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
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.
Download notes of items mentioned in this interview:
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.
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
Download notes of items mentioned in this episode:
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.
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
Andrew Stuck is in Sweden at Björkö-Konstnod (BKN) in the northern Stockholm archipelago to join the Walking as Practice artist residency of which he is going to be part. Among the artists there was Janice Jensen from Germany, whose work Andrew has come across since Janice was shortlisted for the 2023 Marŝarto Award for Walking Art. Janice has just demonstrated a “Drawing by Walking” mechanism that she has created as the first step in an elaborate process to draw the walks she makes. Their conversation takes place on a walk along an unsealed road early on, on a July evening. 20’24” 9.6MB
The people Andrew Stuck interviews tend to be talented, resourceful and resilient or a combination of each, one might describe them as ‘can do’ people. Saira Niazi is not only a ‘can do’ but is a ‘has done’ and ‘will do’. She has worked in many roles, between jobs, a dozen or so years ago she set up Living London, leading walking tours that she called ‘Wanderings’, seeking out ‘hidden gems’ in part to satisfy her own curiosity and finding others to share her discoveries.
Saira is a recent recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship and travelled to New York and San Francisco seeking out what she calls ‘Renegade Guides’ those have a similar passion for exploration and sharing knowledge. She has returned home to Tooting in south west London and written and published the ‘Renegade Guide Handbook’. 22’51” 10.7MB
For many the Covid pandemic has been a difficult time to live through, not least for the residents of Melbourne in Australia, who may well have had to endure the longest lockdown of any city. For Dan Koop, a curator and producer, the lockdown appears to have actually given him an opportunity to explore new ways of working, reconnecting with his immediate neighbourhood environment, as well as tackling common societal issues from a local perspective. Andrew Stuck catches up with him midway through an extended European trip of Dan’s on a sunny afternoon in July 2024. They are walking together along an unmade road on the outskirts of Girona in Spain. 20’12” 9.5 MB
Flowing Loops documentationDan leading Flowing LoopsField recording for Flowing Loops
Andrew Stuck is walking through the streets and around the battlements of the fortified city of Girona in Catalonia, Spain. He is in the company of Molly Wagner an American who has lived in Australia for many years. Neither of them are certain of finding their way. Molly is the author of “No Trespassing”, a sumptuous photographic journal of a number of long walks that she made through urban, suburban and rural New South Wales. They are both attending the Walking Art and Relational Geographies conference organised by Clara Gari of Nau Côclea, at which Molly will be talking about the formation and growth of Australian Walking Artists, for which she is a convenor. 27’25” 12.9 MB
