Talking Walking

Rachel Epp Buller is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Kansas in the United States. She is the recipient of two Fulbright scholarships, the latest of which she went to wintry Edmonton in north west Canada to make a piece of walking art called “One Hundred Days of Walking”. Her piece has now been shortlisted for the inaugural Marŝarto Award for Walking Art.

Andrew Stuck and Rachel talk over the Internet on a Zoom call about the importance to her of using different media to create work, including embroidery, bookmaking, and recording the sounds of the environment through which she walks.  They also discuss how she maintained her discipline throughout the 100 days by keeping to a ‘walking score’, and how she has exhibited the work.

The interview opens with Andrew asking Rachel to explain a little bit about the Fulbright scholarship programme. 18’11” 8.5MB

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Images from One Hundred Days of Walking, 2022, an installation of 100 accordion books, cotton, and vinyl (one full installation view and one detail).

Elena Biserna is an Italian researcher and curator who lives in Marseille. In 2022 she completed and published two compendia, one called “Going Out: walking, listening, sound making”, and the other “Walking with Scores”.

Andrew Stuck catches up with her over the Internet on a Zoom call. It is quite impossible to cover all the topics that she has written about, collated and published as her two books run to over 1000 pages, so he starts by encouraging her to explain from were and why walking art and sound walking in particular might have originated.

The majority of published walking art stems from the Anglo-Saxon world, so it is refreshing to talk to someone who clearly has identified and researched works from other areas, and in other languages, to bring a fresh perspective.

Her research has led her to develop her own walking art practice reinterpreting walking scores written by others with the project “Walking from Scores”. This has later led her to write some of her own scores with a feminist perspective in order to clearly address the specificities of gendered bodies walking in public space. 14.3MB 30’26”

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It’s a sunny summer’s day and Andrew Stuck is on the Waterlink Way, a green route for cyclists and pedestrians that follows the valley of the rivers, Ravensbourne, Pool and Quaggy, flowing south to north through the London Borough of Lewisham.

Andrew is in the company of Emma Jackson, an urban sociologist at Goldsmith’s, University of London and the Director of the Centre of Urban and Community Research, as she tells him about how she uses walking in her research and in teaching her students. They talk about the research centre and how she herself studied there, as well as what urban sociologists do in general, and specifically, when the pandemic restricted their explorations.

Emma is keen to impress on how every walk is different, even if you’re following a familiar route, as the Waterlink Way is to both of us.  As if to endorse what she is saying, something unusual does occur. 22’52” 10.7MB

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Cândida Borges is a Brazilian composer, pianist and music educator whose interests have evolved into transmedia art. 

Following a discovery from a DNA test that her ancestors had migrated from all corners of the world she conceived “Transeuntis Mundi”, a concept for an immersive experience based on recording the everyday walking practices of people in five cities across the world to investigate cultural transformation through time.

In London, to receive the Lumen Prize for her work, Andrew Stuck snatched a window in her busy schedule to chat about her evolving projects on a walk through the ever-popular, St James’s Park. 22’27” 10.5MB

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Twenty radio transmitters were concealed along a three-mile route beside the M11 / A12 link road in east London by artist Graeme Miller, who in 2003 created a trail of sound that celebrated the everyday lives of the householders whose homes were destroyed along the route when the motorway link was built. Unusually for a Talking Walking interview, Andrew Stuck is sitting with Graeme Miller, rather than accompanying him on a walk. It is a weekend in September, at which “LINKED”, a work he made almost 20 years ago, is being reprised, and he is having to man a kiosk on a roundabout, from which he is handing out radio receivers. As will be revealed in the following conversation, Graeme creates work in which “listener walkers” become the performers. 22’18” 10.5MB

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Daniel Beerstecher is a walking artist from Germany.  Over the last few years, he has been focussing on walking slowly, very slowly – just two metres a minute.  In our conversation, we explore why and how he has achieved this, as well as how it has changed him personally, and how it has changed the way others see him.   We live in a society where everything appears to be speeding up, yet here is someone deliberately going as slow as he can; he is curious too, to see if he can influence how Artificial Intelligence and  robots in particular, can be taught to slow down. 24’13” 11.3MB

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Emma Griffin is a transport journalist, turned pedestrian activist, and maker of Footways maps of London, that identify calm and pedestrian-friendly routes and streets for us on foot to enjoy. One such route is the canal-side towpath, that Emma and Andrew Stuck walk along when they meet at Haggerston in Hackney, or so it should be, however, they have to share the path with inconsiderate cyclists. Emma argues that cyclists are part of the solution towards a more pedestrian-friendly London, as are Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and the real battle is with the car drivers. 26’09” 12.3MB

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