência No 2, Flávio de Carvalho, almost a century ago in 1931, walked against a religious procession in São Paulo, while keeping his hat on. The hostile response exposed an informal rule governing acceptable conduct in public space.

Carvalho of course went out to provoke, so his intervention did not represent an ordinary commuter’s experience, but it did expose invisible structures of power, conformity, and intolerance in the public space.

In the work Los Pasos de Mama Killa, by Amanda Gutiérrez, from 2024, the artist explored nighttime agency through collective presence and mutual care, exploring how people, women, might inhabit precarious space together.

Both pieces show how access to public space at least partly depends on social permission. Walking can expose that permission, or contest it. And also negotiate it collectively.

What this adds to evaluating walking

At the start, I mentioned that the three most common themes in the 76 pieces were ‘mapping’, ‘power’, and ‘documentation’. But, more interesting themes to emerge were subjects like ‘counter-mapping’, ‘listening’, ‘collective action’, and ‘constraint’. Themes like these make otherwise overlooked conditions of the route, of public space, perceptible. 

And, so, what this suggests, is that walking art, artistic walking methods, can help residents, and researchers, to identify questions and challenges to aid in the assessment of existing routes.

As I mentioned at the start, this was not a scientific study; the documentation was uneven, and the selection, taken from an archive that documents in English, far from random.

However, it is clear to me, that walking art can help us ask questions, I would like to think better questions, about accessibility of the public space, including whose experience existing assessments might have a tendency to fail to capture.

A route can be used without being acceptable

And, so, the question I would like to put forward for this round table is this: 

How do we assess walkability, what do we count as evidence that a route is genuinely walkable, if those that walk the route have no alternative but to walk it. 
That is to say, what constraints do we miss when establishing whether a route is walkable or not?

•  walkability  walking  walking art