Walking
— one sense at a time
sensory walks, counter-mapping, photography, writing, zine
with thanks to: Splice, Depot Artspace, Aotearoa Festival of Architecture, Pā Rongorongo, Sandie Ritchie, Chris Holdaway and Elliot Hurst
funding: Auckland City Council
2018
About
Walking — one sense a time is an exploration of what changes when we pay careful attention to the place, starting with our bodies.
An attentive walk is an ode to curiosity, to looking inquisitively at the ordinary and seeing the history, the work and value that got entangled together producing the very ordinary. It’s an attempt at comprehending the world more wholly.
There’s been many who walked and thought before us: from students following Aristotle, debating and listening to his lectures, to Buddhist practice of kinhin, or meditative walking, to the spiritual Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, to Henry David Thoreau sauntering through the woods of New England, to Surrealists drifting, Situationists indulging in derives and the Fluxus composing walking Scores. In the 1920s Europe, walking was becoming art but it also became a mode of embodied resistance against the mechanisation of day to day life. A century later, we walk with deliberation too, to pay attention, differently.
My attention to attention is indebted to Bernhard Waldenfels seminal “The Phenomenology of Attention”. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, Waldenfels places attention at the heart of our experience of being in the world. Attention, according to Waldenfels, is a two-way process: once you turn your attention to something, this means you ultimately turn it away from something else.
What we turned to was, our own senses and through them, eventually, each other and the environment. The first part of the smell-walk, for example, involved picking a place and standing there for a fixed amount of attempting to grasp all the smells the location had to offer. The sound-walks began with appreciating the quietness and gradually building up our soundscapes. The touch walk escalated from humble strokes of familiar objects to rolling, jumping, laying around and climbing and tactile examination of under different circumstance may seem repulsive of plain odd to touch: a greasy surface, car’s mirror, floor tiles. The sight walk began with picking an object to look at until it feels like it’s been a really long time, moving on to looking at the interactions offered by a prompt combining the method and the subject of paying attention: look up while standing still at the non-human world, look down intensely at something repetitive, look far and notice difference.
By turning to our senses we were able to see more of the world: we sniffed out consumption culture, saw how colours gender spaces, we noticed how water can be abstracted into status symbol, looked through the glass and pondered abandonment and idleness and rest, heard the sound of a plastic spoon sliding against the walls of a disposable cup, felt lichens crumble under our fingers, we stared back at the CCTV cameras staring at us and discussed the infrastructures of surveillance, felt that trees emanate warmth when hugged, watched tree roots breaking from beneath the concrete surface, questioned the desire for order, questioned the order.
You can read more about the concepts behind the walks, our discussions and stories of paying attention in the Walking Zine, whose production was kindly supported by the Compound Press.
Practical info
The walking series took part in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand from May to September 2018. There were day-time day and four nocturnal walks, each focused on a specific sense. More than 50 walkers in total explored Auckland’s streets as a medium for creative city exploration, linking everyday sensory experiences to broader social and environmental issues.
I led the walks and shared various ways to smell/touch/look at/listen to the city. Participants mapped their experiences and I facilitated discussion after each of the walks. Together with Elliot Hurst we created five sensory maps that collated participants’ sensory observations. These were made publicly available at the interactive community hub Pā Rongorongo in Auckland’s City Centre.
Thanks: Auckland City Council, Splice, Depot Artspace, Aotearoa Festival of Architecture. I am also deeply grateful to Sandy Ritchie whose unwavering support and enthusiasm helped bring this project to life, Chris Holdaway at Compound Press for helping with producing the zine, Elliot Hurst for helping with making maps, and to all the fellow walkers for walking along.
In the media: Radio New Zealand, Depot Artspace’s Art in Action.