Walking is an immersive and multi-sensory form of bodily movement. According to Edmund Husserl and other phenomenologists, we understand our body in relation to the world when we practice the mundane act of walking. While we walk, our bodies engage with the surrounding space and we intimately sense, perceive and think a place. 

Since I am interested in how to gain embodied spatial knowledge in artistic practice, most of my work is based on walking as a way to read the landscape in direct encounter while going through it on foot. This site is a research log which collects some trials, fails and results from my process and also interesting stuff related to walking as an artistic practice.

2022 / 12 / 01

drought walk

When I make use of walking in my practice, I rarely walk only once from A to B. My style of walking is more repetitive, I often walk the same paths again and again to get familiar with the landscape. Usually, I walk several times before I record anything. Nevertheless, I tried a single linear walk in the hot and dry summer of 2022 and walked a stretch of the Neckar river to see what the long-lasting drought did to the riverbank ecosystem. The result of this „drought walk“ is now a two channel video which includes some heat and tries to pick up the linearity and sequentiality of walking through a landscape once. 

I have to admit that - for several reasons - neither the linear walk nor the linear video works for me. Walking through an environment only once but with the intention to document the space photographically appears to me as a rather superficial way to engage with the terrain. I end up scanning the environment to "find" the images I need or want. Like a flaneur who is looking for something specific but is detached from the place.