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