Tag Archives: walking art

Tamsin Grainger talking walking

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Only since Covid has Tamsin Grainger discovered Walking art, but in that short time she’s made two Soundwalks, which have been shortlisted for the Sound Walk September Award and she has made many other works.

A Shiatsu practitioner, she bartered  treatments for home stays, on long-distance walks across Europe and became known on the Camino for helping with pulled muscles and tired legs. You can’t help but be inspired by the story she tells. 25’40” 12MB

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Mick Douglas talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is with Mick Douglas, a self-confessed, long-distance solo hiker. He has worked as an artist researcher into creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, for three decades. Much of his work was around the interaction of people within modes of transport, comparing practices in cities in Australia to cities in India.

We are walking along the uneven shingle beach of the Great Prespa Lake in western Macedonia in north west Greece, as Mick has come to present a piece of work at the Walking Arts Encounters there. 

He’s here to talk about and demonstrate a piece he developed for an unusual festival in New Zealand in which he takes a solo hike for four days within a shipping container. If that’s not unusual enough, he goes on to tell Andrew how he is hosting and ghosting walks around a 40 acre block of land. He is developing an ecological practice in which he invites people to engage with their surroundings in part, listening to commentary that he’s created as a sound walk. 25’42’ 12MB

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Rachel Epp Buller talking walking

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Rachel Epp Buller is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Kansas in the United States. She is the recipient of two Fulbright scholarships, the latest of which she went to wintry Edmonton in north west Canada to make a piece of walking art called “One Hundred Days of Walking”. Her piece has now been shortlisted for the inaugural Marŝarto Award for Walking Art.

Andrew Stuck and Rachel talk over the Internet on a Zoom call about the importance to her of using different media to create work, including embroidery, bookmaking, and recording the sounds of the environment through which she walks.  They also discuss how she maintained her discipline throughout the 100 days by keeping to a ‘walking score’, and how she has exhibited the work.

The interview opens with Andrew asking Rachel to explain a little bit about the Fulbright scholarship programme. 18’11” 8.5MB

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Images from One Hundred Days of Walking, 2022, an installation of 100 accordion books, cotton, and vinyl (one full installation view and one detail).

Elena Biserna talking walking

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Elena Biserna is an Italian researcher and curator who lives in Marseille. In 2022 she completed and published two compendia, one called “Going Out: walking, listening, sound making”, and the other “Walking with Scores”.

Andrew Stuck catches up with her over the Internet on a Zoom call. It is quite impossible to cover all the topics that she has written about, collated and published as her two books run to over 1000 pages, so he starts by encouraging her to explain from were and why walking art and sound walking in particular might have originated.

The majority of published walking art stems from the Anglo-Saxon world, so it is refreshing to talk to someone who clearly has identified and researched works from other areas, and in other languages, to bring a fresh perspective.

Her research has led her to develop her own walking art practice reinterpreting walking scores written by others with the project “Walking from Scores”. This has later led her to write some of her own scores with a feminist perspective in order to clearly address the specificities of gendered bodies walking in public space. 14.3MB 30’26”

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Daniel Beerstecher talking walking

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Daniel Beerstecher is a walking artist from Germany.  Over the last few years, he has been focussing on walking slowly, very slowly – just two metres a minute.  In our conversation, we explore why and how he has achieved this, as well as how it has changed him personally, and how it has changed the way others see him.   We live in a society where everything appears to be speeding up, yet here is someone deliberately going as slow as he can; he is curious too, to see if he can influence how Artificial Intelligence and  robots in particular, can be taught to slow down. 24’13” 11.3MB

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Photo: Daniel Beerstecher
Photo: Stanislaus Plewinski
Photo: Bert Schutzbach

Julius Smit talking walking

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As a former specialist photographer in an academic library, Julius Smit has always been fascinated by the composition of words and pictures. Through a series of walks on the South Downs and in and around Eastbourne where he now lives, Julius has been publishing ‘zines and chapbooks of his poetry and photography, that he has printed and gives away to people he meets on his walks. Andrew Stuck meets him early on a February morning, to walk along the promenade in Eastbourne, and discuss the process Julius follows to create his ‘zines, and how he views his efforts as a way to resist the digital world and encourage us all to slow down. 29’51” 14 MB

Julius Smit

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Eye-Glass Zine covers created by Julius Smit:

Anna Luyten talking walking

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Anna Luyten is a Belgian academic working across a number of disciplines, including journalism and non-fiction writing, theatre, change management and philosophy. Her interests include teaching by wandering, creating collective confusion amongst her students, and encouraging flexible gazing of the layers of daily life, all of which is engendered through walking. Influenced as much by American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, as by German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, she teaches ‘wandering as a discipline’ for which she has defined four pillars of walking. With only a narrow window of time in our busy schedules, Andrew Stuck meets Anna outside Tate Modern, in London on a busy and crowded summer Saturday, having to record snatches of their conversation when they find quieter places. The interview opens with Andrew asking Anna to explain each of the four pillars. 18’02” 8.5MB

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Ivana Pinna talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in the medieval heart of Vic, in Catalunya; its narrow streets are not very conducive to recording an interview as sounds reverberate off the stone facades.

He set out originally to interview Thomas Keis and Ivana Pinna, who together have set up an artist residency on the island of Sardinia.  As you learn through the conversation, after the suggestion of Thomas, Andrew interviews Ivana alone.

As they weave through the bustling streets in search of ambient calm, their much interrupted conversation includes a discussion about “Artivism”, in which Ivana mobilised the community around her Sardinian childhood home in a walking protest against government plans to dump radioactive waste there. 22’39” 10.6MB

Photo credit: Tarek Dakwar
Photo credit: Thomas Keis
Photo credit: Thomas Keis

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Feature image credit: Tarek Dakwar

Yannis Ziogas talking walking

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Out at a restaurant in Gerona having dinner, late in the evening, Andrew Stuck discovers that his plan to interview walking artist Yannis Ziogas the following morning have gone awry as Yannis has to leave on the earliest flight.  So to interview Yannis in person, they had to do it there and then.  They walk near-deserted streets close to midnight, talking about Yannis’ unique bond with Prespa, on the disputed, remote northern border of Greece. 32’26” 15.2MB

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Clara Gari talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in Olot, Catalunya, in the company of Clara Gari, the founder of the Nau Côclea Contemporary Art centre and of The Grand Tour, an annual nomadic walking art residency that Clara has developed over the last eight years.  Previously having received public funding to run a conventional art centre offering exhibitions, workshops and talks, a political change meant the funding was withdrawn, and Clara struggled to keep the art centre alive.  Thinking out of the box, she reprised a personal walking journey she had made in 2003, in which she walked for three weeks on a 200 kilometre route that linked artists and friends, to create what she called The Grand Tour that now follows a spiral route through eastern Catalunya and the Pyrenees. 22’23″ 10.5MB

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Jez Hastings talking walking

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On a hot summer’s day at a walking conference in Girona, Catalunya, Andrew Stuck is accompanying self-styled photo troubadour, Jez Hastings on a short stroll.  Jez has been known to walk to similar conferences, including a walk through Italy, Albania and Macedonia to reach a gathering in Prespas – walking long distances is in his blood.  They talk about why that is so, and how and why Jez has developed his practice of ‘a pace of purpose without purpose’, of making art through experiencing landscapes on durational walks, and in taking fewer photographs…27’31” 12.9MB

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Image credits: Feature portrait: F.Tanguy Landscape: J.Hastings

Andrea Vassallo talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in Bognor, in West Sussex on a very hot day, walking around the University of Chichester campus with Andrea Vassallo. Andrea is completing a PhD with an installation in which gallery visitors will be able to experience walking beside him on a long walk. For Andrew, long walks tend to be 12 to 15 kilometres; for Andrea, he chose to walk from his home in Lancing (UK) to his childhood home on the outskirts of Venice (Italy) during the summer of 2021.

If you happen to be anywhere near Bognor in the first two weeks of September 2022, visit the installation and experience, falling in step with Andrea as he walks to Italy.

The conversation is about the walk Andrea undertook and why long distance walking is so important to him and (spoiler alert) we also cover details of the exhibition – the conversation opens with Andrea explaining how far he walked and how it took him. 28’47” 13.5MB

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