“Composer/performer Pamela Z will lead participants on a walk that creates musical scores from the graphic features (micro and macro) of downtown Manhattan. Participants will form a roving experimental sound and performance ensemble that will interpret and play the neighborhood’s building facades, sidewalk hardware, public art and street markings to make a contrapuntal, chance-based chorus.
“Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who makes solo works combining a wide range of vocal techniques with electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She’s created installation works and has composed scores for dance, film, and new music chamber ensembles. Her numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Fund, the CalArts Alpert Award, The MAP Fund, the ASCAP Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA/JUSFC Fellowship.Pamela’s website”
Okwui Okpokwasili led a 9-person walk that explored the making of an “embodied collective” in the charged landscape of the South Bronx. Facilitating a multi-sensory exchange with each other and the space, the group slowly walked through the Gold Coast Trading Company (an African market) and worked toward an expansive group practice of dynamic movement. No previous dance experience was required.
” “It a people market!” a woman shouted as nine of us slowly followed Okwui Okpokwasili through Gold Coast Trading Company in the south Bronx.
She was telling us this wasn’t our market. It is a place where Africans shop, gather, and commune. It wasn’t our place to create art. One of our participants — an African American woman — tried to explain our mission. The woman disappeared and left us to our ritual.
Walls of Bounty, Ajax, Goya, and West African spices hovered over us as we weaved our way through the market’s maze. Prior to entering the market, Okpokwasili explained women would cleanse the roads to the market, and we were symbolically going to do the same at Gold Coast Trading Company. At a walking meditation pace, we moved together as much as a unit as we possibly could contain.
But what if a space and its owners do not want the roads to their market cleansed? What if they have a special place in their neighborhood in which Americans do not visit? As participants, we became performers for people who didn’t want a performance. They were confused, concerned. But we never felt unsafe.
One man, in a green cap with a red star, stopped and stared. He grinned, seemingly getting it, turned around, and headed down another isle.
But to other customers and employees, the ritual seemed sinister. Maybe it was a ceremony to bring bad juju. That’s what the market’s owner suggested to Okpokwasili after the walk as we stood outside and waited for her to finish negotiating with him.
Shalom said someone told him, “This is an African market. Not an American market.”
Outsider. Infiltrator. Other. For a change, I was placed in the uncomfortable position of feeling unwelcome.
Okpokwasili grew up in this neighborhood, and she wanted to share something from her childhood. The smells, the energy, the malts, and chin chin awakened a childlike joy in her. All she wanted to do was share a special experience in a special place with a small special group of people.
In the end, Elastic City decided it best not to return to the market and disturb them again. The remainder of Okpokwasili’s walks trekked through the Harlem Market.”
“WALK THE INDIAN SCHOOL” was led by Patty Talahongva on Saturday May 7, 2016, 8am – 10am in Phoenix, AZ. Here is the event description:
“Chances are you’ve taken Indian School Road to drive into downtown Phoenix but do you know how the road got its name? Did you know the federal government operated a boarding school for Native American children for 99 years at the corner of Central Avenue and Indian School Road? Come join us for a walking tour of the former school site, which is now Steele Indian School Park, and learn about the history of such boarding schools and the students and people who lived, worked and played on the site. Three buildings remain from the Indian School and all three are on the National Register of Historic Places. The City of Phoenix owns and operates the park and rents out Memorial Hall for public and private events. Learn about the effort to restore the former music building and turn it into a Native American Cultural Center. The tour will be led by a former student who attended Phoenix Indian School.
Patty Talahongva is the Community Development Manager at Native American Connections (NAC). She is overseeing the restoration of the music building for NAC and its partner, the Phoenix Indian Center (PIC). Patty attended Phoenix Indian School and will share her memories of the school and show guests how the campus changed through the 99-year history. Interview on NPR with Patty about this project. Click here.
Note: We suggest going to the Heard Museum prior to the walk to view the current exhibition on federally run Indian boarding schools. Following the walk we will join Patty at The Frybread House for a meal and a Q & A session. Lunch is on your own and the walking tour is free.”
“Walking the Edge invites New Yorkers to reconnect to the diversity of the city’s shorelines and have a voice in the city planning process. Walking the Edge uses walking to encounter, reflect upon, and see places anew. Walking the Edge is a collaboration between arts organizations Culture Push and Works on Water with the NYC Department of City Planning. Due to Covid-19, we transitioned to online platforms for this project. See walkingtheedge.nyc for more information.”
“Jaime Koebel is the founder of Indigenous Walks, “a walk and talk tour through downtown Ottawa that brings awareness about social, political and cultural issues while exploring monuments, landscape, architecture and art through an Indigenous perspective,” according to its website, which is available on internet archive.
Part of the appeal for Koebel—an Indigenous arts activator who also works in traditional and contemporary Métis/Cree art forms such as dance, fish-scale art and beading—is highlighting Indigenous stories that are alternately cloaked, mistold or misrepresented through monuments in Canada’s National Capital Region.
“I open up some information about what each of the monuments is representing, and what each is hiding,” says Koebel.
“We take a look at some monuments that have a clearly Aboriginal theme, like monuments to Indigenous veterans, but there might be some monuments that seem to be Indigenous”—and aren’t.
There are also, Koebel notes, “monuments that seem to have nothing to do with Indigenous people, but there is no information given” about those Indigenous connections.
And on the flipside, there are monuments in Ottawa that seem to be about Indigenous people, “but are actually more about Canada.”
Koebel is well poised to undertake this kind of work—her graduate and undergraduate degrees are in Canadian studies, and she says, “as an Indigenous person having lived in a rural community and moved into an urban centre, that really helps inform my perspective.” She is also practiced in looking at art; Koebel works at the National Gallery of Canada, too, where she was assistant curator on its major survey of Dene-Sauteaux artist Alex Janvier.
Having worked at the National Gallery of Canada as an educator during “Sakahàn,” a massive exhibition of Indigenous art, Koebel sensed that there was a hunger among non-Indigenous people to learn more about Indigenous histories and cultures.
After conducting youth tours of “Sakahàn,” she says, and opening up conversations with youth there about the artworks on view, “what I found so interesting about these conversations was, inevitably, at the end of the tour, I could see these non-Indigenous folks hanging around, and I could see that there was this hunger to know more about Indigenous people.”
For Koebel, walking also aligns with her cultural beliefs around Nehiyawak. This Cree term and concept underlines that there are four parts for human beings—that is, spiritual, physical, emotional and mental aspects of the self.
“The one thread that ties” all of Koebel’s art forms together, she says, “is that they really include all four aspects of what it means for me to be a human being.”
That experience, in part, is what led her to establish Indigenous Walks in 2014. Spring and summer are a particularly busy seasons for the walks, and Koebel also hopes that tour participants right now get a sense of her culture’s values during their experience with her Indigenous Walks team.
“I think when people leave the tour, they get a holistic experience, an understanding of those four parts that together form what it means to be a human being,” Koebel says.” [credit]
“In Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour, Miss Canadiana acts as a tour guide to the hidden Black histories of Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood. You can View the photo Album here”
Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)
Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)
Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)
Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)
Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)
Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)
““For me, walks really bring awareness to the places that we’re in in a completely different way than any other types of artwork that I’ve seen,” says Toronto artist Camille Turner. “It really makes people see the space in a completely different way, and I think that’s really powerful.”
Turner would know—after creating her soundwalk Hush Harbour, which guides participants on a walk near King and Front Streets in Toronto to reimagine the city’s Black past and to remap Blackness onto the urban landscape, Turner conducted an online survey to get feedback on the piece.
“[The Hush Harbour participants] said they were looking in a new way at the space they walked through every day,” says Turner. “So that way of transforming space is something that walks really do well.”
Currently, Turner is working at one of the formal limits of walking-based art—trying to transform the mobile Hush Harbour walk experience into an installation for the Theatre Centre in Toronto.
“There are limitations to walks as well,” Turner notes, “because people have to come to the place where the walk is made to experience it. I’m trying to uncouple that, so it can be experienced in other places, and travel.”
Turner’s understanding of the power of walking to transform experiences of place started well outside of the art realm.
“I’ve probably gone on lots of different walks, and not necessarily ones that are done by artists,” Turner says, saying one of her favorites was “an amazing walk with Ed Mirvish and Sam the Record Man around Kensington Market” in the 1980s.
Perhaps it is the impact of such experiences that drives Turner to imagine how to make the remapping of space and reclaiming of place available via live, in-person walks, and transform that into something downloadable and reproducible.
Originally performed live in 2011, the piece has Turner, in her Miss Canadiana persona, act as tour guide to hidden Black histories of Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood. (The area is home to the Art Gallery of Ontario and OCAD University, among other canon-building institutions.)
“I am going to do it as a Google Doc so people can actually do it as a self-guided walking tour,” says Turner, who will also remount the work live once more in November 2017.
There may also be a digital or downloadable sound component of the new version of this walk. Turner herself is a great admirer of sonic-walk pioneers like New York’s soundwalk.com, which has created a 9/11 memorial walk with Paul Auster, among other pieces.
“I also really love the sonic walks, because for me, it’s like time travel—you can bring people backward and forward in time,” Turner says. “I use binaural microphones that I put in my ears, so [the recording is] picking up space exactly as I hear it.”
Ultimately, it is the ability to intervene in history that draws Turner to walking in her practice—especially when it comes to surfacing Black and African experience in spaces constructed by the canon, and by society at large, to read as white or European. (Meetings of past and present Black history also come to the fore in some of Turner’s works in other media, like the combination of contemporary photo-portraiture and historical “runaway slave” notice texts in her series Wanted, co-created with Camal Pirbhai and opening in “Every. Now. Then.” at the Art Gallery of Ontario on June 28.)
“Walking can be an intervention into history—it’s a way of practicing public history, and in bypassing the institutions that create history, you can be a producer of history,” says Turner. “I really like these kinds of ways of working, of intervening in space and in the way that power is kind of written itself in the land.” [credit]
“Realized in East Vancouver in 2015 as part of the experiential research that Carmen Papalia undertook prior to his collaboration with Sara Hendren’s Adaptive and Assistive Technologies Lab at Olin College of Engineering, White Cane Amplified is an improvised process in which Papalia replaces his detection cane with a megaphone that he uses to identify himself and hail support from passers-by. An effort to reclaim the social function of the white cane, the process is an opportunity for Papalia to practice accessibility and disclosure as an ongoing exchange with his community.”
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.
“Throughout the summer of 1999, the storefront of Deitch Projects at 76 Grand Street will be the center of operations for Tourguide?, Christine Hill’s functional enterprise specializing in improvisational walking tours. Acting as a catalyst for new experiences in the Big Apple, Hill (b.1968, Binghamton, NY) and her Tourguide? participants infiltrate the city and engage in dialogues about New York’s inner workings, providing an entertaining and humorous alternative to the popular, commercial tours of New York City.
Hill’s selection of offbeat sites highlights aspects of New York that most guidebooks do not, embellishing them with anecdotes and group discussion about their cultural ramifications. During the two-hour tours, groups are guided primarily through downtown locations, but Hill also offers excursions to other parts of the city and augments the scheduled tours to include guest guides, theme events, treasure hunts and special excursions.”
“Costume by Eric Andersen
Performed by The Group Berzerk
During the art fair Art in 1980 in New York, Gallery Interart from Washington arranged a sensational Fluxus Buffet from October 10 through 18, 1980. The following artists participated: Eric Andersen, George Brecht, Joe Jones, La Monte Young, Yasunao Tone, Nam June Paik, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, AY-O, Geoff Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Yoshimasa Wada and Bob Watts. For the occasion Eric Andersen produced a Dinner Dress for 30 people. The costume is part of a series of possible shared costumes for which function overrules convention. Among these costumes are a TV Costume for 1 to 10 people, a Soccer Costume for 11 people, an Industry Costume for 5 to 10,000 people, a Big City Costume for 5 to 10 million people, an Erotic Costume for 3 to 99 people, a Witness/Victim Costume for more than 2 people and a Debate Costume for fewer than 179 people.
In 1984 in Copenhagen, the group Berzerk performed The Idle Walk of the Year for Eric Andersen – a procession stretching from The Ethnographic Collection at The National Museum through The National Bank to the courtyard of Amalienborg Castle. During the Festival of Fantastics, Berzerk performed with the 30 people costume carrying out an extensive choreography. Initially, the performers put on every second part of the costume, conducting a procession across Stændertorvet. Then audience members were invited to enter the remaining fifteen costume parts. The ensuing procession climbed ladders on fire department vehicles and stretched through city streets, alleys, busses and shops. The whole performance lasted more than two hours.
