Perambulism: moved earth, sweet water.

“ The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned “ - attributed to Antonio Gramsci.

Walking as an epistemology:

After several years practice in outdoor celebratory arts I had become disillusioned with such ‘place-making’ enchantments. I was increasingly aware of the silences and absences that such practices so often collude to maintain. As a re-set I began a series of performative walks exploring disenchantment, tacit knowledge, ecology and embodiment. The intention was to devise a walking practice that could facilitate a critical approach to enchantment, challenge and test boundaries by raising questions about change and movement, terrain and space, belonging and exile. The practice is performed live by the walking participants, our presence resonates, extended via social media through the networking of texts, images and sounds live during the walk. My contribution to the symposium offers a participatory experiment in memory and movement in the context of a practice seeking to challenge authorised heritage narratives.

The walk offers an opportunity to explore how landscape and the routes through it may hold intangible cultural heritage and how a networked walking practice may transform, renew, reveal and create such heritage. My process is increasingly (re)turning to (my) body and embodiment: this contribution offers an experiment in walking intra-acting with processes and strategies of cultural heritage. Can a disenchanted approach enable us to step aside from the enchantment of ‘nature’ and ‘heritage’and other such constructs whilst taking ‘pleasure’ in them? How can such an approach change our relationship with the past and the land, can we generate new ways of understanding ourselves in the world?

Two possible walks:

1) Workshy Bath: A walk from Bath train station to BSU Newton Park considering the concealment of work, obscured histories of slave-ownership and the reluctant heritage of industry in a city that is grimey no more....
(Approx 5 miles. 2.5 hours)

2) Moved Earth - Sweet Water: A slow walk around the Newton Park Lake out to the remains of Wansdyke on the edge of the BSU campus considering the enchantment of landscape, confectionary and boundaries.
(Approx 2 miles. 60-90 mins)

• http://www.walknowtracks.co.uk/