Entangling with the landscape: a methodological walking art experiment

Abstract

This paper presents a walking art experiment called ‘Line Walk’ aimed at attuning to more-than-human landscapes. The researchers wanted to expand the methodological repertoires for engaging with contemporary semi-urban and urban living environments. A second goal was to increase attentiveness to multispecies relationality and thus challenge uncritically normative notions of nature in environmental educational research. The experiment demonstrates how a walking art protocol has the potential to work as a catalyst to expose walking human bodies to the material, affective, and sensory relationalities of the landscapes. Additionally, it can generate encounters with ghostly, atmospheric presences of past histories and hints of more-than-human world-making projects and their temporal scales. We suggest that the value of such an experiment lies in its capacity to take researchers from comfort zones to multispecies and multitemporal contact zones and to help them trace back and out the material entanglements of humans with the planet.

Keywords:

• Methodology
• walking art
• more-than-human
• antropocene

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

• SDG 4: Quality education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Verneri Valasmo, a member of Children of the Anthropocene research group, for his open-mindedness in participating in various methodological experiments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 An extreme line walk example would be the performance by the artists Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval. The artist duo walked 750 kilometers in France in 2002, following as straight a line as possible with the help of a compass. The performance lasted for 16 days (O’Rourke, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kone Foundation (Children of the Anthropocene, 2022–2025, grant number 202104460) and Finnish Reseach Council (grant number 355563).