Sound walks offer a new way to travel

Referring to the current Covid-19 pandemic, an article in last week’s Guardian newspaper reported about urban and landscape walking tours ‘at a time when many people are struggling to make it too far beyond their front door’.

The featured sound walks are one of the activities that the Museum of Walking is heavily involved with, an initiative, project and network developed by Andrew Stuck with whom Bohn&Viljoen collaborated many years ago on London-based events that aimed to rethink the city by engaging its urban landscape in novel ways.

Th Guardian’s author Lorna Parkes interviewed Andrew, who initiated in 2017 what has come to be known as Sound Walk September, a ‘global festival’ that he now runs with Geert Vermeire, the convenor of Made of Walking, and Babak Fakhamzadeh, an award winning locative app developer. With key institutional partners in Brazil, Australia, Greece, Spain, Germany and Poland, the event has become not only a showcase for innovation, but also a valued community-building resource, bringing practitioners together, many of whom are remotely working creatives who have previously felt isolated or ‘ploughing a lonely furrow’.

The Museum of Walking, in its own words, is a ‘showpiece for events around walking’ that promotes walking, art and creativity, and bringing the two together. The Museum invites co-creators to work together to create a variety of different walking opportunities as ‘walking events with a creative twist’. Their walks and ‘walkshops’ (walking workshops) are mainly artist-led and include a mix of drawing, learning and making. The focus is to be creative using walking as the art form. Its ‘intention has always been to encourage people to dip their toes into trying new things, out and about on foot, giving them the chance of being more creative – “the art is in taking part”‘.

The Guardian article of the same title by Lorna Parkes (printed 14th Nov 20 / online 16th Nov 20) can be found here.

For more information on the Museum of Walking see the project’s own website.

Image: Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman of Cona Institute Ljubljana were shortlisted for the Museum of Walking’s Sound Walk September 2020 Awards for their work Sandbox. (source: Irena Pivka www 2020)