Activating Imaginative Attention and Creating ObservantMoments in the Everyday Through the Art of Walking Since 2013, I have been conducting a collaborative project on walking together with the actress and tightrope walker Helena Kågemark, where walking has become a means for inquiry-based performing. e purpose of this project was to apply techniques and strategies from the theatre work we pursue in situations outside of the theatre on walking actions in urban spaces -in order to create attention as well as bring forth poetry in situations of everyday life. e project included a wide range of activities and events; from our own explorative walks documented through "walking journals" to participatory walks with others and public presentations of performance acts, performance lectures, discussions, workshops and exhibitions. In our project, we used physical acting techniques to create attention and meaning in situations that emerged in the streets. Our aim was to go beyond the automatic patterns of the everyday when walking through town in order to activate a way to relate to the environment and to create experience that develops both the perception and imagination of the one who walks. We chose to focus on the seemingly small and invisible stories and observations of the everyday, while actively carrying out a psychophysical walk. In this article, I would like to re ect on certain parts of the walking project in order to investigate more closely how we transferred our experience as theatre practitioners to walking activities, and in doing so, activating imaginative attention in order to create observant moments in everyday situations.
This article deals with a city walk, (In)Justice in the city, which took place in the Haga neighborhood of Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, in 2016 and was conducted within the symposia Exploiting Justice. The walk started from Haga's peripheral areas and gradually approached its center, in order to provide space for narratives other than the dominant public image of Haga. Various conceptual and perceptive entrances were used for the participants' physical encounters with the five sites visited. At each location, complex layers of history, urban planning, and people's intersecting interests became visible. Although the walking tour generated responses from participants who spoke of abandonment, secrecy, order, and lack of encounters, it simultaneously opened the possibility for a variety of different interpretations of the sites. In this way, the walk can be seen as a critical performative practice that awakens many different voices and narratives, all of which can be included in a complex exercise of democratic society.
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