I was delighted to discuss Walking as Artistic Practice with Adam Zucker of Artfully Learning this past week. Check out the recording of our conversation when you get a chance. I talk about how the book came to fruition, as well as describe a sensory walk for beginners (zine of this exercise available on my site).

As part of the release of the hardcover release of my book, Walking as Artistic Practice (softcover comes out in April!), I’m going to be publishing some brief interviews with the various artists, authors, researchers, creatives, collectives, and platforms whose art practice, written material, or other works I cite and mention.

My twelfth interview in this series is with Claudia Zeiske who is a curator/producer, a cultural activist and a ‘Walk Curator’ whose practice is based on a balanced approach between artistic criticality and community involvement. Employing anthropological methods, her experiences come from participatory visual arts, linking local activities with global realities.

As a walking curator, her interest lies in path-making as a cultural practice. With friendship at heart, her walks combine a desire for a slower pace of life with socio-politically and environmentally sensitive issues. For more than a decade, her walking art projects have varied from short to long, in her vicinity or further afield, connecting places, communities and people along the way. Her walking prose promotes thinking aloud.

EM: How would you describe Walking Lunch to someone who is not familiar with it?

CZ: Walking Lunches are a series of moving meetings between Claudia Zeiske and artists, arts professionals and other participants. Claudia provides a written agenda prior to the walking lunch, as well as sandwiches and tea during the walk. The lunch partner brings a camera and takes three pictures (portrait, landscape, still-life) on the walk. Afterwards Claudia writes minutes and archives them, along with the images taken by the partner.

Walking Lunch is a critical play on the concept of Working Lunches designed for busy people to maximise time. It does not only bring people together to merge working and eating, but also adds our need for physical exercise to the equation.

EM: Can you talk about one of your most recent walking projects that you are most excited about?

CZ: This week I completed Slow Coast 500, a long-distance walk from Dunnet Head to the Scots-/English Border in Berwickshire along the entire coast of the North Sea in Scotland. The 63 day/1150km long walk borrows its name from the North Coast 500 route designed to attract tourists to drive around northern Scotland. Slow Cost 500 considers the role of tourism in making (or breaking) places. Often intended as a boost to local economies, tourism can contribute to making or breaking places for local communities and their environment.

Along the way, I was carrying an orange linen tablecloth the colour of an OS ‘Explorer’ map, using it as a picnic blanket to encourage conversation. Step by step and stitch by stitch, I embroidered it along the long way to the Scottish-English border, questioning the role and impacts of tourism today. For further documentation, I was sending a daily postcard – written in my walking prose – home to Art Walk Projects in Portobello who commissioned the project. This served as a visual diary of the walk. https://www.artwalkporty.co.uk/commission/slow-coast-500/

EM: Your recent Phd focuses on Transformational Fieldwork in rural contexts. Can you share more about this research?

CZ: While a lot has been written in the past two decades about the impact of participatory arts on people in urban places, my practice based research aims to fill the gap in relation to the rural context – often places with little traditional arts provision.

Based on the development of Deveron Projects in Huntly/Aberdeenshire, where the ‘town is the venue’ rather than a gallery or arts centre, my aim is to show how cultural provision can be framed through a combination of durational commitment to place and effective cultural management.

To do this, I have been reflecting on twenty-five years of working in the small town community setting, examining retrospectively my role as curator/producer. Underpinned by Scottish philosopher Patrick Geddes’s Place/Work/Folk thinking machine and artist Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture as well as other thinkers’ engagement with place and social context, I show how we can create a cultural ecology that assists the well-being of rural communities.

The study is based on four case studies that explain how the collaboration with artists can lead to transformative change through participatory practice led projects. Through them, my inquiry leads from the identification of socio-political themes to collaborative development of the projects between community, artists and ourselves, the ‘Anthro-Producers’.

The research shows why and how art provision in rural locations can be structured sustainably through field-research akin to anthropological methods. The ensuing approach I call Transformational Fieldwork, a form of cultural management that combines social engagement with research methods relating to long-term participatory observation. Structured around 16 inter-woven administrative/artistic principles, this framework offers a tool kit for continued arts development in the rural community context.

My contribution to the curatorial sustainability discourse therefore is to show step-by-step how Transformational Fieldwork can contribute to rural development and community well-being in places that, unlike urban cultural contexts, have limited involvement with contemporary art.

As part of the release of the hardcover release of my book, Walking as Artistic Practice (softcover comes out in April!), I’m going to be publishing some brief interviews with the various artists, authors, researchers, creatives, collectives, and platforms whose art practice, written material, or other works I cite and mention.

My eleventh interview in this series is with Bradley Davies who was born in London, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art and later to HfBK Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main. He currently lives and works in Berlin. The work he makes is about looking into the present conditions and parameters we live in, the kinds of narratives that form our social and political systems, and our beliefs and daily routines.

EM: First, thank you for chatting with me about your work Echoing Movements (2012). I cite this work in chapter five (Who Gets to Walk and Where?) in the subsection “Surveillance.” How would you describe this work for people who might not be familiar with it?

BD: The work is a film that follows myself (dressed in a hi-vis jacket), and friends, who follow one another and others passing by. I take the lead in following others’ walks, and bit by bit I am being followed myself, my walk is being mimicked, in a sort of Conga line of walkers/followers. The audio dubbed on top was footsteps of myself and a friend recorded in the Hamilton Mausoleum, which once held the longest echo (in terms of fabricated acoustics). The soundtrack crescendos with echoing footsteps, the change of person/direction being followed is noted by a whistle. In the end the footsteps become more of a military march. The film overall has surveillance quality to it, being watched from a discreet distance, following these individuals walking around, watching their movements.

EM: What are your thoughts on walking as artistic practice?

BD: Thinking about walking as an artistic practice is interesting, I think for me that walking could be more expanded to being more about movement, the feeling of going somewhere by foot is a point of departure but I took more interest in the transfer from one thing or individual to another, the movement, the walk was simply a part of this process. Observing the movement was more the way I was thinking. I live in Berlin, and in German there’s a saying that goes, “Der Weg ist das Ziel”, which translates as “the journey is the goal”. I like that, it’s a journey whether there is a point to it or not.

EM: Can you tell us about any upcoming or recent projects you are excited about?

BD: The next exhibition coming up is this December at the Kunstverein Heidelberg, in Germany. Last year, I did an installation in Cologne at the Temporary Gallery where I took an anecdote about the Cologne cathedral that was once used by Napoleon’s cavalry during the French occupation in Cologne as a stables. Using this as my initiative to make a soundtrack working together with a local community choir to imitate horse sounds, and stable noises using the art of foley sound effects. It became a carnivalesque imitation of a day in the life of an imagined Cologne-Cathedral/French-stables. Images and info can be found on their website, here: https://www.temporarygallery.org/en/hold-your-horses-bradley-davies-2/

As part of the release of the hardcover release of my book, Walking as Artistic Practice (softcover comes out in April!), I’m going to be publishing some brief interviews with the various artists, authors, researchers, creatives, collectives, and platforms whose art practice, written material, or other works I cite and mention.

My tenth interview in this series is with Phil Kline. A survivor of New York’s downtown scene, Kline is known for his range and unpredictability. From vast boombox symphonies to chamber music and song cycles and stage works, his work has been hailed for originality, beauty, and subversive subtext. From the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, Phil came to New York City to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at Columbia. After graduation, he moved downtown and is still there writing things like Zippo Songs and Rumsfeld Songs, the mass John the Revelator, and the song cycles Out Cold and Florida Man, written for Theo Bleckmann.

EM: First, thank you for chatting with me about your book Unsilent Night (1992–). I cite your work in chapter two (Analyzing Walking Works) in the subsection on “Audio.” How would you describe this work for people who might not be familiar with it?

PK: Unsilent Night is an outdoor audience-participation musical event which processes through the streets annually during the winter holiday season. The inspiration for the piece came from my memories of Christmas carolling with friends as a child in Ohio.

Originally, the music was played on cassette boomboxes, but as boomboxes have become scarce, most people now download the tracks online and play them on smart phones. First presented in New York City in 1992, it is regularly done annually in 40 cities around the United States and Europe.

EM: What are your thoughts on walking as artistic practice?

PK: I’m tempted to say “see above.”

As a musician and composer, I’m acutely aware of the way things sound while moving in space, and never more than when I am walking. I love to “watch” birds, but walking through woods in spring, with the warblers mostly overhead, I lead with my ears. One usually hears the lazy “zur-zee-zu-zu-see” well before you look up and see that it’s a Black-throated Green Warbler. Living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I have reveries of the wild histories hidden beneath the pavement of the irregularly patterned streets I walk. Walking is a meditation.

EM: Can you tell us about any recent or upcoming projects you are excited about?

PK: 1. An opera-like object about Nikola Tesla in a haunted hotel, co-written with Jim Jarmusch and starring Anthony Roth Costanza as Tesla.

2. A dramatic song cycle about Isabella Stewart Gardner which will be first heard and seen in the Museum she built.

Tuesday, October 24, 2023 at 1pm CT
Walk Listen Create Cafe Book Talk – ONLINE
Registration Link

I hope you’ll join me online for this talk about my newly released book, Walking as Artistic Practice! Please help spread the word – it would be great to have a lot of folx show up.