‘Asking, We Walk’

2021

Holocaust Studies

The article explores a creative somatic and digital intervention working with Holocaust memory retrieved from archive testimony. A walking and multi-media arts approach renewing agency in Holocaust testimony and generating contemporary resonances is introduced. Forced Walks is a programme of speculative, socially engaged experiments, initiated by artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein. Honouring Esther , the first Forced Walks project, walked the route of a Nazi Death March digitally transposed to Somerset (UK), subsequently retracing it in Lower Saxony, Germany. The project worked with the digitised testimonies of survivors and witnesses including that of the eponymous Esther. Making public anniversaries personal and personal anniversaries public, the first walk took place on the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Belsen, and the second on the seventy-first of Esther's arrival at the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Juxtaposing registers of walking and curated interventions generated empathic dialogues, the project engaged walkers in co-creating an immanent reflective space materialised in mark-making, social media and installation. The paper reviews the use of mobile media and social networking, and discusses the catalysing of affect and involuntary thought. An emergent hybrid somatic/digital process, 'making the return' in a specific Holocaust context is presented.

Section: Walking-withmentioning

confidence: 99%

Walking-with, re-membering the Holocaust:Forced Walks: Honouring Esther, a case study of somatic and digital creative practice

2021

Holocaust Studies

“…The walking-with approach has been discussed and applied by other researchers (e.g. Sundberg 2013;Jeffries 2010;Kelly 2013;Springgay and Truman 2018). This walking and questioning approach generates critical learning and empathic dialogues through embodied experience and affective encounters, curated interventions, provocations and serendipity.…”

Section: Walking-with In the Wounded Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Walking the Names: sensing presences and absences in a contested memory landscape

2021

Landscape Research

Walking the Names was a cycle of walks in a 'reluctant' site of memory in Bath (UK), 2019-21. Walkers read out the names of those who died of poverty in the C19th Workhouse and were buried on the site. As the project progressed, the Covid death toll mounted. A walking arts process is presented as slow activism, offering a participatory, corporeal, sensory engagement with landscape, power and memory.Bath is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. A National Lottery funded Landscape Partnership, Bathscape, seeks to articulate a vision for the city as a Landscape City. The paper explores Walking the Names as part of an emergence of uneasy memories, silenced voices and care in the contested spaces of Bath's memory landscape. Drawing on the vision of the Landscape City, reflecting on the city as 'wounded', the paper articulates a process for co-creative critical rememorialisation, reclaiming absences and silenced memories.

“…Walker's notebook pages (e.g. Figure 1), evoke the messy complexity and immanence of the walking-with approach used (Jeffries 2010;Kelly 2013;Sundberg 2013;Springgay and Truman 2018b). Drawn, written and rubbed as the walk progressed, these experimental visual tracings and other images, text and digital media, are the surviving fragments from the embodied learning experience case-studied in this article.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking silences and revealing the disappeared: Walking-with legacies of slave-ownership, Bath (UK)

International Journal of Education Through Art

2021

An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and ‘affect aliens’, unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on ‘authorized’ heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts.