The Walking Encyclopaedia - A reconnaissance walk with Phil Smith

In just over a week, esteemed walking artist Phil Smith of Wrights & Sites and Mythogeography fame will be leading a brand new group walk, designed specifically for The Walking Encyclopaedia.

Phil's walk is entitled, Refrains For Uncertainly Sacred Spaces and will look to explore, uncover and explode mythologies built up around the imposition of the notion of sacred on particular city spaces. 

As Phil puts it -

This is a walk in search of pseudo-sacred spaces; these might be the ruins, fabrications, fadings and hoaxes of sacred space; they might include spaces that once were regarded as sacred but have been traduced or abandoned, like a chapel that is now used as offices, or a fake sacred space like a stone circle erected as ornamentation in a children’s play area. We will follow a route of promising possibilities and test out some little moments of transgression and transcendence, nosiness and excavation, while on the lookout for other pseudo-sacred spaces on the walk itself. 

Before this week's Soup Kitchen, I had the privilege of joining Phil on his recce walk of the environs around the Gallery. Acting as onlooker and assistant to Phil, was a really instructive experience.

I think we started out, or at least I did, with the idea that we would cover a large distance, considering the 3-4 hours we have put aside for the walk, yet it quickly became clear, that Phil's eye for the minutiae of the urban landscape meant that in the 2 and a bit hours of our walk, we physically travelled probably no more than a few hundred metres - yet in metaphysical terms, it felt like a bit of a marathon!

And as ever when you are walking someone else's walk, you start to see things you wouldn't necessarily see. I've lived in this city for a good many years, and yet Phil, a stranger, with strangers eyes,  took me to parts of the City - only a few hundred yards from the Gallery, that I had never seen before.

I don't want to give too much away at this point, and full documentation of the walk will follow soon, but as a taster, here are some of the things we were looking at.

The Walking Encyclopaedia - More Content Arrives

Two wonderful parcels arrived at AirSpace HQ this morning - more material to add to our growing Walking Encyclopaedia. Thanks to Luce Choules and Walter Siegried.

Luce Choules - “With combined interests in cartography, geography, architecture and cinematography, ‘viewpoints’ are collected in the field while walking, cycle-touring or climbing. My practice involves photographic recording of elemental details found deep within the natural landscape and at the edges of urban communities. Activities using slow travel allow a more reflective time to encounter the physical landscape and make a connection with the wider issues of human passage. These ideas are explored through a series of themes – Orientation, Landmarks, Stronghold andBarriers. Narratives involving a notion of ‘place’ and ‘situation’ are constructed through single-image reference points, conceptual films and experiential maps.”

Walter Siegfried - Born in 1949 in Zofingen. Youth and studies in Switzerland. 1977 PhD at the University of Zurich in the combination of subjects psychology, art history and philosophy. After teaching about exercise and dance at several universities and academies. From 1982, research (MPIV, Seewiesen) about: aesthetics, behavior - on the model of the human dance - published in: Beauty and the Brain. Birkhauser, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1988.
Since 1986, art projects and performances . 1986-2005 continued teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the University of Art and Design in Zurich.

Siegfried's work was funded and awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Pro Helvetia, the Siemens program and culture of the City of Munich, and by Philip Morris and the Board of Trustees Aargau.

To find out more and to add your walking artist content in readiness for The Walking Encyclopaedia exhibition at AirSpace in February 2014, click the link.

http://www.airspacegallery.org/2007/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=332%3Aopportunity-the-walking-encyclopaedia&catid=69%3Aopps&Itemid=124

The Walking Encyclopaedia - The First Submission

We realise that in order to get as broad and comprehensive a survey of walking artist practices in time for the opening of The Walking Encyclopaedia on February 7th 2014, we've got to start early. The response top the call out for works has been encouraging and we're getting a real sense that there is a collective will to see the project happen successfully.

To that end, it was really heartening today to kick of the physical collection with a submission from Phil Smith, of Wrights & Sites, Mythogeography and Counter Tourism fame. We met Phil, along with the rest of Wrights and Sites, at last year's Sideways Festival of walking in Belgium and were lucky enough to share a small walk around the perimeter of a holiday camp we were staying in.  Phil lectures at Plymouth University where his research interests centre around performance and theatre, tourism and walking as a cultural activity.

Phil has sent us a large package, containing the following components and is the perfect start to the survey.

• GeoQuest – A journey of exploration through the English Riviera Global Geopark - CD 
• A Dawlish Warren Low Tide Walk - CD 
• Counter-Tourism – A pocketbook  - BOOK 
• Crab Step Cards and Maps – assorted cards and maps 
• Atmospheric Maps – an invitation to explore around the route of Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway
• The Great Walk – A documentary of sorts by Clive Austin  - DVD 
• Mythogeography is…  - LEAFLET 
• Mythogeography – a Guide to Walking Sideways - BOOK 
• Crab Walks  - MAPS 
• The Discoverie of Signs and Wonders – Wrights and Sites - PUBLICATION 
• A Sardine Street Box of Tricks  - BOOK 
• A Mis-guided Tour - CD 
• Tactics For Counter Tourism by Crab Man and Siobhan McKeown  - CD 

Wrights and Sites is a group of artist-researchers with a special relationship to site, city/landscape and walking, of which Phil is one quarter.

From their website

Formed in UK, 1997, Wrights & Sites are four artist-researchers (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith  Cathy Turner) whose work is focused on peoples' relationships to places, cities, landscape and walking. We employ disrupted walking strategies as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making.

Our work, like walking, is intended to be porous; for others to read into it and connect from it and for the specificities and temporalities of sites to fracture, erode and distress it. We have sought to pass on our dramaturgical strategies to others: to audiences, readers, visitors and passersby.

The outcomes of our work vary from project to project, but frequently include site-specific performance, Mis-Guided Tours (e.g. Stadtverführungen in Wien, Tanzquartier Wien and Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, 2007), published Mis-Guides (e.g. A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, 2006), 'drifts', mythogeographic mapping, public art (e.g. Wonders of Weston, CABE/Situations, Weston-super-Mare, 2010) or installations (e.g. mis-guided, Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Fribourg, 2008), and public presentations and articles.

Today, walking and exploring the everyday remains at the heart of all we do, and what we make seeks to facilitate walker-artists, walker-makers and everyday pedestrians to become partners in ascribing significance to place.

MythoGeography  is a website for walkers, artists who use walking in their art, students who are discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking, anyone who is troubled by official guides to anywhere, urbanists, geographers, site-specific performers, town planners and un-planners, urban explorers, entrepreneurs and activists who don’t want to drive to the revolution.


As part of MythoGeography, Phil presents a specific strand Counter-Tourism which encourages a mass re-perception of the heritage industry. It is an approach to place/space that celebrates the multiplicities of meaning in every heritage site and upsets the industry’s attempts at meaning-control and homogenisation. It’s what gives counter-tourism its emphasis on the sites of heritage, on the places themselves.

The Walking Encyclopaedia

On Februrary 7th, 2014, AirSpace Gallery will be opening its physical and cyber doors to The Walking Encyclopaedia.

In conjunction with The Walking Artists Network, and timed to coincide with Tate's touring Artist Rooms, which brings a collection of works by Richard Long to The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke as part of the 2013 tour, The Walking Encyclopaedia will present a solo show by artist Tim Knowles, and will attempt to bring together a compendium of the vast array of arts practices that concern, contain, and/or are inspired and informed by, the WALK.

Submissions are being invited from the thousands of cultural walkers in any form they wish - photograph, film, sound and written. We will aim to fill a portion of our gallery space with documentation and will include a reading room and a screening room. The month long exhibition will include a specially created walk as well as an Artist Soup Kitchen to discuss some of the themes engendered by the exhibition.

In the 1960's, the conceptuality of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton fuelled what is rapidly becoming the largest participatory segment of contemporary art practice. This exhibition is close to our hearts at AirSpace - our directorate are keen walkers - but beyond that, in broader terms, we fully buy in to the ideas of utilitarianism, activity available-to-all, outward looking and doing. We're excited to start a process of collation and presentation of the state of the walking art practice today.

A Walking Encyclopaedia is an attempt to collate and present as many different artistic responses to, and uses of the walk as possible. Timed to coincide with the Richard Long Exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery (part of the Tate’s Artist Rooms On Tour programme), The Walking Artists Network in partnership with AirSpace Gallery is inviting submissions from walking artists and artists who walk to send in documentation of their practice, historic or current, in all forms of media, in order that we can offer a significant overview of the contemporary state of the genre.

Our exhibition will then, become a physical repository for Walking Practices, and we envisage any of the following being submitted:

• Video documentation of walks, and films about walks
• Sound documentation of walks
• Photographs and photographic documentation of walks
• Artworks made on walks, about walks and as walks
• Publications and zines about walks and walking practices (we will have a reading corner within the gallery).Over the month-long course of A Walking Encyclopaedia, and in conjunction with a major exhibition of works by artist Tim Knowles, AirSpace Gallery will be highlighting daily, through its gallery spaces, website and social media outlets, different walking practices and walking artists, submitted via this call. There will also be a Walk planned, and an Artist Soup Kitchen event, themed around walking practices.

Please contact with details of what you would like to submit for A Walking Encyclopaedia, by Friday, 13th December 2013.

AirSpace Gallery, 4 Broad Street, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 4HL 

mail@airspacegallery.org 

Exhibition runs from 7/2/14 to 8/3/14