Category Archives: Publications

Kristina Borg, The Cities Within (2016) Alternative DIY Walk – Vienna, Austria

people walking in a city with headphones and zines

Kristina Borg, The Cities Within (2016) Alternative DIY Walk – Vienna, Austria

Kristina Borg

“In 2016, the methodology and practice outlined in the previous section (Alternative DIY Walks) resulted in the project The Cities Within. This walk was specific to the city of Vienna (Austria), precisely to the neighbourhoods of Leopoldstadt and Favoriten, the 2nd and the 10th districts respectively. This project was made possible as part of the Artists in Residence programme of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and KulturKontakt Austria, and also supported by the Cultural Export Fund of Arts Council Malta.​” (credit)

Alternative DIY Walks

These alternative do-it-yourself walk-tours are specific to different cities. Starting off with a series of conversations with a number of locals, the artist gains knowledge about their day-to-day experience of their city. Gleaning information from these conversations, together with onsite-research walking, the artist maps-out a number of hidden and/or neglected spaces, significant to personal and collective memory, so as to create a fictional-narrative based on a mix of fantasy and reality.

The narrative forms basis for a sound-walk that takes the shape of a do-it-yourself walk-tour and invites the participant/walker/wanderer to enter a one-to-one relationship with that city. Through a combination of recorded found, ambience sounds and a voiceover narration, one is guided through different neighbourhoods, streets, spaces and places. This project purposefully moves away from the city touristic centre and focuses on the outer districts/areas which more often than another are neglected by authorities. During such one and a half to two hour walks one passes through streets and places that are not always so common, but are significant to the daily lives and memory of the local inhabitants. Each DIY walk is also complemented with a series of illustrated maps, presented in the form of a booklet, which help indicate the way as well as when to play or pause the audio. From time to time the audio is paused so as to get a live experience of the place here and now.

Through this mix of fantasy and reality it is up to the participant/walker/wanderer to decide how to interpret the narrative, whether to take it as a fact, a metaphor or a dream. ” (credit)

Modelab, Ghost Walker (2014-15)

“Like photography negatives, urban design comprises information on what is not visible and only can be inferred by its contours. In this manner, urban geography becomes a catalogue of defeats and absences that can be interpreted from what once existed.

Based on Mexico City maps from 1867 and 1892, superposed on a 2014 Google map of the Juarez and Cuauhtémoc neighbourhoods, this project seeks to create an appropriation of histories through an artistic and scholar exploration of a specific street that ceased to exist more than a century ago.

Following the techniques of the Situationist’s dérive and Andrei Monastyrsky’s work with the Collective Actions Group, Ghost Walker: An Impossible Walk Through Mexico City’s History is a longitudinal study of a specific urban space, witness of a myriad of processes and modifications throughout 150 years

Ghost Walker (2014-15) has been presented at Muca Roma in Mexico City (2016), and as part of the group exhibition “Walk With Us” at the Rochester Arts Center (2022).

Participants: Sandra Calvo, Ramiro Chaves, Erick Meyenberg, Raul Ortega Ayala, Sergio Miranda Pacheco, Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Modelab.

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Modelab is an artistic initiative aiming to promote interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of public space, history, and cartography.

Formed in 2014 by Claudia Arozqueta and Rodrigo Azaola, Modelab projects have taken place in streets, parks, billboards, beaches, museums, vacant retail stores, and other spaces in Australia, New Zealand, France, Mexico, Taiwan, and the Philippines.” (credit)

Hui-min Tsen, The Pedway (2009-13)

brochure

published 2013 by Green Lantern Press | Specs: 18 pages, 4.2 x 0.2 x 9 inches

“Deep beneath the surface of the city, a tangled ribbon of corridors runs throughout 40 blocks of downtown Chicago. This meandering passage appears to have grown up organically as if it were an animal’s burrow or a donkey’s path.  Its route is illogical: the corridors exist outside of known space, and its hidden entrances lead to mysterious destinations. What is this place?  It is the Chicago Pedway, an intricate non-system of pedestrian tunnels built to separate the citizens of the city from the dangers and foul weather encountered on the street.

On the Trail of a Disorderly Future was an interdisciplinary project consisting of a walking tour of Chicago’s Pedway, ephemera given and sold to tour participants as souvenirs, and a book for a “self-guided” tour of the Chicago Pedway. The project told a story across 36 points-of-interest, weaving together mythic and historical tales to tell the story of urban development, utopian impulses, and fears of the city from the Renaissance until now.

Details: Active from 2009-2013 | performance (90-minute walking tour), ephemera (postcards, map, website), book” (credit)

Max Neuhaus, Sound Walks (1966)

Listen Postcard

Listen-postcard, 1979
Courtesy Estate of Max Neuhaus [credit]

“Work description by Manuela Ammer

With Sound Walks, Max Neuhaus intended to take the use of everyday sounds in the concert hall, as propagated by John Cage and others, a step further. Instead of bringing sounds to the audience, he took the audience outside to experience the acoustic everyday world on site. The Sound Walks began with Neuhaus asking the audience of the performance/concert to gather outside. He then put a stamp with the word LISTEN on their hands and led the group through its everyday environment. The idea was for people to concentrate in silence on the listening experience until they returned to the point of departure, thus refocusing their auditory perspective. Neuhaus also led excursions to places that could not be entered and that caused noises that could not be recorded. In 1978, he produced a do-it-yourself version of the work in the form of a postcard bearing the word LISTEN, which the owners could place at selected locations.” [credit]

Saleh Khannah, In Between Camps (2012)

A more recent walking artwork highlighting the intersection of walking and race is In Between Camps (2012), which consisted of a group of six researchers and artists, Ismael Al-bis, Fabio Franz, Matteo Guidi, Thayer Hastings, Ibrahim Jawabreh, Saleh Khannah, Sara Pelligrini, Giuliana Racco, and Diego Segatto, walking across the West Bank from the springs of al-Arroub to Solomon’s Pools (three massive stone reservoirs) south of Bethlehem in search of an ancient Roman waterway, the Arrub Aqueduct. The project originated from the Campus in Camps program developed by Al-Quds University, an experimental education program in the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Dheisheh. The purpose of the project was to both reactivate the water system’s source, and imagine a time-frame before the contemporary apartheid-reality of walls, colonial land parceling, and occupation of Palestine. While they were hiking, the group was stopped by Israeli soldiers who were suspicious of the Palestinian participants due to their skin tone and dress. The international participants intervened and explained the trip, their search of the aqueduct, and showed them the map, engaging in a type of information overload tactic, not unlike the tactics Codogan described for minimizing the perception of criminality. After the walk, the group created a booklet (Booklet ) reflecting on the history of the site, their experience, and how the various layers of race-based rule and exclusion are projected on the land.

Hastings, Thayer. “Tracing a Line Through a Fractured Palestine, from al-Arroub to Bethlehem,” Walking Art / Walking Aesthetics. Accessed May 16, 2022: https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/thayer-palestine

On Kawara, I Got Up / I Met / I Went, 1968-79

On Kawara (Japanese, 1933–2014)

Photomechanical prints, 8.3 x 14.0 cm (3 1/4 x 5 1/2 in. ) each

Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001

“In the I Got Up series, Kawara sent two postcards every day to friends, family, collectors, colleagues. The postcards that Kawara chose were always horizontal in format, and always of the touristic variety. He played games with the cards, sometimes sending a single recipient multiple[s] of the same image, or taking recipients on tours around the cities.

Transcript

Narrator: Here on Rotunda Level 3, you will see three bodies of work organized by On Kawara to be viewed as a single section of the exhibition that he titled Self-Observation. These works all represent a record of ordinary activities—the kinds of things we all do, each day. Every day for 12 years beginning in 1968, Kawara sent postcards for the series I Got Up, recorded lists of names for I Met, and traced his movements on maps in I Went.

Presented here are over 1,500 of the more than 8,000 postcards comprising I Got Up. Kawara used various kinds of stamping tools to date and address the cards, including a return address, which provides another way to plot his whereabouts. Along with this information he stamped the phrase I GOT UP AT followed by the precise time he arose from bed. Assistant curator Anne Wheeler:

Anne Wheeler: In the I Got Up series, Kawara sent two postcards every day to friends, family, collectors, colleagues. The postcards that Kawara chose were always horizontal in format, and always of the touristic variety. He played games with the cards, sometimes sending a single recipient multiple of the same image, or taking recipients on tours around the cities.

Narrator: Curator Jeffrey Weiss:

Jeffrey Weiss: He’s taking advantage of mediums that already exist in the world. What he’s doing is supposed to reflect the parameters of daily life that are decidedly nonaesthetic. Kawara’s work seems to be the residue, in a way, of a practice of these activities. It takes the form of the repetition of modular elements, or units, that are roughly but not quite the same from one to the next.” [credit]

“Considered the most personal and intimate of his works, I GOT UP is part of a continuous piece produced by On Kawara between 1968 and 1979 in which each day the artist sent two different friends or colleagues a picture postcard, each stamped with the exact time he arose that day and the addresses of both sender and recipient. The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months; the gesture’s repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist’s peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty-eight cities). Moreover, Kawara’s postcards do not record his waking up but his “getting up,” with its ambiguous conflation of carnal and existential (as opposed to not getting up) implications.

Contrasted with the random temporal shifts conveyed in the text messages are the diverse images of Manhattan featured on the postcard fronts, which accumulate over the piece’s forty-seven day duration into an unexpectedly quasi-cinematic aerial tour of the city-circling around the United Nations (and inside the General Assembly), down the East River along the waterfront to New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, and finally roaming around Federal Plaza at street level before coming to rest at City Hall. Like the newspaper pages that line the special cases housing each date painting, these found images juxtapose the infinite variety and quotidian reality of the public world with the elliptical, self-reflexive messages on the back. The sequence also extracts a drifting urban poetry from the mass-produced and anonymous, layering it conceptually over the banal, functional postal route of the objects themselves, as well as reintroducing a formal design to a work that is at first glance anticompositional.

With tremendous economy of means and a surprising visual elegance, Kawara creates a complex meditation on time, existence, and the relationship between art and life.” [credit]

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.

Takehisa Kosugi, Theatre Music (1964)

[image credit]

Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018)

“Keep walking intently.” That straightforward instruction formed the entire score for Takehisa Kosugi’s Theatre Music.Theatre Music was one of a series of the Japanese artist’s “Event” pieces, printed on a set of cards and published in 1964 by George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus movement.” [credit]

“The most generically titled of his Fluxus scores, Theater Music, is deceptive in its indeterminacy and formulation. Patently without object, and strikingly unmusical, it simply instructs: “Keep walking intently.” It is worth pausing to consider this. The piece brings focus, even determination to a daily action. Calling on the impetus of the individual or the collective, there is the fundamental element of endurance, an intensity in commonality, compressed within the borders of its time; space is thickened by a threat of the interminable. The otherwise quotidian activity of walking is framed as out of the ordinary by the “theater” of its execution. And through its accessibility, like the simplest Fluxus works, including others by Kosugi, it has continued to take on meaning through unlikely executions.” [credit]

Takehisa Kosugi
Theatre Music
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1963
card: 5.5 x 11 cm., foldout: various sizes
Edition size unknown

Most copies of Fluxus 1 contained both the score card for Theatre Music (“Keep Walking Intently”) and the realization of the work: footprints on paper. The card also appears in Kosugi’s boxed work Events, and is reproduced in the second Fluxus newspaper.

The George Maciunas designed graphic of seventy-three boots in a spiral pattern is among his more iconic images.

A recent book on walking in the arts takes its title from the Kosugi work: Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus, by Lori Waxman (2017).

The Fluxus 1 realization of the composition is similar to Yoko Ono’s Painting to Be Stepped On.

“In Theatre Music the performer is concerned with a simple unity of time, space and bodily movement. The persistence (“Keep”, “Intently”) takes on a savagely physical character in Music for a Revolution: “Scoop out one of your eyes five years from and do the same with the other eye five years later”.”– Michael Nyman,  Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond

[credit]

walkwalkwalk (2005-2010), East End London, England

Members: Clare Qualmann, Gail Burton, Serena Korda

Via Qualmann:

an archaeology of the familiar and forgotten was a live art project made in collaboration with the artists Gail Burton and Serena Korda between 2005 and 2010. At the core of the work was a walk route in the East End of London that we used as a repeated route, walked with groups of participants, often at night. Commissions and invitations took the project to other locations; for example creating a chip shop tour of the postcode district of E8 in 2007, a walk and series of posters for Exeter’s Spacex Gallery in 2008, and an immersive installation at Camden Arts Centre in 2006. Permanent site specific artworks are viewable in Bethnal Green Old Town Hall. We continue to exhibit artworks and ephemera generated by the collaboration.

Visit the project website for more information at: http://www.walkwalkwalk.org.uk/

Máiréad and Tim Robinson, Folding Landscapes (1972-)

a map

Tim Robinson “Oilerin Arann a map of the aran islands Co. Galway eire” (1996)

“Tim Robinson [1935-2020] is the alter ego of artist Timothy Drever whose abstract paintings and environmental installations were seen in a number of exhibitions in London before he moved to the west of Ireland in 1972. Robinson originally studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked as a teacher and artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London.

He and his wife, Máiréad [1934-2020], [then lived] in Roundstone in Connemara, where, in 1984, they established Folding Landscapes, a specialist publishing house and information resource center dealing with three areas of particular interest around Galway Bay: the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara. The maps and accompanying books are beautifully drawn and meticulously researched, explaining, often for the first time, the derivation and meaning of hundreds of place names and representing a wide range of information about the region’s culture and landscapes.

[They] gained much of this information literally on the ground, walking with naturalists, historians, archaeologists and other specialist through the landscape. [Their] maps and books provide an invaluable guide for visitors to the region as well as nourishing community spirit by identifying the irreplaceable uniqueness of the local environment and history. Tim and Mairead also run Unfolding Ideas, an annual Colloquium Series for scholars, educators and artists to engage in public talks, small group discussion and workshops in Roundstone, Connemara.”