Walking is Still Honest

someone holding a question cardphoto: A. Ivinskaitė

The symposium Walking is still honest in Vilnius was an excellent opportunity to show our ongoing research in simularr, discussing findings, and experimenting with methods.

The symposium at SODAS2123 was dedicated to walking and represented a great framework to share not only the individual research processes opened during the intensive weeks phase of the first simularr interval, but also some overarching questions and proceedings. Daniele Pozzi presented his ongoing experiment, a project based on sonic mapping of the spaces of the Schrattenberg compound, allowing the participants to feel and record the space while hearing and correlating with memories, simultaneous with the documented experience of the person before. Nayarí Castillo presented her transposable objects, a performance activating liminal spaces and found objects of the compound. The action gave context and opened magical portals on the different surfaces of transposed objects. Hanns Holger Rutz, on his side, revealed dialogical objects and other conceptual movements within space. Using Rogues1 as instruments for conversation and spatial articulation, he established a site for interaction.

video projection of presentationphoto: A. Ivinskaitė

Following the general project introduction and the individual sub-projects, Castillo, Pozzi, and Rutz presented the “question walks,” a shared method to answer issues of the project while walking in pairs and collating the results. The method originated from a long list of questions built by Emma Cocker in her pursuit to document the process of the intensive weeks, based on which the group of artists-researchers decided to talk and elaborate some of the questions while walking.

For Vilnius, the simularr team prepared a set of new or adapted questions to facilitate the sharing of the walking method. The participants were invited to follow the inquiry through their own paired conversations and walks. The presentation ended with an open forum and collecting written responses on the back of the distributed question cards.

  1. A Rogue is a thing that lives with you, a multi-sensory and multi-modal object, perhaps sitting on a pedestal or a table, the size somewhere in the magnitude of 40 by 40 by 40 centimeters, emitting sound and image, and taking in sensations of its surroundings, in the prototype probably through touch and light. ↩