Walking in Air in Ditchling

(local) fieldwork and collective recollection

 

With Ryoko Akama, Carol Watts, Will Montgomery, Emmanuelle Waeckerlè

knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world’.’ ‘la connaissance se forme le long des couloirs transitoires du ‘weather-world’. Tim Ingold

The Walking in Air project spent the weekend at Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft with invited artist/ composer Ryoko Akama and poet Carol Watts.

We walked separately and together on the Saturday, finding different ways of bringing the element of air into contact with the activity of walking.

On the Sunday we ran a workshop with nine members of the public. Everyone walked and we concluded the day with a rich two-hour conversation – or ‘recollection’ in our vocabulary – about what we’d done and what we’d thought about.

 

Traces of our first ‘Walking in Air’ fieldwork are available on the Walking in Air website and in Walking in Air, Performance Research ‘On Air’, Vol 26 issue 7 (Sept 2022).

Walking in Air

An interdisciplinary project that encompasses walking, writing, thinking, music, performance and discussion. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s suggestion that ‘knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world’, the project considers walking in air to be a model for speculative thinking, for creative activity and for reconsidering our place within the natural environment. The core walking events give rise to performance, workshop discussion, texts and audio recordings. Participants are drawn from an international pool of composers, artists and poets.
A collaboration with Will Montgomery building on the rich body of poetry-music-environment encounters generated by the tradition of text scores inaugurated by the Fluxus movement as well as as composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveiros and Annea Lockwood to name a few.

The project is supported by UCA research fund, Royal Holloway HARI, The Centre des Livres d’Artistes, Ditchling Museum and Folkestone Fringe.