Test Drive – Walking on Campus

A walking work by Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre
Commissioned by the Art Exchange and
ESCALA (Essex Collection of Art from Latin America)
Essex University

To coincide with the exhibition Margins: Walking Between Worlds, the Art Exchange has commissioned me to produce a new work for the University Colchester Campus.

During December 2011 I will be collecting Instructions for a Walk from staff, students and regular visitors at the Campus.

On 3rd February 2012 I will Test Drive the walks recommended, and comment upon their merits for the benefit of all Campus walkers. Everybody is welcome to join me on the Test Drive walks, and a time table will be available closer to the date.

All recommended walks will be compiled into a guide, annotated and illustrated by myself. The guide will be available as a hard-copy from ESCALA and downloadable from the new ESCALA website.

This work is in line with my interest in creating shared resources and communal knowledge with groups of people, built from partial, individual and smaller knowledges on a given subject.

In response to the invitation by Art Exchange to propose a walking event for communities at Essex University, I was inspired by the many different forms of walking that are already present in Campus. From the purposeful and practical daily routes of postmen and cleaners, to the many different research projects and social activities organised by staff and students that involve walking in and around the Campus, there is already much walking going on. As an outsider, I felt it would be more pertinent to make good use of this existing expertise, and lent myself to testing the suitability of these modes of walking for the novice.

Get involved (If you are familiar with the Colchester Campus)

Recommend a walk

Give your walk a title, a starting and ending place, and approximate duration.

Walks can be of any duration, but shorter ones will be more suitable for Test Driving them. However, all walks, regardless of duration, will be considered.

Please submit your proposed walk, including any instructions for a person who is not familiar with the Campus, to be able to do the walk on their own.

Walks can be of any nature: practical, conceptual, focused on a particular topic or even impossible to perform. If relevant, please specify instructions for the walk, such as suggested attire, form of documentation, particular things to notice or activities to carry out.

Please note that your submission of walking instructions will be compiled into a work that will be freely available to the public. I would like to credit the author of each walking instruction, but if you want to remain anonymous, that’s fine too.

Please send your proposed walk to arts@essex.ac.uk, or drop it in/send it to
the Arts on 5 Office, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ.

Help Test Drive the walks

A timetable of the walks that I will be testing on Friday 3rd February will be available closer to the date from the ESCALA website and on posters around campus. Please feel free to join me on any of the Test Drive walks. Just come on time to the location specified in the schedule.

Organise your own Test Drive

After the event, a guide of all walks will be available to download from the ESCALA website. You might want to Test Drive some or all the walks yourself, or organise group Test Drives with your friends, colleagues or those you always wanted to meet but never had a silly
enough excuse.

Hamish Fulton: Slowalk (In support of Ai Weiwei)

30 April 2011, 12.00 – 14.00
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

Since the late 1960s British artist Hamish Fulton has made sculptures, actions, images and text pieces in response to his direct physical engagement with the landscape. In 1973 he resolved to ‘only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks’, a strategy that he maintains today.

Fulton will present Slowalk (In support of Ai Weiwei) at Tate Modern as a collective action created specifically in response to the iconic architecture of the Turbine Hall and in the context of the recent disappearance of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose work Sunflower Seeds is currently on display in the east end of the Turbine Hall as the eleventh project in the series of Unilever Commissions. Fulton’s Slowalk (In support of Ai Weiwei) is conceived as a meditative experience to which he invites ordinary people to come together and walk very slowly, in a formation created by the artist over a period of two hours. This is a form of silent activism, where the participants are both art and viewer on a communal journey. Both Fulton and Ai Weiwei explore the role of political and social activism as a force for change in art and as such this action forms a public gesture of solidarity towards Ai Weiwei as a gesture towards freedom of expression.

Leah Gordon

Leah Gordon is a artist working with photography. She has also worked as a freelance photographer for film, theatre and magazines and was lyricist and singer for London-based punk folk band, The Doonicans. She visited Haiti for the first time in 1991, and has continued the relationship ever since.

At the workshop she presented a piece she made in collaboration with Rachel Cooper, entitled Walking in the Gower. Together they scoured the coutryside in South Wales, looking for places with strange names. At every spot, each of them took a photograph while the other hid her eyes.

Walking in the Gower © Leah Gordon and Rachel Cooper

Click on the icons below to see a full sized version with more details about the work:

Visit Leah’s website to see more of her work.

Street Training Manual by Lottie Child

This publication by Lottie Child compiles the personal advise and knowledge of people in Camberwell South London, on how to use public space both to have fun and to keep safe. The manual is thus split into recommendations to travel the Path of Joy and the Path of Safety.

For more information visit Lottie Child’s website

Bankside Walk

At the end of the workshop we went on a walk from Tate Modern Staff entrance, to Pizza Express in London Bridge where some of us had lunch to celebrate the end of the course.

The Walk

I planned a route to take participants on a walk that would reveal something about the past, present and future of the area. We were lucky to count also with the presence of Simon Pope who knows the history of the area well, and used to have a studio in Clink Wharf before the Bankside regeneration.

Together and as we walked, we looked for traces of the past and objects that herald the area’s move towards gentrification. We searched for marks and signs left by others, and we discussed the different ways in which a walk can be structured or documented by making use of what the street has to offer.

Walk itinerary

The proposed itinerary was selected by walking backwards from the desired destination place (a spacious and affordable eatery where to say our farewells). The main requisite for choosing which streets to take, was that there would be as tourist and car-free as possible, to allow for a large group to walk leisurely in the middle of the road, and to stop and talk when the scenery took our fancy.

On the preparatory walk I took notes and made drawings that helped me organise my thoughts to provide the group with some sort of running commentary. These notes were completed and expanded on the day with the observations and knowledge of others in the group.

The old and the new

The area where we walked has suffered a major transformation in recent years, and in our walk we noticed the fragile coexistence of the old with the new, whilst pondering how long it will be before the new corporate spirit takes over completely. A sense of the transformation still under way can be tasted in the following quote from Simon Pope’s book, London Walking.

Under one arch in Stoney Street near Borough Market you can see the evidence of change written in large white letters. ‘Bankside’ declaims the 20-foot-high corporate graffito. Not Borough; not Borough Market; not Southwark; not even ‘London’s Larder’, but ‘Bankside’. In reality this is a short stretch of walkway between Southwark Bridge and the site of the old Clink prison, an area that epitomises the cultural-property-developer’s dream of surmounting the doomed post-war South Bank Centre with a pastiched and reclaimed Little England-on-Thames. Bounded by the Millenium Wheel in the west and London Bridge in the east, the Millenium Walkway takes us through a ‘thousand years of adventure’. The showpiece is the ‘cathedral of power’, the Bankside Tate or Tate Modern, housed in a gigantic former power station, putting art and culture into the realm of nationalised industry where coal once reigned.

Surveillance

We were reminded of a piece by Francis Alys where he constructed his itinerary by moving outside of the reach of CCTV cameras in a specific area (I haven’t found any documentation about this work).

Using a reversal strategy the artist Jill Magid “spent 31 days in Liverpool, during which time she developed a close relationship with Citywatch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council), whose function is citywide video surveillance- the largest system of its kind in England. The videos in her Evidence Locker were staged and edited by the artist and filmed by the police using the public surveillance cameras in the city centre. Wearing a bright red trench coat she would call the police on duty with details of where she was and ask them to film her in particular poses, places or even guide her through the city with her eyes closed, as seen in the video Trust.” You can find out more about this work at Evidence Locker website.

Official signage

The proliferation of warning and imperative signs in the area is daunting. Perhaps one could do a walking piece by following carefully all those instructions, or perhaps by defiantly challenging every instruction issued. This kind of signage is displayed on hard surfaces and materials, foretelling possible vandalism, and the lettering is bold and serious, usually in a striking sans-serif font. Colours are either serious (blue and black) or alarming (red and yellow). In 2003, as part of an art project done in collaboration with Latin American residents in Myatts Field Estate (Brixton), we replaced all the Council signage with hand painted sign boards issuing similar requests and information but adding words like “please” and “thank you from your neighbours”, in an attempt to temper the hostility and authoritarianism of official signage.

Drawings and illustrations

Thankfully, the street also offers a range of images, drawing, illustrations and wall decorations made by anonymous hands, of a more human and friendly nature. Sometimes practical, sometimes mysterious, these 2-D works embellish the street and do not impose their presence on pedestrians. On the contrary, one needs to actively search for them. They also invite us to came back to the same places, looking for changes, new additions and disappearances.

Anti-social sculpture
A walk also offers the pedestrian a chance to encounter (and perhaps document) three-dimensional interventions made in the public space by anonymous pedestrians. I call these objects and installations Anti-social Sculpture (they are usually made of rubbish or discardable stuff), as a way to highlight and explicitly relate these creative if messy contributions to the public space, to Joseph Beuys concept of social sculpture.

Virtual walk
For a younger generations, advertising services and talents through stickers is seemingly a common practice, if one is to judge by the number of stickers found of lamp post, bins, benches and bollards. What kind of journey would you embark if you followed the links to all the websites advertised alongside your itinerary? What kind of conclusions or revelations could you derive from comparing or overlapping your physical and virtual journeys?

Here is a list of links taken from stickers found during our Bankside Walk.

http://www.V-ZINE.co.uk
The world first virtual magazine, entirely re-designed for each issue.

http://www.carefreecyclingtours.com
The way to experience cycling. Fully managed cycling tours & experiences for all abilities at home and abroad. Fully guided & supported. Bikes & transfers included.

http://www.encepence.com
A gallery of collages by some Russian or Ukranian artist or designer, no other information given.

http://uk.youtube.com/user/aldenny
Al vs the Marathon. Video diary of Al, who was mysteriously invited to the Mall by his mates, and was presented with an envelope containing his acceptance form for the London Marathon for which he never applied. A series of video clips following his week by week preparation for the Marathon.

http://www.violentflooklove.com
http://www.myspace,com/flookmusic
A strange combination of a myspace-based group of rock lovers, running also a web portal with links to trivial services such as gift shops and insurance companies.

http://www.scnc.co.uk/
Science Skateboards. Based in London, it is a skateboarding and design company without any desire to compromise the skateboard culture from which it is was born.

http://www.style43.com
This site is a collaboration of several friends that wanted to share their interests be it BMX, skate, music or whatever else with others.

http://www.streeteam.spreadshirt.net
Street clothing, Textiles for street people

http://mcmarpo.cz

http://www.marpofans.tym.cz

Official site and fans site for Marpo (the king of metaphors), seemingly a Checz MC

http://www.daydream-mag.com
The virtual home of Daydream Network, a platform for grassroots creative talent, promoting people’s style and ideas through publications, workshops, parties and exhibitions.

http://www.CallieArt.com
A painter and watercolour female artist based in New York. Vegetal motifs and ornamental works.

Jesus Jimenez

Jesus Jimenez is a young Mexican artist who came to London to do an MA at the London College of Communications.

Here are some video pieces he started as part of his individual project.

Chasing Birds

The walk of my right hand

The walk of my left hand II

You can see more works in Jesus’ website.

Mary Ann Huslack

Mary Ann Huslack is a Canadian writer currently based in London.

News and projects

For the Tate Modern workshop Mary Ann created two separate works, see the documentation below:

First walk (The contemplative walk)

A sunny, summery Saturday afternoon. I need new sandals. My toes want to flick free of shoes; my feet long for direct contact with air. I decide to try those stand-erect-and-don’t slouch Masai sandals. I look up the website to find the nearest stockist, which is a Sweaty Betty in Chiswick. I ring them. They do have the sandals in stock.

It’s 2km away. I could drive and park in the Sainsbury’s car park. Instead, I walk. I have an end destination and, other than having to cross under two train bridges, I don’t plan my route.

I wear brown jeans and a willow green t-shirt; they feel less ‘winter’ than black. It’s too soon for white jeans and a white shirt, as if I need more transition to summer.

On my back rests my usual leather backpack with my medium-size Moleskine notebook inside it. (I feel naked without a notebook.) I also carry a fabric bag from Strand Books in New York over my shoulder. It’s a present, a fit that leaves my hands free, though I face the logo towards me instead of out to the world. That’s less a comment against a logo-gripped world than my being treated as if I were from the US. My Canadian accent (and that most people here can’t hear the difference) gives me a peculiar insight into how people (surprisingly many) in the UK hurl verbal contempt at those they assume are American. I’ve lived here for twenty years so I know it’s a recent phenomena. It makes for dilemmas. If I say I’m originally Canadian, not American, smiles break out and it’s all oops, so sorry, except by pleading exemption I feel as if I’m colluding with something deeply pernicious. I find myself saying, ‘you know, 54 million people voted against George W. Bush.’

Hmnn, I think. This has potential for an active walk. I make a mental note for the future. For now, I steer myself to my ‘Reader, I Actually Bought a Compass’ project, a short story about how I, as someone who comes from a monumental landscape with grid survey roads, relates to London. I muse about an active walk next week, around Willesden, a ‘sample’ area in the story. But something else niggles and niggles at me. And has niggled at me for weeks now.

It’s a passage from Domus, the architecture magazine. In an article discussion about architecture and public space in Tehran, two Iranian architects casually mention that women cannot stroll or stand still in the streets. They always have to keep moving or they will be asked what they are doing. I feel myself settling on a kind of ‘Tehran’ walk for a project. I fret: am I imposing Western imperialist values? I, as a western woman, wouldn’t set off on a contemplative walk at, let’s say, 2am, would I. Yet, for me, walking is as much about moving as about being able to stop. Stop, sit down, maybe sip tea, write in notebook, read, chat (or not) to person(s) at next table, meet friend (even male friend) in public place. The idea of having to keep moving . . .

Sweaty Betty’s don’t have the sandals in the neutral tan colour I want. I amble to a health food supermarket. I caution myself: don’t turn this into an ‘errands’ walk. I ‘do’ a small shop because I’ll be carrying it. A cyclist whizzes in front of me.

I think maybe a notebook that slips into my pocket would be more accessible when walking. I pop into Waterstone’s, hold the small-size Moleskines in my hand. I notice a storyboarding version. I cut across a green on my way home. People bask in the sun. A working title – A ‘Tehran’ Walk – surfaces and it occurs to me that I could use storyboarding as a way of structuring it.

Second walk (The active walk)

Teheran Walk © Mary Ann Huslack (PDF file, size: 196 KB)

Mo Lewis

Mo Lewis is a London artist working with photography. She studied painting at Wimbledon School of Art, and showed work with the Young Contempories touring exhibition. Drawing on local history and personal family records Mo Lewis traces her identity through a series of walks and visits to the houses, church and streets where her family once lived and worshipped, in Bermondsey and The Borough in Southwark.

News and projects

Signals5 – Art in Crystal Palace (September 2007)

As her contribution to this festival Mo took 5 separate people on the same walk she did as her individual project at the Tate Modern course. The festival is organised by Crystal Palace Artists, a community of over sixty artists living in the area.

Find out more at Mo Lewis website

Maryclare Foa

Maryclare Foa is an artist based in London, working in performance, drawing and film.

News and projects

Stick*Stamp*Fly – Gasworks (August 2007)

A group show looking into posters as a means to communicate an event, an opinion or a rumour, as well as objects of design in their own right.

Maryclare Foa’s poster “Maryclare is a Liar” was one of the works selected from an open submission, and she contributed to “It’s going to be a long night”, a live event part of the exhibition, with an interactive performance in which visitors and special guests were invited to take a lie detector test.

Escorting the Commuters (2005)

Read about this performance piece in the Profiled Artworks Section.

Amy Sharrocks

Amy Sharrocks is a film maker, sculptor and live artist based in London. She is a recipient of a current Artsadmin Bursary.

News and projects

SWIm (July 2007)

SWIm was an open invitation, all access swim across London, taking place on July 12, 2007 from Tooting Bec Lido to Hampstead Heath Ponds. SWIm was one of a series of works looking at people and our relationship with water in an urban setting. It is an attempt to forge a new understanding of ourselves and our vital resources, creating a new way to span our Capital within a large group collective.