What this workshop proposes is to explore walking as quotidian and an aesthetic practice by actually doing it. Demarcations between the two are not always visible.

There will be no pre-written scrips of how to do it apart from a basic skeleton proposed but also shaped in response to each session.

We will basically write the script as we walk it.

We are in a nutshell to examine our bodies in the city and the city within our bodies, narrate, record, collect and overall seek means to mediate our outdoor experiences with each other and if possible make them public.

Chapter 21: THE URGAN FLANEUR - A PHILOSOPHY OF WALKING
Frédéric Gross

Unnecessary Walks
Nikos Doulos (2016)

What if my body maps as it remembers to stand on its feet? what if the city is entrapped within my body as I am entrapped in ‘hers’?
Every human is a tour and every body is a map.
My spine breaks its linearity and expands as a rhizome in all the edges of the Athenian metropolis. Every bone, a dot on a map, every dot, effectively attached with another causing a constant vibration to the capital’s topology. Every piece, an epicenter, and all together a seismic cacophony of narratives. My feet sense the vibrations and walk the connected lines. I claim my spine back, but every encounter during this hunt expels its bones to all sides.
I can’t seem to trace a core. I can’t find my belly-button. Where is my belly-button? Where is yours?

‘Walking Home’ - Nikos Doulos & Christos Chrissopoulos, performance; a narratological pin-pong of shorts consisting of composed texts addressing the city as a body, our embodiment within, memory and its mutating nature in storytelling. Circuits & Currents, Athens, November 2017

LOSING THE FORM IN DARKNESS - Close To The Knives (1991), p.17-31 David Wonjarowicz

When streets become supernatural: the joy of walking in cities at night.
Nick Dunn (The Guardian - 18/11/2016)

A MANIFESTO FOR THE NOCTURNAL CITY - DARK MATTERS (2016, ZeroBooks) p.93-99
Nick Dunn

Guy Debord & the Situationists International - PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY (Pocket Essentials, 2010) p.81-98
Merlin Coverley

My body knows its own histories. It voices them through the muscles, sometimes as a whisper and others as a scream; a microcosmos of sensorial particles exposed to internal and external stimuli.
And though for me nightwalking has been an essential mode for co-habiting the exterior (city) as well as the interior (my being), I still seek for adequate means to dialogue with my bodily shouts.

NOCTURNAL WANDERINGS

ON FLANEURIE & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

WALKING STICK

Muchness - ON LOOKING Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (SCRIBNER, 2013)
Alexandra Horowitz

This 'hybrid of a walking' stick is not only to support you when walking (vertically) but also to be used as an extension of our body (horizontally) measuring our distance to things and each other, pocking things we do not wish to touch, making our way through paths, help us stretch when tired and sore and overall physically examine our proximity and connection to materiality outside our body.

It is also meant to carry in imprint of our perambulations in the city;
finger prints on the wood, stains from the ground, ‘trophies’ from the streets (found objects) are to literally ‘dress’ its surface turning it into an object of recollection and reflection.

The aim is to hopefully end with a series of walking sticks posing as evocative, subjective maps of our encounters and musings.

Nomadic Space and ‘Erratic’ Space - WALKSCAPES: Walking as an aesthetic practice (Culicidae Architectural Press, 2002)
Francesco Careri

ON WALKING , OBSERVING & NARRATING

The Special in Spatial Narratives And Vice Versa - UNMAKING or HOW TO RETHINK URBAN NARRATIVES (Expodiu, 2015)
Nikos Doulos

This year’s Walking Club Rietved will be looking into islands as physical entities and as symbolic manifestations of our fluid relations with each other and the world.
How are we to understand islands as seemingly autonomous ‘bodies’ enclaved by bodies of water?
Taping into Greek mythology, travel literature, architecture, maritime poetics (through current artistic projects and critical thoughts), [I]sland [D]rift will investigate islands’ bond with the sea and the mainland and with forces that shape their identity, function and symbolic prospects. Anchoring on those concepts and processes, we are to tap into politics of modern travel juxtaposed against waves of migration, both interlaced with notions of hospitality, fortification, isolation and escapism.
Setting sail on foot, our sessions will examine our fluid proximity to water and the archipelago through literal and metaphorical encounters with canals, creeks and waves, lighthouses, ports, tourists, sirens, mermaids, asylum seekers and ghosts from the sea.
Drawing further inspiration from nautical flags as a code of communication between ships, we are to prospectively develop our own visual language of signaling.

ARCHIVE PAGE:

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT: Women, Sex, and Public Space
Rebecca Solnit - Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Chapter 14)

CITY OF FEAR
Leslie Kern - Feminist City - Claiming Space in a Man-made World (Chapter 5), Verso Books 2020

2021

2022

REFLECTIONS:

OUTCOME: