Walking the questions

What does belonging mean? What is my territory? What is yours? What do you truly own? Where is the wild? How to listen to non-human voices? What is the power of slowness? The best way to answer questions is to live them and in order to do that I went on a slow journey with simple means through northern Spain from my home in Barcelona to The Foundry in Galicia, 6 weeks mainly on foot, moving attentively through the world to encounter people, places, none-human beings, to find new stories and new questions.

I walked in the three piece business suit I had worn daily for a year and embroidered with questions people asked me through calls on social media or when encountering me walking around in the suit. The suit gives the walk a performative aspect and in every new walking project in a suit (this is nr. 8) new meaning is added to the body of work. It addresses ecology, politics, gender issues, capitalism, the outside versus the inside (how we deal with appearances), the history of walking (a business suit is still officially called a three-piece walking suit) and many other things.

This time an unplanned extra focus on climate change – its causes and results – happened because the month I started my walk turned out to be the hottest month ever recorded on earth, or to put it in a question: “To what extend are the men in suits responsible for what is happening?” Still, all the questions are equally important and are connected to the other ones somehow.

I walked without planning, being guided by and putting my trust in the world, carrying everything I needed to survive outdoors in a walking cart, going through life with simple means, improvising, giving time to everything and everybody asking for it.

Although there was a final destination, the conference Territory beyond State and Property, organised by the Foundry – a non-profit space for artists, writers, artisans and other creators who seek to work outside of the institutional confines of market and university – the journey itself was the goal and the main work; a performative walking around of questions, of being in and connecting with the world in a different way.

You can read my daily stories here.

Afterlife, beginning, inbetween, now

Writing is traveling backwards and forwards at the same time, revisiting memories and thoughts and creating new connections and insights. In my case, in this case, it is to revive the being in the moment of a walk, a moving through the world slowly, as attentive as possible. The moments are gone, the memories are fleeting as well, the photos I took are always from the next moment, the moment after I thought “I have to capture this”. They never have the same colours my eyes saw, they don’t carry the scent of the salty sea or the dusty paths or the fields covered in morning dew, they can’t convey the intense joy or sadness I felt, they touch upon something but you can’t touch the trees, stones, doors, people, in them. I did though, and the traces of that touching, that listening, that seeing and being seen, that being touched, are still somewhere in my body and in the places I moved through, both visible and invisible.

The difference from other long solo walks was that this time I planned a walk - the timeframe and  the performative aspect of it - but I didn’t have a destination when I planned it, whereas other times there was a destination first which made me walk there. The walking itself is the most important goal though and some day I will go on a long walk without knowing where I am headed (or maybe I am doing that already and it is simply called life). Until now the walks have always been projects with a beginning and an end, a leaving from home and an arrival at a place I had in mind when I started out. The Nomadic Village, the Climate Conference, the Eighth Continent, this time a conference: Territory beyond State and Property.

There are similarities between walking and writing. You can live in your steps the way you live in your words. When I walk, I think about writing and when I write, I think about walking. I write when I am on a walk, but this is never really writing, it is reporting, just like I walk when I am writing, but this is a different kind of walking, it is strolling. The pleasure isn’t so much in the written words or the taken steps, it is in the moments in-between, in the being somewhere, even when - especially when - you don’t know where you are exactly.

In the summer of 2023 I walked and travelled slowly from my home in Barcelona to The Foundry in Galicia: a non-profit space for artists, writers, artisans and other creators who seek to work outside of the institutional confines of market and university. Against the abstraction and commodification of creative and intellectual labor, the site stresses that critical thinking is a way of living rooted in engagements with one another and with the environment. The Foundry is a collective and self-organized project, where everybody is welcome, and all are using and taking care of a shared space in a non-hierarchical way. I was supported by Rewilding Cultures, a project  that wants to reposition the wild after COVID and focus on inclusivity and ecology within the art, science and technology area: “We cannot go back to business as usual, especially in terms of polluting and important inclusion issues unaddressed. We need to rewild on terms fit for the present and future.” I walked in a business suit, carrying everything I needed in a walking cart strapped to my body. The suit was embroidered with questions people had asked me in the year I had been wearing the suit daily, walking the questions around, collecting new ones, engaging in conversations with people I encountered commuting by train, walking in nature, wandering through cities, visiting the social media. Although there was one question central to the walk: “How do you inhabit a territory?” it wasn’t the most important question. All questions were equally important and every question was connected to the other ones somehow.

What is your neighbours name? How do you listen to none-human voices? What is success? How many trees can you name? How much is enough? How do you grow things? What matters most? Which border would you never cross? I had some answers but finding answers is never more important than living the questions. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet).

This blog is a report of (some of) the things that happened during the walk and the year I was wearing the suit daily. I am currently working on a series of articles addressing the themes that were important during this process. (To be added here later).

Image: found on the sidewalk in Lugo, from where I took a bus back to Barcelona, words by Lois Pereiro, a Galician writer and poet, a traveler and explorer who was looking for new spaces, new languages, new truths, but always with his feet firmly planted in Galicia.

terra lingua cultura
dereito á diferencia
mente aberta o mundo …
e nada mais

land language culture
right to difference
open mind to the world ...
and nothing else

Walking the Questions

 What does belonging mean? What is my territory? What is yours? What do you truly own? Where is the wild? How to listen to non-human voices? What is the power of slowness? The best way to answer questions is to live them and in order to do that I went on a slow journey with simple means through northern Spain from my home in Barcelona to The Foundry in Galicia, 6 weeks mainly on foot, moving attentively through the world to encounter people, places, none-human beings, to find new stories and new questions.

I walked in the three piece business suit I had worn daily for a year and embroidered with questions people asked me through calls on social media or when encountering me walking around in the suit. The suit gives the walk a performative aspect and in every new walking project in a suit (this is nr. 8) new meaning is added to the body of work. It addresses ecology, politics, gender issues, capitalism, the outside versus the inside (how we deal with appearances), the history of walking (a business suit is still officially called a three-piece walking suit) and many other things.

This time an unplanned extra focus on climate change – its causes and results – happened because the month I started my walk turned out to be the hottest month ever recorded on earth, or to put it in a question: “To what extend are the men in suits responsible for what is happening?” Still, all the questions are equally important and are connected to the other ones somehow.

I walked without planning, being guided by and putting my trust in the world, carrying everything I needed to survive outdoors in a walking cart, going through life with simple means, improvising, giving time to everything and everybody asking for it.

Although there was a final destination, the conference Territory beyond State and Property, organised by the Foundry – a non-profit space for artists, writers, artisans and other creators who seek to work outside of the institutional confines of market and university – the journey itself was the goal and the main work; a performative walking around of questions, of being in and connecting with the world in a different way.

The Foundry

 

It was never about arriving somewhere, but at some point I was almost at my destination. It is one of the strangest moments in a long walk, having crossed mountains and plains, having met dozens of people, having slept in the most comfortable and uncomfortable places and then one morning there are only 36 kilometers left, 25, 13, 7, 3, 5, 3 (how on earth did I take a wrong turn in the last couple of kilometres) and there it is, already in sight, although the road there hasn’t ended yet. I took a break with 500 metres left, to postpone something ending. I longed for a room of my own, a proper bed, a table to spread out the collection of treasures that had no value for anybody but me, but I would miss stretching out my arms in the morning and feel leaves and grass, waking up in a place I had no knowledge of until I arrived there in the evening.
Ten days later I would be asked by Victoriia, one of the Ukrainian artists staying at the Foundry, to reenact my arrival so she could take photos of me. I had forgotten some things she remembered, because she was there when I arrived, she saw me cross the bridge while the evening was falling, wondering where to enter the building, detaching the walking cart from my body, opening the door.
In a way it didn’t feel different from arriving at any of the other locations where I arrived after a day of walking, my feet hurt a bit more because I walked more than I usually would in the last 2 days and I guess I accomplished something by getting to a place after roughly 1400 kilometres of which approximately 700 were on foot. Still the distance is a side issue, it isn’t about achieving a walk, a slow journey, it is only a way to be. To be at, to be in, to be close to, to be under, to just be. Now I was here. There would be a different kind of journey tomorrow and the day after.

On my first full day I explored but throughout the week I would keep discovering new corners, buildings, paths, I would meet new people, hear new stories. The site was an ironworks in the 15th century, the castle that came afterwards didn’t survive Napoleon’s armies and the stones from the ruin were used to build a manor house. In the 1970s it was deserted and stayed like that for decades until new life was blown into it in 2018 and it became a non-profit space for creators of any kind “who seek outside of the institutional confines of market and university”: The Foundry, a site that “stresses that critical thinking is a way of living rooted in engagements with one another and with the environment”. Everybody is welcome and all are using and taking care of the shared space in a non-hierarchical way. Although the site was still privately owned, the goal was to create a legal model against real estate speculation and hand over 50% of the ownership to the to be founded Sindicato de la Tierra, which would make it impossible to sell it and safeguard its function of a free space, a model that could be used for other properties as well and would help collectives with similar goals as the Foundry to acquire a place to live and work..

In the week after my arrival we learned about different ways of commoning in Galicia (the commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, commoning is a way to describe the commons as an actionable idea, not just a place. With commoning, rather than having everything decided for by markets or governments, it is possible to take matters in one’s own hands according to shared visions). The Sindicato de la Tierra and the Foundry itself are initiatives that attempt to construct a new type of commons to limit the hold of capitalism over our lives. Noortje Keurhof came to talk about the Brigadas Deseucaliptizadoras; a lot of Galicia’s common lands are covered in monoculture tree plantations, the eucalyptus trees are invasive, deplete the soil and form a risk in case of forest fires. The Brigadas work together with the local communities, removing the trees from common land.
Sabrina Rosina took us on a walk to reimagine and redefine territorial boundaries through the lens of botanical wisdom and gain insights into the symbiotic relationship between nature and human systems. Kilian Jörg talked about the car as a main driver and embodiment of the Homogenocene—the ecological era that is about the homogenization of biodiversity as a result of people—and discussed possibilities of undoing its auto-destructive homogenisation of landscapes, desires and economies. There was a debate about rural gentrification, two lawyers from Despacho came to explain the Sindicato de la Tierra, there was a communal work day and presentations by the Ukranian artists staying at the Foundry. On the last day, Dennis Schep presented his upcoming book “Bloom; Iron and the Theft of Space and Time”, written inspired by the Foundry’s history, Peyton Chipman and Siddiq Chan gave a workshop about fermenting and local products, Davoud Gerami showed us his movie “Age of Iron” and I gave a presentation about my walk. It was mainly improvised since I had prioritised spending time with everybody involved in the programme and the Foundry over sinking into all the material I collected and wrote during the walk. I used apples from the trees in the field outside to map my route, so that afterwards they could be transformed into community cider.

Day 40

Is there a difference between a person offering you shelter or nature offering you shelter? Most of us would think that if somebody invites you into their home to spend the night there, safe from cold and rain and anything that could cause harm to you or make you uncomfortable, they are offering you something whereas when you spend the night under an overhanging rock away from the beaten track, it is you who found the perfect place. But didn’t you also find the person who gave you shelter and didn’t nature offer you this opportunity to be comfortable at night?

 

 

 

 

Day 39

 

Day 38