Walking the Walking Performances

Walking through the city and questioning the meaning, purpose and role of walking as an artistic practice. When Honoré de Balzac published his extraordinary study The Theory of Walking in 1833, he wondered why no one before him had seriously examined the phenomenon of human walking. “Isn’t it curious,” he wrote, “that ever since humans have walked, no one has thought to ask how they walk, whether they walk at all, whether they could walk better, what they do while walking, or whether there might be a better way to reorganize, modify or analyse walking.”

These questions will guide the walk, which focuses on walking as a bodily technique and on walking performances – performative events conceived as walks by performers or audiences who thus become co-performers and participants. Borrowing from the ancient Greek Peripatetic philosophers the idea of developing thought in motion, the project centers on walking as an artistic and critical practice.