Walking as Demonstration
1 December 2022 at 11:30:00 pm
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Session Convenors
Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Royal College of Art
Simon King, University of London
Dr Jacqueline Felstead, University of Melbourne
Carola Ureta Marin, Royal College of Art
Session Speakers
Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Royal College of Art
Simon King, University of London
Dr Jacqueline Felstead, University of Melbourne
Carola Ureta Marin, Royal College of Art
This panel uses the example of the Walkative Project at the Royal College of Art to talk about the relationship between walking and ‘demonstration’. Founded by Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Simon King in 2013, Walkative’s propositional starting point is that the city contains narratives, knowledge and contested materialities best accessed through walking. Through participant and guest-led walks, written and visual documentation, the Walkative Project uses walking to trigger processes of thinking, researching, collaborating and making. As the world went into lockdown due to COVID-19, Walkative continued as a series of international city walks in a virtual sphere. Meeting online allowed for a connection in the here and now that was conducive to a dialogic exchange of experiences, attitudes and preoccupations. The differences in location and time zones between presenter-walkers, panellists and audience reinforced not only a sense of our temporal and spatial dislocation but also a shared commonality. In each city the pandemic had changed the way artists engage with public space and this new relationship with the city impacted on their practice, at the same time this project generated a new virtual community around their concerns. Through the example of the Walkative Project during lockdown this panel considers walking as a means of knowledge production, community building and demonstration.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChp00VbIiwCv3IiA6BkXmCw
THE CITY AS TEXT
Carola Ureta Marin, Royal College of Art London
This project is a virtual walk of 2.4 kilometres along a main avenue in Santiago de Chile where demonstrations took place since October 2019. It is a walk in time, recorded by hundreds of photographs captured on 23 November 2019, between 7:10 am and 10:18 am. The route begins at the epicentre of the protests, the 'Plaza de la Dignidad', and then moves along the southern pavement of the emblematic central axis of the city, ending outside the government palace; the place where it was hoped that all the demands would be heard. Through this drift, people from all over the world can experience walking these streets. Being able to fix their memory on a specific moment in Chile's history, picking up the echoes of the social demands tattooed on its walls.
MAINTAINING THE BORDER
Dr Jacqueline Felstead, University of Melbourne
In the dead of night a walk of the Accor-owned Mantra Bell City Hotel was shared live on Zoom to a community who, via a split screen, could also see footage from past walks at the Hotel – secret investigations – undertaken since October 2020. This furtive walking, within our constrained allowable travel radius during COVID lockdown, took place in response to the indefinite detention of refugees on the Mantra Hotel’s third floor. These men, detained at Mantra for 16 months, begun their detention 7 years earlier at Manus Island Regional Processing Centre. They had been brought to Australia through “Medevac” legislation, which briefly gave doctors the authority to send asylum seekers from Australia’s offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru to Australia for medical treatment. With the repeal of this legislation these refugees were left imprisoned in publicly unknown sites, like this hotel. The Mantra is a black site, the site of black ops. In a period in which public protest had been largely impossible, walking this perimeter was a means of acknowledging this black site, a secret, and keeping its infrastructure on the radar of our collective consciousness.
Biographies
Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Royal College of Art
Jaspar Joseph-Lester is an artist, reader in Art & Post-Urbanism and head of the MA Sculpture Programme at the Royal College of Art. His work explores the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal, regeneration and social organization as a means to better understand how art practice can redefine master plans and regeneration schemes that determine the cultural life of our cities. He has exhibited his work internationally and is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2012).
Simon King, University of London
Simon King is a London-based walking artist with a socially engaged practice who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. Co-founder of the Walkative Project with Jaspar Joseph-Lester, he has worked collaboratively since 2017 with the artist Corinne Noble, as N&K, to create group walks that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive methodology: the use of literal and metaphorical correspondence through ephemera i.e., antique postcards, found maps, archive photographs, fragments of text, as well as personal recollection and speculation to prompt engagement and interaction with participant walkers. Simon is a practice-led PGR PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement.
Dr Jacqueline Felstead, University of Melbourne
Jacqueline Felstead completed her PhD in 2022 at the Victorian College of the Arts University of Melbourne. Felstead’s research focuses on art and computing through the relationship of digital environments to lived experience. She attended the Royal College of Art, London funded by Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and completed an MFA (Monash University) in 2014. She has undertaken residencies at Banff Centre for Art, Canada and Objectifs, Singapore, funded by Australia Council through Asia-Link amongst others. Solo representations of her work include Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA; St Heliers, Abbotsford Convent; Bendigo Visual Art Gallery; Objectifs, Singapore and West Space.
Carola Ureta Marin, Royal College of Art
Carola Ureta Marin is a London-based Chilean designer and visual translator specialised in editorial, cultural development and historical research projects. She was part of the curatorial team of the Chilean Pavilion at London Design Biennale 2021, Somerset House, which won the most outstanding overall contribution. In 2019, she created The City as Text [La Ciudad como Texto], a collaborative digital platform that allows online visitors to partake in a virtual walk through 2.4km of Santiago de Chile's main avenue during a specific date and time. In 2020, she turned these visual and textual recordings into a book that is currently in its second edition (December, 2021). Other publications include the award-winning Luis Fernando Rojas: Obra Gráfica 1875-1942. She was president of RCA's Walkative Society 2020-2021. Ureta Marín obtained her BS Design (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2012), MA Cultural Management (Universidad de Chile, 2015), and MA Visual Communication (Royal College of Art, London 2022).