That’s a question that Simon James French opens his Kyoto in Sound podcast. It is a question he poses to fellow residents in Kyoto, Japan where he is now living.
Concurrent with recording sounds from this intriguing city, he also leads sound walks in which he encourages participants to record the sounds which are memorable to them and with which he then creates a souvenir audio postcard for them.
It is with a little bit of trepidation that Andrew Stuck is interviewing Simon on a Zoom call as he is a sound artist and professional at manipulating audio. As it happens the pair of them have some problems before they even start recording. But don’t worry as it won’t detract from your enjoyment.
Australian Ainslie Murray is a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany and Andrew Stuck takes the opportunity of contacting her over Zoom before she returns home. Ainslie has been teaching architectural design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney for several years and concurrently researching Walking art. She’s a keen solo hiker following trails not only in the Australian bush but also around the world and she’s particularly interested in researching the temporary structures that hikers create with their tents and belongings as they walk the trails. 35’42” 17.1MB
Not everything goes according to plan. Andrew Stuck is to meet the two young co-founders of the route-finding app Safest Way. The rendezvous is at the café kiosk at the Kingston Gate of London’s Richmond Park. The weather forecast says it’s going to be rainy and windy. Hardly ideal conditions to record an interview on a walk, in a park.
As it happens, Andrew learned that Ilya Ilyankou wasn’t going to join his co-founder Alesja Gilvear until sometime after the meeting time. At the kiosk there’s a man of similar age to Andrew, also waiting. When the person who Andrew thought might be Alesja approaches, Andrew was somewhat caught out that it was the other man that she greeted and not him. However, this turned out to be Ed Parsons, a digital geographer, who happens to live locally, from whom Alesja and Ilya have been receiving advice.
So, as you’ll learn from this interview they begin as a threesome and then Ilya does eventually join them.
It’s been 18 years since Andrew Stuck met Canadian Barbara Lounder at the Banff Centre in The Rockies at a walking and art residency where Talking Walking podcasts began. She is here in London for a few days with her partner and artistic collaborator Robert Bean and they have asked him to meet them in Fitzroy Square. The reason for this specific rendezvous becomes loud and clear very early on in their conversation, in which they talk about some of the works they have made together and individually in the intervening period. 28’39” 13.4MB
“In Place: photographs, objects, stories” is on now, until July 25, at the Artspace Gallery in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. It’s a two-person show with Barbara Lounder and photographer Katherine Knight.
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Walking the Debris Field of the Halifax Explosion Walking the Debris Field of the Halifax ExplosionWalking the Debris Field of the Halifax ExplosionBeing-in-the-Breathable: annotated walk Being-in-the-Breathable: annotated walk
Image description and credits
3 Images from the Narratives in Space + Time (NiS+TS) Walking the Debris Field of the Halifax Explosion project, Centenary Procession event, December 3, 2017. Bean and Lounder are founding members of NiS+TS. Photos by Katherine Nakaska for NiS+TS.
NiS+TS collaborators, actors from the Halifax-based improv group “Tea Time Creations”, create dramatic tableaus based on historical records from the Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917. The tableaus were enacted at locations along the procession route.
The Centenary Procession of approximately 200 people made its way through the residential neighbourhoods that were at Ground Zero of the 1917 Halifax Explosion. The procession was led by musicians playing snare drums and saxophones and included specially designed banners.
The Centenary Procession route included the historic site of Fort Needham Memorial Park, overlooking the harbour and Ground Zero. The distinctive bell tower in the park is a landmark that can be seen from many vantage points in the city.
2 images from Bean and Lounder’s Being-in-the-Breathable: annotated walk held in Sokołowsko, Poland, 2017, as part of the Festival of Ephemeral Art. Photos courtesy the festival organizers.
Participants stretch their arms out and circle around, establishing their individual “quarantine” spaces. This project took place on the grounds of the former tuberculosis sanatorium in Sokołowsko, Poland, and predated the COVID19 pandemic and its “social distancing” protocols.
Participants walk on a woodland trail through the grounds of the former sanatorium.
Feature image description and credit
Tintype portrait of Barbara Lounder and Robert Bean, with unnamed more-than-human companion, by Alanah Correia. Reproduced in Becoming Corona Walker chapbook published by Barbara Lounder, 2026.
Andrew Stuck is peppering Shane O’Mara with a number of questions as we pace around Queens Square in Bloomsbury London
As a professor of experimental brain research with a couple of best selling books on Walking and on talking this Dublin resident must be one of the most eligible guests on a Talking Walking episode.
Shane is also very familiar with Bloomsbury and this square in particular, as it is home both to the Institute of Neurology and to the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience where he has many colleagues and friends to discuss his research findings with.
As a listener to this podcast, you are probably only too aware that walking is good for coming up with creative thoughts and resolving problems, but like me, you may be unaware of how that happens and thankfully Shane has got the answers.
34’58” 16.4 MB
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For a performer trained to draw attention to themselves Ami Skånberg has found a way to make herself invisible in public space. Andrew Stuck has come to Gothenburg on Sweden’s western coast to interview her and learn about her passion for a Japanese performing arts step called Suriashi (also practised in tea ceremony and martial arts). Not only does she practice Suriashi daily but she uses it in her teaching and through that encourages others to use it in meditation and peaceful protest.
So, join them on this walk through a busy modern city occasionally adopting an ancient Suriashi step and turning themselves invisible.
In this photo Ami practices with Nishikawa Senrei, Kyoto 2011 Improvising to two giant organs (dance)Domesticated pilgrimage in Carina Ari’s apartment in Paris (Suriashi)
Coming to the final day of the Walking Art and Relational Geographies conference (2024) that has included a walk from the city of Girona to where we are now in Banyoles, Andrew Stuck is with visual artist and writer, Laroche a.k.a. Luce Choules. They have just given the keynote this morning, a performance lecture, as they call it, described in the conference programme as ‘Material Fields: surveys, mappings and counter-cartographies’ – a live performance using a format of projected imagery and narrated script to invite an audience on a poetic journey across the natural, managed and urban territories of Europe and beyond.
In our conversation we discuss Laroche’s interest in fieldwork and how they have established a network of fellow thinkers to explore ‘fieldwork as research and art form’, as well as how they compose their performance lectures.
24’23” 11.4MB
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In May 2025, multi-award-winning Canadian photographer and environmental artist Marlene Creates is in Brighton, England, and Andrew Stuck takes the opportunity to meet her there.
They are walking in woodland not far from Preston Park train station and Andrew invites her to compare their surroundings to where she lives on the island of Newfoundland off the east coast of mainland Canada.
Marlene uses the 6-acre patch of old-growth boreal forest where she lives as an outdoor studio and now spends much of her time there observing how it changes with the seasons, photographing what she sees, and writing poetry to describe the unseen.
She’s been sharing this forest with primary school children, inviting them to go on multidisciplinary guided walks to learn about the nature of their local ecosystem, as well as concurrently bringing back to light terms in the Newfoundland dialect through video-poems.
Andrew and Marlene chat about her unusual field research back in the 1980s, when she came to Britain and rode thousands of miles on a 1968 Vespa motor scooter, and they discuss her walking art practice. The podcast ends with her reading a list poem composed of over 100 verbs that describe ways of walking. We retreated indoors to make the recording of Marlene reciting the poem. She also shared other words and phrases related to walking that she found in the Dictionary of NewfoundlandEnglish that she would like to be brought back into common parlance.
Andrew Stuck has come to Sweden to an area 3 hours drive north of Stockholm, at the northern tip of the Stockholm Archipelago on the Baltic coast to interview Anna Viola Hallberg a video maker turned Walking Artist, the curator of the WAP coalition of walking artists – a residency based at Björkö Konstnod / BKN .
His trip is part of The Walking Arts in Local Communities (WALC) 4 year project that is part funded by the EU Creative Europe programme, as the WAP coalition of walking artists has been nominated as a node. These nodes are to extend the network beyond the original seven partners in five European countries who are promoting walking art within their local communities. The WAP coalition of walking artists is relatively new but has already gained significant recognition through the efforts of Anna Viola and a cohort of almost 200 artists.
Andrew has had the opportunity of staying with Anna Viola and taking part within their residency for a week before he interviews her. It’s a Sunday morning at the start of the Swedish summer holidays at the beginning of July.
Matt Gilbert, the author of the ‘Richly Evocative’ blog has had a collection of poetry published recently called ‘Street Sailing’.
Andrew Stuck and Matt are on a walk together through Dulwich Woods part of the Great North Wood, an area where Matt volunteered to undertake conservation work.
Frequently walking through the woods has been key to much of Matt’s creative writing process and in their conversation, Matt talks about his approach to writing prose as well as to writing poetry, and gives insight into the contemporary poets who have influenced and inspired him.
Although brought up in Bristol, Matt spent much of his life in West Norwood, what one newspaper described as “an anonymous suburb of South London” – a remark that has rattled Matt and prompted him to write the ‘Richly Evocative’ blog.
22’57” 10.8MB
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Graphic designer, illustrator. art and health practitioner, turned Walking Artist, writer and Desire Lines podcast producer, Emily Wilkinson is now studying for a PhD researching therapeutic landscapes.
Based in north east Wales, it is not practical for Andrew Stuck to meet her in person and go for a walk, and instead they record an interview over a Zoom call.
Perhaps it is a little indulgent on Andrew’s part to be interviewing a fellow podcaster, but in doing so Emily reveals a lot about the value she places on writing (as a portable art form), and on listening and recording conversations. She believes Walking Art can contribute to building confidence in the young and generating creative opportunities for marginal groups as well as for others. 30’15” 14.6MB
Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with Emily Wilkinson
Pau Cata presented at the Walking Arts and Relational Geographies conference, held in Girona, Catalonia, in July 2024. After his talk, they set off together on a slow walk through the city’s historic streets — partly in search of somewhere to pause, where Pau could enjoy a beer and Andrew a coffee.
Pau is a walking historian, researcher, and curator whose practice bridges art, geography, and cultural mobility. He has coordinated several significant initiatives, including the Center for Research and Creativity Casamaleas (CeRCCa), North Africa Cultural Mobility Map (NACMM), and the HARAKAT Platform. Over the past decade, he has developed an extensive body of research in Morocco and across parts of North and Saharan Africa, focusing on mapping and documenting artist residencies and creative networks that have often been overlooked or underrepresented in Western art discourses.
His work seeks to understand alternative, non-Western approaches to creativity and exchange — exploring how movement, migration, and collaboration shape artistic practice. Through a mixture of happenstance and deep engagement with place, Pau has also participated in collaborative research along trans-Saharan trade routes — journeys that, fittingly, have frequently unfolded on foot.
Since 2020, his ongoing inquiries have been framed withinthe Art Residency Research Collective (ARRc) , where he continues to investigate residencies as spaces of encounter, knowledge exchange, and relational geography.
