Springfield Park & Walthamstow Marshes
10/01/2026
Individual field work / reflective documentation / collective recollection
with James Davies, Will Montgomery, Artur Vidal and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
We met locally at Artur’s home and walked together to the bandstand in Springfield Park on a very cold Saturday. After some discussion over lunch in a nearby café, we went our separate ways, some to the Marshes, others back to the bandstand.
We set a deadline for the completion of traces a few weeks after that. Our prompts, chosen for optional orientation in our walks, were the following:
the most simple way is to walk a different path
(the second way is to give it another name)
James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall (Pamenar Press, 2022)
Walking, eating, touching, listening, waiting, sounding… like an ecotone.
Artur Vidal, score extract, 2025
recollection (online) - 04/02/2026, 6pm
We met for a recollection later that afternoon back at Artur’s, and, after we had generated traces in response to our walking, again in early February.
Four distinct traces emerged from my activities on 10 January. In ‘Walking in Air Walthamstow’ I expand on the concept of the ‘ecotone’ (an ecological boundary with that of the ‘sociotone’, which describes a social or cultural boundary. This is followed by a transcription of words improvised while walking in air and thinking aloud in and around the bandstand in Springfield Park. Then the following day I reflect on our activities, placing them in the context of our first Walking in Air, five years ago.
The text concludes with a list of French and English ‘vrais-amis’ (true friends – terms shared across the two languages). This list forms the basis of a video made at the bandstand at Springfield Park on 9 February and a short text built around these words and generated through an interaction with an AI assistant. Another short video documents Emmanuelle’s ‘whistle-walking’ around the bandstand
All traces of this ‘Walking in Air’ fieldwork are available on the Walking in Air website.
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. 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.