artist projects, curated walks, PUBLIC talks, readings, DIALOGUEs, video shorts and films
SUMMER 2020
PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS is four years old. After PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS 2016, the work has continued by encouraging projects such as Katarina Weslien’s Walking Kailash project, (walked by 19 artists throughout the world), offering local thematic walks (a winter walk; walking the spine of Portland like a book), offering a community class about walking art histories, publishing a catalogue of student research regarding walking arts, and public walks in other countries including Sweden, France, and Greece.
Walking arts in particular offer the opportunity for immersive experience in our natural world and with others. Through walking together we can continue to forge activist and engaged community relationships and form bonds that we can draw on to further develop our knowledge and critical connections as we face the coming changes.
“The revelatory power of mobilizing the entire body transforms us as well as the spaces we pass through. Modifying the sense of space crossed, walking has been claimed our first aesthetic act”
SUMMER 2016
There is a tradition in literature that connects walking and thinking, walking and coming to language. In the late 1700s, Rousseau wrote Reveries of a Solitary Walker; and in his book from that same time, Confessions, he notes "Walking has something that animates and enlivens my ideas: I almost cannot think when I stay in place; my body must be in motion to set my mind in motion.” William Wordsworth believed writing a bodily labor, and composed poems while walking to the rhythm of iambic pentameter. In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire brought us the notion of the flâneur, the artist-poet wanderer of urban spaces, and Virginia Woolf wrote "Street Haunting" in 1930. Ossip Mandelstam composed and memorized his work while pacing about his room.
In the visual arts, too, we may track a history of walking as creative provocation, practice and product. André Breton and Tristan Tzara, created their Excursions & Visites Dada in the 1920s. In the 1950s, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, developed the dérive of psychogeography, a method of unplanned wandering to discover the qualities of place and encounter new experience. Fluxus artist, Stanley Brouwn is know for his records of walking, and the 1960s and 70s also brought such artists as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton to the attention of the art world. Other artists who create walks include Janet Cardiff, Ernesto Pujol, Sophie Calle, and Francis Alÿs.
PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS explores these histories while learning from contemporary makers and thinkers.