Category Archives: Commuting

Jalan Gembira (2016-), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

“Jalan Gembira is a walking practitioners collective that has been walking together since 2016. Jalan Gembira are based in Yogyakarta and mostly walk around the neighborhood in Yogyakarta. The idea of walking emerged in the condition of motorbike cities. Most people are not comfortable walking around. On the other hand, the walking infrastructure has not been capable of accommodating the walker. However, this rarely walking condition are leading to the layers of social problem that related to the safe space for women, adult at risk, minority community, and children in all area; tension between private and public space; also hierarchical of public infrastructure access that impacted of seeing the city as a living space. Jalan Gembira are focusing on initiating the walking activity started with the supportive companion to sensing the city and archiving all those walking experience and city senses through a visual documentation and pieces of writings.” [credit]

Jalan Gembira is a female-led arts collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. They recently collaborated with Walkspace (Birmingham, UK).

“Birmingham and Yogyakarta have shared the condition where people would prefer to take other means of transportation than walking. Definitely, these conditions have shaped the dynamics of people living including the barriers between public and private space who grow organically following their needs for living space.

This project will be conducted by Amarawati Ayuningtyas, Gatari Surya Kusuma, and Zunifah of Jalan Gembira, in collaboration Fiona Cullinan and Pete Ashton of Walkspace.” Here is a link to their joint walking zine. [credit]

Instagram for Jalan Gembira

Amarawati Ayuningtyas

Her short name is Mara, works as a freelance graphic designer and also an employee at an art gallery based in Yogyakarta. After graduating from the Modern School of Design (MSD) study program in design communication visual, Mara did a lot of action database archiving artists in Indonesia and did administrative work in an art collective, Lifepatch.

Gatari Surya Kusuma

Called Gatari, is a researcher, writer and curator based in Yogyakarta. After graduating from the Department of Photography at the Indonesian Institute of the Art in 2016, she did a lot of action research and deepened critical pedagogy with her group KUNCI Study Forum & Collective. In addition, she also conducts artistic production and ethnographic research related to food with a food study collective called the Bakudapan Food Study Group. Currently, she has many works within the fields of ecology, critical pedagogy, and collectivism.

Zunifah

Also known as Uniph. She works daily as an account executive in an advertising agency. She used to work in an art space while studying philosophy at university. Her thesis was about the philosophy of art. The combination of study and previous job made her understand that art is a basic human need for expression. She continues to understand art as her daily observation.

Norma Hunter, Walk this Way (2010)

two people walking and two people using wheelchairs

Norma Hunter, Walk this Way (2010) [credit]

Hunter collaborated with disabled community members to create a choreographed wheelchair walk featuring two members of the local community (two wheelchair users and a parent of a disabled child). The work explored the experience of navigating Huntly, Scotland’s town square in a wheelchair. Participants were asked to traverse the square twice before going on a specific trip, such as visiting the post office. [Morris, Blake. Walking Networks (2019)]

a leaflet

Claudia Zeiske, Walking Lunches (2010-2020)

images from walking lunches

Claudia Zeiske, Walking Lunches (2010-2020)

[credit]

“Claudia Zeiske is a keen walker and founding director of Deveron Projects.

Walking Lunches are a series of moving meetings between Claudia Zeiske and artists, arts professionals and other participants.

Claudia provides a written agenda prior to the walking lunch, as well as sandwiches and tea during the walk. The lunch partner brings a camera and takes three pictures (portrait, landscape, still-life) on the walk. Afterwards Claudia writes minutes and archives them, along with the images taken by the partner.

Interested in a walking lunch? Contact Claudia

Recommended: good shoes, waterproofs, hat and gloves

Walking Lunches are an adaptation of ‘working lunches’, combining the purpose of a business meeting with fitness and environment appreciation. The idea is that instead of lunch-time meetings people are encouraged to undertake movable get-togethers, where they walk for the duration of a normal meeting (i.e. between 1-2 hours). Targeted for busy people who want to keep fit but can’t ‘afford’ the time.

‘The intention is to set up a network of walking lunchers which has a snowball effect over a 6 month period. These moving meetings will be orchestrated by myself; each week I will encourage at least one other person to walk. The walking partner in turn will commit to undertake at least 2 further walking lunches. If successful this project should create an exponential rise in the number of people walking over the 6 months of the project. If everybody I walk with (minimum 26 people), walks with at least two other people, this will already be 26+2×26 = 78 people. One can imagine how much this number will go up if every one of those walkers encourages 2 more walkers, and they in turn do the same…..’ Claudia Zeiske”

Kubra Khademi, Kubra & Pedestrian Sign (2016)

Live Performance by Kubra Khademi
16 Feburary 2016, Paris, France

“PE: When you moved to France, you continued to put on walking performances. For Kubra & Pedestrian Sign (2016) you walked through Paris in a black dress and high heels with a pedestrian crossing lightbox tied to the top of your head, except the green sign in the box was a female figure. I’m curious about how you found the experience of reclaiming public space in this new European context.

KK: The challenges are different here: the texture and sense of the landscape, the cityscape, the people around me. Public space in France and the Parisian art scene are still very masculine, but in a far more subtle and sophisticated way. No one harasses me in Europe like they do in Afghanistan. I don’t need an armor to walk here. The city is like that blank white page again. That was the first performance I put on in a public space after then one in the Kabul. It was a few months after I arrived. The image of me is almost funny. I was looking into people’s eyes and allowing them to talk to me. Most of the reactions were similar, but one woman screamed at me from the other side of the street, “That is sexist! Skirts are sexist!”” [credit]

Amanda Heng, I Walk from the South to the North (2017)

This work saw Heng travelling alone on foot from Clifford Pier to the Causeway checkpoint in Woodlands. This solo walk continued Amanda’s interest in rituals, exchanges and their relationship with live performance in daily life.

“Heng has been a central figure in Singaporean performance art as well as feminist discourse in Singapore since the 1980s.

In 2017, Heng performed “I Walk From The South To The North” which constitutes a series of daily walks spanning the duration of two months (September – November). … From my perspective, this work is a comment on the breakneck speed at which Singapore develops. Bridges, skyscrapers and entire parks are built in the span of a few months. The urban landscape morphs and mutates unforgivingly. How do people hold on to memory and history?

It also reads to me as a reflection on technology and how we wield it in our contemporary lives to ‘make lives easier’. Singapore is a technologically advanced country with a highly comprehensive transport system. What is the point of walking anywhere anymore? Smartphones are ubiquitous, Google Maps is the most sensible mode of navigation. What is the point of talking to anyone, asking for directions anymore? Heng’s work brings focus back to the physical and social nature of the body and sheds light on the effects which technology has on that.

Could you tell us a bit more about your most recent walk from Clifford Pier to the Causeway which you took from September to November 2017?

It is titled “I Walk from the South to the North”. The participation is a little different from my previous walks. I deliberately do not get myself acquainted with the route so I start to ask around for directions so where I go depends entirely on who I chance upon and how forthcoming they are. I’d get these people to draw out maps or write out directions and these form part of the documentation for this project. Many people I approached were generous with their help and were surprised I wanted to walk so far. They kept insisting it was much faster to take the MRT nearby.” [credit]

 

Sophie Calle, The Shadow (1981)

“At my request, my mother went to a detective agency called “Duluc”. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities and to provide photographic evidence of my existence. The investigation was conducted on April 16, 1981.” [credit]

“In April 1981, a detective followed the French artist Sophie Calle through the streets of Paris for one day. Hired by her mother at the artist’s request, the detective logged her movements and photographed her activities as she, without his knowledge, recorded her experience of being watched. She later exhibited the reports side-by-side in her piece “La Filature” (“The Shadow,” 1981), which highlights Calle’s method of working over three decades. Staging provocations resembling seduction, documenting them with snapshot photography and a forensic first-person point of view, she crosses the thresholds of voyeur and exhibitionist, public and private, conceptual control and chance.” [credit]

plan b “All GPS traces in Berlin in 2011-2012” 2012

a map

plan b

two people tracing

plan b

[credit]

plan b is the name that Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers take when working collaboratively as artists. They are amongst the leading figures to engage with GPS technologies since their widespread availability over the last decade or more. Their practice is based on both walking and on data collection including, most notably, their GPS traces. Rogers has tracked every single one of his journeys for a whole decade. New has done the same since 2007. On several occasions they have exhibited an entire year’s worth of traces in one space, effectively making every action they take become public knowledge.

Such actions present ethical problems for us, as much as for the artists. The viewer becomes privy to the artist’s habits and, hence, inner life. If information about apparently innocuous activity such as walking through one’s own city can be timed, monitored and recorded by an artist, such information can easily be known by technology providers and sold to others. Those who might want to observe, redirect, restrict or control our behaviour have new ways of doing so. Most recently, plan b have engraved a whole year’s worth of GPS data onto a transparent acrylic sheet. The journeys that they routinely or repeatedly undertake are ‘dug’ out of the material in an almost archaeological manner. Their habits and ways of inhabiting the city are simultaneously made both monumental and as ghost-like traces.”

Gwen MacGregor, 3 Months New York/ Toronto (2004)

gps mapping

Video still. CREDIT: //www.gwenmacgregor.com/three_months_new_york_toronto.html

GPS Series – 3 months New York / Toronto

VIDEO

single-channel video, duration two minutes, 2004; exhibited: librairie-galerie Histoire de l’oeil, Marseilles, France; Rencontres Internationales Paris–Berlin, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Theatre Babylon, Berlin, Germany, 2007; Transmedia Dundas Square, Year 01 Artist-run Centre, Toronto, 2006

THE FIRST OF THE GPS SERIES, this animation charts my movements for three months in New York and in Toronto. Each day is drawn and then partially fades to allow the day to be seen in the context of the accumulation. By leaving the page white, the identity of the locations are revealed over time. In this way the works uses walking as a creative drawing tool.

ABOUT THE GPS SERIES:
Since 2004 I have been carrying a GPS everywhere I go to record my movements. This raw data is used to create animated drawings for an ongoing series.

[CREDIT]

Roberley Bell, Still Visible After Gezi (2015)

[credit]

“In 2010, I began photographing the “Istanbul” trees on my daily meanderings through the city streets. These trees were not iconic symbols of the beauty of nature, but rather trees that had negotiated a precarious position within the urban landscape. I returned in 2105, after the Gezi demonstrations to check up on and again photograph my “Istanbul” trees. I returned to try to find the trees, they had become important to me and I knew seeking them out would reveal something –I just wasn’t sure what that would become. I wanted to go back and see, if working from memory, I could relocate these trees. What emerged was a story, theirs and mine, as I moved through the city retracing my footsteps from memory. For me, the trees of Istanbul are a powerful metaphor and stoic symbol of survival speaking to the humanity of the ever-expanding city. The installation Still Visible After Gezi expresses that set of experiences.

For the installation, I conceived each tree as its own story, creating a turquoise frame. Within the frame the tree as I originally photographed it in 2010, smaller images of landmarks that guided me back to the tree in 2015 then finally an image of the tree as I found it five years later or a void. The empty space representing that the tree was no longer there or perhaps I had remembered the location wrong. Still Visible After Gezi includes 16 tree stories.”

Link to Bell’s Site

Michael x. Ryan, Roadstains (2007)

[credit]

a white carved sculpture

Roadstains #3: Coke spill from parked car on Potomac Ave. Chicago, Fall 2004 / Installation in process, view #3, Hand cut wood relief: Finnish and Baltic Birch plywood painted with latex paint to match wall color, 2017

Ryan traced spilled drinks in the street as he went walking. He transferred them to wood carvings painted white.