Category Archives: Rural

Dread Scott, “Slave Rebellion Reenactment” (2019)

Credit: The Guardian, a still from video piece

A community-engaged artist performance and film production that, on November 8-9, 2019, reimagined the German Coast Uprising of 1811, which took place in the river parishes just outside of New Orleans. Envisioned and organized by artist Dread Scott and documented by filmmaker John Akomfrah, Slave Rebellion Reenactment (SRR) animated a suppressed history of people with an audacious plan to organize and seize Orleans Territory, to fight not just for their own emancipation, but to end slavery. It is a project about freedom.

The artwork involved hundreds of reenactors in period specific clothing marching for two days covering 26 miles. The reenactment, the culmination of a period of organizing and preparation, took place upriver from New Orleans in the locations where the 1811 revolt occurred—with the exurban communities and industry that have replaced the sugar plantations as its backdrop. The reenactment was an impressive and startling sight—hundreds of Black re-enactors, many on horses, flags flying, in 19th-century French colonial garments, singing in Creole and English to African drumming.

Marcus Coates, “Stoat” (1999)

Credit

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Single Channel Digital Video
Duration: 3 min
Filmed in Grizedale, Cumbria, UK Camera and sound: Miranda Whall , Produced by Grizedale Arts

Here Coates attempts to become Stoat, a member of the weasel family. We see him stumbling along a rural stoney track, wearing home made ‘stoat stilts’. A section of 2×4 inch wood strapped to each of his feet with multiple elastic bands are the basis for each shoe, below this though are the two sections of small circular dowling protruding from each which Coates is intent on balancing on. Eventualy, after some ankle turning falls manages to find a way of striding sideways in them. The stilts, replicating the stoat’s paw print dimensions and spacing, create a physical limitation on his body which inadvertently makes his walk not dissimilar to that of a bounding stoat. The stitls are an unconscious mechanism for him to “become’ stoat and move from humanness

Simon Faithfull, “0º00 Navigation Part I: A Journey Across England” (2009)

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Super8 transferred to SD video (silent), 51min

The film 0º00 Navigation Part I: A Journey Across England shows an obsessive and deranged journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian.

Always seen from behind, a figure first swims out of the seawater where the meridian hits the south-coast of Britain at Peacehaven in Sussex. The solitary person emerges out of the water carrying a hand held GPS device and using this implement he proceeds to walk directly north along the 0º00’00” line of longitude. Any obstacle encountered is negotiated – fences climbed, properties crossed, buildings entered via nearest windows, streams waded, hedges crawled through. The figure gradually makes his way up through southeast Britain, through London, the Midlands and ultimately re-enters the sea at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The figure then slowly swims away into the North Sea heading ever further north.

In 0º00 Navigation the hypothetical, geographic construct that is the zero line of longitude is treated as if it were a real phenomenon – a path mapped out to follow. The Greenwich meridian bisects southern England because it was here that it was once fabricated out of treaties, maps and the mechanics of naval power.

Richard Long, “A Line Made by Walking” (1967)

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Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967)

Left a trace
Art made by walking
it was a fundamental interruption of art history: anticipates a widespread interest in the performative

This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.
Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.

Gallery label, May 2007

“Thus walking—as art—provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded in my work in the most appropriate way for each different idea: a photograph, a map, or a text work. All these forms feed the imagination.” − Richard Long

Simon Pope, “The Memorial Walks” (2007)

SOURCE: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide

Simon Pope (1966-)

The Memorial Walks was a series of 17 walks, each with a guest walker, many of whom write about landscape, memory or the environment. These walks were made in the vicinity of Norwich and Lincoln in the east of the UK and were commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella for the group exhibition, Waterlog, 2007. Each walker was asked to spend time with a painting of a local landscape, taking into memory the detail of a tree, often depicted as the central motif in the painting. On accompanying me on a walk out into the farmland and fenlands of East Anglia, each writer would perform a recollection, from memory, of the tree. In doing so, I had hoped that they might repopulate the countryside with images, summoned-up and made to live through the sheer force of a spoken-word description, as an act of defiance against forgetting.
Simon Pope
The Memorial Walks was made as a homage to WG Sebald, drawing on his use of walking and the stubborn insistence that the past would not fade from memory. In The Rings ofSaturn, a rough photocopied image of trees, which had been ravaged by the storms of 1987, form part of a description of the destruction of those things which seem permanent or destined to outlive us as human beings. In December 2006, on the fifth anniversary of Sebald’s tragic death, I walked with Nicholas Thornton, one of the curators of the exhibition committing to memory the image of the fallen, broken trees and walking into the fenland outside of Norwich. Here, we each recalled what we could remember of the image, casting out a partial, spoken word description into the prevailing wind. This became a rehearsal of sorts for the work that was to follow: a summoning-up of a series of tree-images as a metaphor for human frailty in the face, not only of nature, but also of economics, politics and so on.
Walking with others became the focus of my work following The Memorial Walks,
exploring how walking together can be a model for dialogue. I often continued to use spoken-word descriptions of things shared during a walk, such as the negotiation of the route itself in A Common Third, 2010. In Memory Marathon, 2010, I used a ‘walking and talking’ method to elicit descriptions from 104 walkers in a relay over the course of a day. This emphasis on the social modalities of walking led me towards a wider interest in how land can become an interlocutor in human dialogue and how other non-human things can be brought into the realm of dialogic art practice.

You can buy a copy of the Memorial Walks.

Ingrid Pollard “Wordsworth Heritage” (1992)

photographs of Black people in the landscape

Ingrid Pollard [credit]

[CREDIT]

This photographic work was originally presented as a billboard image on 25 urban sites around the UK. The image takes the form of a mass produced tourist postcard. It shows the profile of William Wordsworth, 19th century English Poet Laureate. Wordsworth and his poetry are icons closely linked with the ‘Lake District’. A group of contemporary Black walkers transform the ‘Romantic’ landscape and ideas of History and Heritage.

From Ingrid Pollard (2004) in The Art of Walking: A Field Guide:

“Going to the Lake District over the years, collecting postcards, deliberately searching out England’s timeworn countryside ‘the way it’s always been,’ searching the postcard-stand for the card that shows a sunny upland scene with a black person standing, looking over the hills. Never finding it. I fantisise about encountering that image amongst the England of craggy rocks, rushing streams and lowly sheep. Simple stories, simple connections.”

Billboard, Kings Cross London. Dr Julian Agyeman & Ingrid Pollard

Victoria Evans “It Takes a Year to Walk Around the Sun” (2016-17)

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This floor projected video installation offers a disorientating, closely framed, POV experience of walking and provokes a mimetic response in the viewer. The hypnotic, single-camera, rhythmic montage, combined with overlapping layers of diegetic sound, exposes slippages in how we experience time when walking. It Takes a Year to Walk Around the Sun considers the incongruities between notions of scientific, measured, clock time and the non-linear experience of embodied, lived time.

Richard Long “A Line in the Himilayas” (1975)

A simple land-art piece, Long has made a line out of colored rocks in the Himalyan mountains.

a line of white rocks in a mountainous area

Richard Long “A Line in the Himilayas” (1975)

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“Richard Long has, since the beginning of his career, worked outside the gallery to create works by walking, where he leaves marks and traces on the landscape. His work has encompassed making epic walks lasting many days to remote parts of the world, as well as making use of the materials from the River Avon. His work is made through the relationship he develops with a place and his physical involvement with it. On the course of a walk this can entail rearranging natural elements, or walking in lines or circles so that his presence has been made manifest.

As he has remarked, “These works are of the place, they are a rearrangement of it and in time will be reabsorbed by it. I hope to make work for the land, not against it”. Accordingly, many of his walks are made visible through marks on the world which form basic shapes – lines and circles – rather than through constructions or new artifacts. Although Long has often been associated with the earliest days of ‘land art’, his interventions in landscapes are ordinarily temporary or humble and almost always simple.”

Marina Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk (1988)

Marina Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk (1988) China

The Lovers – summary by Apramovic

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Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay ended 12-years of intense personal love and shocking art collaboration, in 1988, with an art stunt never seen before. It was named “The Lovers: the Great Wall Walk” in which they decided to make a spiritual journey that would end their relationship: each of them walked half the length of the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. There they would end it all.

Marina Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk (1988) China

Abramovic started walking westward while Ulay walking eastward, from the eastern end of the Great Wall of China, at Shan Hai Guan to the opposite end at Jaiyuguan. It would take three months for the couple to meet in the middle, where they embraced each other and went their separate ways. After covering 2500km each in 90 days, they would break up their relationship. They met at Er Lang Shan, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province. Here, they embraced each other and said goodbye. From then on they would both go on with their life and work separately.

Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy, and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end we both would be really alone, whatever we would do.”

: The Lovers (1988) – from “On Walking” catalog (2013)

: The Lovers (1988) – from “On Walking” catalog (2013)

: The Lovers (1988) – from “On Walking” catalog (2013)

: The Lovers (1988) – from “On Walking” catalog (2013)

//kickasstrips.com/2015/01/lovers-abramovic-ulay-walk-the-length-of-the-great-wall-of-china-from-opposite-ends-meet-in-the-middle-and-breakup/

//publicdelivery.org/marina-abramovic-the-lovers-the-great-wall-walk/

Marina Abramović walks China’s Great Wall only to break up//publicdelivery.org › Performance

Richard Wentworth “To Walk” (2001)

Richard Wentworth

Wentworth works with photography as an archive for walking.

For this piece he published a number of his walking photos to a broadsheet/folded-poster, “To Walk,” for the English towns of Charleston, Ramsgate, and Rochester to encourage the public to take a fresh look at their urban and rural landscapes.

(credit: Walk Ways catalog)