Category Archives: Rituals

Fran Crow, WALKING TO SAVE SOME SEA – MY 46000 CHALLENGE (2006-7)

“I have always loved walking by the sea and was increasingly disturbed by the amount of plastic I was finding washed up on the beach. But in 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme reported that humankind’s exploitation of the oceans was ‘rapidly passing the point of no return’ and I was really shocked to discover that they estimated that on average there were around 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating on every square mile of ocean, leading to the death of over one million seabirds and over 100,000 marine mammals every year due to entanglement with or swallowing of litter.

We now know that over 12 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans every year, travelling on ocean currents to every part of the globe. These plastics endure in the marine environment indefinitely: items from the birth of plastics are washing up on our shores, virtually unscathed. Scientists estimate that plastic can take 1000 years or more to degrade in seawater and even then will continue to pollute our environment with thousands of microscopic fibres: samples taken from a Northumbrian beach were found to have over 10,000 fibres in just one litre of sand… But disposal of plastics in our oceans isn’t just harming wildlife now. We are also providing a toxic legacy that may last an eternity. Moreover, plastics can be found throughout the food chain, even ending up in the food on our plates.

plastics, like diamonds, are forever…

The Challenge
I was so shocked by what I had learned, I felt I had to do something and resolved to ‘save’ one square mile of ocean by collecting 46000 pieces of litter whilst walking on the beaches near my home. Every time I visited the beach I picked up all the litter I could carry. My challenge took exactly a year to achieve (September 2006 – September 2007) and in total I walked over 200kms and carried away nearly a third of a tonne of rubbish.

But sadly my challenge will never really be complete. Scientists estimate that the amount of plastic in the sea is increasing at a rapid rate, doubling every 2 or 3 years. I’m still collecting (I can’t stop!). But this could be a lifetime’s work and I still might not save a single square mile of sea…
My efforts may only be a literal splash in the ocean compared to the immensity of the problems are seas are facing. But what if everyone tried to do something about it? Luckily there is a lot more we can do – have a look here at the things we can all do…

Whilst walking, I took photographs and created a book of what I saw, contrasting the seemingly unspoilt beauty of the landscape with the man-made debris which inhabits it.
See my photographs in sequence from the beginning of my challenge.
To see specific locations, click the following links:
Aldeburgh – Bawdsey – Covehythe – Dunwich – Felixstowe – Orford Ness – Shingle Street – Sizewell – Southwold – Thorpeness – Walberswick

Collecting
I have saved and photographed nearly everything from my walks.
See some of my collections.

Exhibitions
The plastics I have collected have become my materials: I create huge installations with what I have found, ‘recycling’ it as art with potent message, playful but deadly serious.
See photographs from some of my exhibitions.“

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Richard Fleischner, Chain Link Maze (1978-79)

Chain Link Maze, 1978-79 (destroyed), Galvanized chain link fencing, 8′ x 61′ x 61′, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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“Adjacent to the University of Massachusetts football stadium in Amherst stands an 8-foot-tall chain-link fence encompassing an area some 60 feet square [by Richard Fleischner (1944-)]. …

The work sits, as do most of Fleischner’s projects, delicately on its terrain—it does not so much structure the natural, open site as it asserts itself discreetly, sensitively on the slightly rolling topography as a neat, geometrically concise object. Once through the corner entryway, we are confronted with a long corridor, the beginning of a path that winds, multicursal, toward a central inner chamber. Decisions must be made, and confusion is possible as we look through the wire grid at spaces beyond our reach. Both entry and path are ample, affording no sense of claustrophobia. One is struck instead by the open, hospitable feeling of the first corridors as they trace the perimeter. Comfortable strides are possible within the labyrinth; one can even turn or stop easily. It is not long before one of several decision points is reached—several paths can be taken but no great mistake can be made. It is as if the artist wants to coax us gently through this experience. There is no threat here but instead a fuller, more rewarding task of finding one’s own way. We are separated spatially but never visually from the outdoor environment as we can almost always see shimmering details through the various layers of mesh.

As one traverses the walkway, patterns of light reflect off the metallic walls, sometimes creating moiré-like surfaces, at others seeming almost flat and mat-colored. Fleischner has given us a visual labyrinth as well as a participatory maze. In no other maze are almost all the parts visible even as we are confined to a specific track. Depending on how many layers of chain link we gaze through (and this can vary from one to almost a dozen), details of the environment and other figures in the maze fade in and out of our sight. This seems then the perfect visual accompaniment to the fugitive spatial experiences we all undergo within a labyrinth.

In Chain Link Maze, Fleischner uses intuition to achieve his means—physical, optical and psychological experiences that depend on carefully measured spaces. In a broader context, a work like this directly engages some of the notions, particularly American, of the unbounded, natural environment. Fleischner works directly in the landscape, sometimes using concepts from rarified historical traditions. He has reasserted his ability visually to grasp the given landscape in a particularly American fashion, while simultaneously structuring situations within that landscape derived from conventions of garden design, architectural history and spatial perception. —Ronald J. Onorato ” [credit]

Dakota Commemorative Walk (2002-2012)

“They walked past red barns and white picket fences, past new housing developments and plowed fields dusted with snow. They walked with blisters on their feet and with hats pulled low to ward off the winter wind. They walked to remember.

The sixth annual Dakota Commemorative Walk ends Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012 after six days retracing the footsteps of the 1,700 Dakota women and children who were forced to march 150 miles to Fort Snelling after the U.S. Dakota War of 1862.

Some call it Minnesota’s Trail of Tears.

“This is a ceremony,” said Gwen Westerman, who teaches humanities at Minnesota State Mankato and who has walked with the group since 2004. “It’s not a protest. It’s not a re-enactment. It’s a spiritual ceremony for healing and for honoring those women and children we descend from. We remember their strength and their determination.”

The first commemorative walk was organized in 2002, and organizers have held one every two years, leading up to this year, the 150th anniversary of the original march. After the Dakota War of 1862, the Dakota men who attacked government offices and white settlements were given cursory trials. Just more than 303 were condemned, and 38 were hanged in Mankato, remembered as a notorious event in Minnesota history.

After the war, 1,700 men, women, children, elders and mixed-race noncombatants were marched to a fenced camp along the river beneath Fort Snelling. During the winter of 1862-63 hundreds died of illness and exposure. In the spring, the remaining 1,300 were taken by steamboat and trains to a semiarid reservation at Crow Creek, S.D., where many more died of starvation and illness.

“They lived through three horrific experiences,” said Chris Mato Nunpa, a retired professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, who was bundled in a black coat and who talked as he walked along the shoulder of the road.

“They lived through this forced march, through the concentration camp, and through the forcible removal from Minnesota.”

He called their ordeal a genocide.

This year’s walkers set out just after dawn Wednesday from the parking lot of the Lower Sioux Agency in Morton, in the Minnesota River Valley. By Monday afternoon, the group had passed through the town of Jordan after covering about 20 miles a day. They walked on the shoulder of Scott County Hwy. 17, followed by a caravan of cars and vans carrying friends, supporters and elders too frail to make the journey on foot. Some people walk all six days; others join for a few days or even a few hours.

Each day, the procession is led by a woman carrying a sacred pipe wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by a quiet group. Farther back, people chat. The walkers stop and place a marker about every mile and honor two ancestors from the march.

At one stop Monday, a woman cleared weeds growing at the base of a tall electrical pole. She pounded a stake into the ground, topped with red and yellow ribbons. Someone called the names on the ribbon into the chilly wind: “Alek Graham. Maline Mumford.”

Then one by one, people went forward, took a pinch of tobacco from a leather pouch and sprinkled it over the stake.

“The name is not just a name. When we call their name, they come,” explained Nick Anderson, cultural chairperson for the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community. “They are here with us.”

He said he walked as a way to thank his ancestors, one of whom was a sister of Chief Little Crow.

“When I think of what they had to endure, I don’t know if we can ever give enough thanks,” he said. “We survived, but we have lost a lot of our culture. Participating in this is a way for me to get some of that back.”

Other people came long distances to walk.

“The reason I’m here is because my great grandmother was on this march with her four kids and her mother,” said Reuben Kitto, who flew in for the march from Florida, where he spent 30 years working for Honeywell. Kitto spent his childhood on the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska where many Minnesota Dakota were sent.

“This walk brings us back to the reality of how hard it was for them,” Kitto said. “The weather was a lot like this, there was a little bit of snow.”

“It’s a way for me to spend a day with my grandmother,” he said.

It’s also a way for him to spend time with his living family. His nephew Robert Thomas drove up from Winona to join the march for a day. Thomas is working on a commissioned play about the Dakota war and exile for the Minnesota History Theater and is concerned with helping both Dakota and non-Dakota remember the Dakota’s past.

“The old aunties and uncles are still passing down the stories,” he said. “The struggle is to get the younger generation interested.”

Kitto’s daughter, Ramona Kitto Stately of Shakopee, also was on the march, bundled in a long red coat and walking next to her father. Stately coordinates Indian education for the Osseo Area Schools and this year, as in past years, brought several students along on the walk.

As the sun started to dip low, she and others arrived at the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community center, where they would eat dinner together and reflect on that day’s walk.

“We carry a deep grief inside and if we don’t connect with that grief, we can’t heal,” Stately said.” [credit]

Walk & Squawk, The Walking Project (2003-2006)

Walk and Squawk, The Walking Project (2003-2006)

“The Drawing Project began in Detroit in 1999 and became an interdisciplinary performance, mapping and cultural-exchange project collaboratively developed by Walk & Squawk (Hilary Ramsden and Erika Block), with U.S. and South Africa-based artists and communities during a series of residencies in Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal from 2003 through 2006. Inspired by desire lines people made across vacant lots in Detroit and across fields in South Africa we explored the paths we walk and how they are formed through culture, geography, language, economics and love. We looked at how changing our patterns of movement can alter our attitudes and perception, how taking a different path can alter our lives. We discovered how learning language alters the actual paths in our brains and how taking a car means something very different from taking a walk.” [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]

Clare Qualmann, Perambulator (2012-)

Via Qualmann: Perambulator is an ongoing artwork that explores the experience of walking with a pram (or pushchair, stroller or buggy). Working from an auto-ethnographic standpoint the project explores gendered spaces, maternal narratives and shifting identities, inequality and mobilities. Elements of the work have been produced for Lewisham Arthouse, London, Deveron Projects, Huntley, and Flux Factory, New York.

Please visit the perambulator website for more information: https://huntlyperambulator.wordpress.com/

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Violin Phase from Fase: Four movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982)

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

“MoMA’s Performance Exhibition Series presents a program of live performance and dance in conjunction with the group exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. The dancing body has long been a subject matter for drawing, as seen in a variety of works included in this exhibition. These documentations show dance in two dimensions, allowing it to be seen in a gallery setting. But if one considers line as the trace of a point in motion—an idea at the core of this project—the very act of dance becomes a drawing, an insertion of line into time and the three-dimensional space of our lived world.

Choreography and dance: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Music: Steve Reich, “Violin Phase” (1967)
Violin: Shem Guibbory
Duration: 16 minutes
Created at the Dance Department of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, first performed in April 1981 at the Festival of Early Modern Dance, Purchase, New York.
Rosas is the dance ensemble and production structure built around the choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Find out more at www.rosas.be.” [credit]

Tim Brennan, iAmbic Pedometer: Ur Manoeuvre (2013)

“‘iAmbic Pedometer : Ur Manoeuvre’ [runs over 1.5 hours and] revolves around the report of Wordsworth’s mode of composition in which he would walk and utter aloud for hours on end. The work is an iPhone video of a walk made by the artist from his former home in Sunderland. Moving through inner city, suburban and open spaces, Brennan’s mumblings emerge from the sound of the traffic, shifting between semi-cogent announcement to that of the concrete poem. They collide Kurt Schwitters’ ‘ur poetry’ (another Cumbrian resident) with that of the pentameter (we hear snatches of ‘a. b. b. b. a’ – the rhyme scheme of iambic form). The artist sees this fusion as proposing Wordsworth’s early writing mode as bearing a relation to that of the Shaman, who, once induced into a separate reality may then speak in a variety of tongues to provide insight.” [credit]

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“Tim Brennan’s performance-led practice has been based around walking for over two decades. He has created over forty major works, which have ranged from a re-walking of the Jarrow March entitled, ‘Crusade’ to what might be described as guided tours concerning subjects and locations, from all of the angels on display in the British Museum (‘Museum of Angels’) to St Mark’s Square in Venice (‘Vedute’). Brennan has created such cultural counter-histories for both elevated and unexpected situations by inhabiting received stories as well as forging wholly new ones.

More recently, he has examined the idea of Northumbria as a distinct cultural region, walking through and photographing the territories defined by that ancient term. This broadened into an investigation of ‘the idea of North’, as colleague Peter Davidson has described it. In 2012, Brennan created a digital guided tour for the Durham Miners Gala, to be followed from one’s phone or mobile device.

In ‘Walk On’, Brennan presents several works including his longest completed walking work, ‘Vedute Manoeuvre’, and ‘iAmbic Pedometer’, a durational iPhone video that records his walking through Sunderland with semi-coherent mumblings that refer to both Wordsworth’s compositional strategy and to the sonic poetry of Kurt Schwitters.

Brennan’s current project – one might almost call it a campaign – entitled ‘Roman Runner’ involves the artist envisaging running the entire circumference of the Roman Empire. To date, he has traversed Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall as ultra-marathon manoeuvres. He also presents a compendium of his publications and guide books. Publishing, in tandem with walking, have been critical components of Brennan’s practice throughout his career. The two are inextricably bound together in his oeuvre.” [credit]

Rachael Clewlow “Explorer” 2011

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“Rachael Clewlow meticulously documents the ways in which she inhabits the city in which she lives: the routes she takes through it, the times and dates of her travels, and the methods by which (to paraphrase Warhol) she moves from A to B and back again.

Several of the artists in ‘Walk On’ use GPS technologies to monitor their own movements through space. Clewlow, by contrast, prefers what the writer Robert Macfarlane has punningly called “the old ways”: she keeps a series of “statistical diaries” in which routes, traditional pathways or not, are “logged, through dedicated, almost ritualistic daily recording”. These diaries are exquisite objects in their own right. They are also the source material for Clewlow·s pictorial inventions.

Like other artists here, Clewlow creates her own systems of translation by which the patterns of her own mobility become abstract patterns of form and color. She describes her process as “the organization and presentation of related data, accumulated over years” into abstract imagery which “recalls the visual language of maps and their color coding systems, though their graphic style belies the rigorous and precise handmade approach to making them”. Indeed, Clewlow plays with the idea that her works should be functional, deliberately making them lie on the borders of legibility. Her conceptual and material dexterity ensure that her works instigate journeys in our imaginations.”

Walkabout

desert

A landscape from the edge of the Simpson Desert / Photo credit

Historically speaking, the walkabout is a rite of passage in which young (adolescent) Aboriginal Australians undertake a journey that will help “transform” them into adults. The journey is usually made between the ages of 10 and 16. During this journey which can last for up to six months, the individual is required to live and survive all alone in the wilderness.

This is not an easy thing to do, especially not for teenagers. That is why only those who have proven themselves mentally and physically ready are allowed to proceed with the walkabout. Only the elders of the group decide whether it is time or not for the child to do it.

The children are not completely unprepared for the journey. During the years before the walkabout, the elders instruct them and give them advice about the ceremony and adult life in general; they have been passed the “secrets” of the tribe, the knowledge about their world.

Those who are initiated in the walkabout are also decorated with body paint and ornaments. Sometimes they are marked with a permanent symbol on their bodies. In some cases, a tooth is removed from the mouth, or the nose or ears of the initiated are pierced. Traditional walkabout clothes include only a simple loin cloth and nothing more.

During a walkabout, a young person can sometimes travel a distance of over a 1,000 miles. In order to survive this long hike, the participant in the walkabout must be able to make their own shelter and must be capable of procuring food and water for themselves.

That means he needs to hunt, catch fish, and also recognize and utilize edible and healing plants. The initiated youngster must learn to identify plants such as bush tomatoes, Illawarra plums, quandongs, lilly-pillies, Muntari berries, wattle seeds, Kakadu plums, and bunya nuts.

Besides the obvious goal of the walkabout – to walk and survive, the initiate also has to devote his time to thinking and discovering himself.

The teenager needs to understand the concept of bravery and to get in touch with his spiritual guides. While moving across the land, the initiate sings so-called “songlines” – ancestral songs that serve as “spoken maps” that help him find his way. In the lack of modern instruments such as a compass or radio, it is believed that the young person is guided by some spiritual power.

In its essence, this important aboriginal ritual is the ultimate survival test that a young person should pass in order to enter adulthood. The person doing the walkabout should prove to the elders that he is capable of surviving the harsh environment of his native land.

The walkabout is also an excellent time for self-evaluation and reflection. One can say that the walkabout is both a journey across the land and a journey of the mind. (Credit)