PROJECT

Walk with the artist is a program of authors’ itineraries that combines the idea of tour, walk, open air workshop, interview to the artist and urban intervention, investigating the artistic practice in the public space. Artists are asked to present an indipendent proposal of walk in the city in order to walk the partecipants into the discovery and the experience of the urban space. The Walk becomes an open-air workshop and actively involves the participants, questioning the artists, reading and re-writing the visited places through the act of walking.

The project is the result of a reflection and investigation about the walk practice as an aesthetic tool that can describe and modify those metropolitan spaces that are still unknown or undefined nature. The involved artists investigate the territory starting from a subjective research. They instill their curiosity by exploring places that are located out of planned spaces. They don’t limit themselves to walk through the city’s monuments, squares, big venues and parks. Their practice is an experiment consisting of mapping the city’s unconscious. It is extreme and brave attempt of exploration of those apparently unspectacular areas, yet unveiling an authentic and fascinating charm.

About Walking. The practice of walking, moving from a place to the other, is an anthropologic action of autonomy and freedom. It is proved to be a basic experience, a fundamental and necessary procedure which has been evolving in human history, an evolving progression: from the Paleolithic nomadism, through the geographic human dispersion, to the modern contemporary excursions. As a primary cultural action the walk has been used as an expression of individual freedom, solidarity, resistance, protest act as well as an act of reconquest of some fundamental human dimensions like space, time, body; It can also be meant, in the artistic field, as a critic and aesthetic tool or as a symbolic form of art and architecture. The itinerant art project Walk with the artist aims to re-arrange and re-think the concepts of urban-space and urban-itinerary concepts in a survey that founds its starting point in costant peculiarities and in different aesthetic processes already existing in history. It also suggests a new independent view that recombines urban geography with a personal artistic research.

Historical context: flânerie, Dada, Surrealists, Situationists, Land Art, transurbanze.  Moving away from the late nineteenth-century flâneur notion, still strongly related to the physics of sauntering, walking aimlessly; taking into consideration the subtle switch of significance obtained throwout the Twenties, when which the bare “action” of walking became a true “art of walking” giving birth to a new aesthetic and theoretic idea, we get to those artistic movements that use the walking as research and observation on the territory. Dada’s visits in the “banal city” of the Twenties, countryside walking of the Surrealists, Situationists’ walking in the “ludic city” in the Fifties, considering also the interventions and new theorization on the connection between art and nature from the Sixties up to the transurbanze (transurbances) of Nienthies of Stalker group, the Walks represent a new starting point that we found following this consequential fil rouge. The edges of the Walks interest are the ones of nomade and liquid, continuously changing, never static city. Therefore the usual relation between subject and environment and the related capacity of influencing each other, determines the importance of knowing the space. And this space knowledge can be achieved through a deep perception of it. Movement amplifies our sense perception: the more we move, the more our senses can perceive.

Disciplinary diversification. As an investigative motion, walking through the city involves both contemporary art and architecture, underlining the subtle edges between the two disciplines, yet opening the way to new thesis and innovative ideas in various research fields like urban intervention and the creation of new categories like unitary space – cohesion of public and private space – which become interactive and transformative (area). The possible combinations and modalities to investigate are endless the more sciences are involved. The co-penetration between different artistic codes and fields like acting, singing, performing, with different areas of expertise like anthropology, psychology, geography, politics, history, botanic, literature, allows a fusion between geographic realities – as the privilege territory-observer science – and psychological reality – as main human-observer science.