Category Archives: Curator

Interviews with curators and festival organisers

Elena Biserna talking walking

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Elena Biserna is an Italian researcher and curator who lives in Marseille. In 2022 she completed and published two compendia, one called “Going Out: walking, listening, sound making”, and the other “Walking with Scores”.

Andrew Stuck catches up with her over the Internet on a Zoom call. It is quite impossible to cover all the topics that she has written about, collated and published as her two books run to over 1000 pages, so he starts by encouraging her to explain from were and why walking art and sound walking in particular might have originated.

The majority of published walking art stems from the Anglo-Saxon world, so it is refreshing to talk to someone who clearly has identified and researched works from other areas, and in other languages, to bring a fresh perspective.

Her research has led her to develop her own walking art practice reinterpreting walking scores written by others with the project “Walking from Scores”. This has later led her to write some of her own scores with a feminist perspective in order to clearly address the specificities of gendered bodies walking in public space. 14.3MB 30’26”

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Emma Jackson talking walking

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It’s a sunny summer’s day and Andrew Stuck is on the Waterlink Way, a green route for cyclists and pedestrians that follows the valley of the rivers, Ravensbourne, Pool and Quaggy, flowing south to north through the London Borough of Lewisham.

Andrew is in the company of Emma Jackson, an urban sociologist at Goldsmith’s, University of London and the Director of the Centre of Urban and Community Research, as she tells him about how she uses walking in her research and in teaching her students. They talk about the research centre and how she herself studied there, as well as what urban sociologists do in general, and specifically, when the pandemic restricted their explorations.

Emma is keen to impress on how every walk is different, even if you’re following a familiar route, as the Waterlink Way is to both of us.  As if to endorse what she is saying, something unusual does occur. 22’52” 10.7MB

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River Ravensbourne
A collage from a workshops with people by the river.
Fly tipping on the river bank

Cândida Borges talking walking

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Cândida Borges is a Brazilian composer, pianist and music educator whose interests have evolved into transmedia art. 

Following a discovery from a DNA test that her ancestors had migrated from all corners of the world she conceived “Transeuntis Mundi”, a concept for an immersive experience based on recording the everyday walking practices of people in five cities across the world to investigate cultural transformation through time.

In London, to receive the Lumen Prize for her work, Andrew Stuck snatched a window in her busy schedule to chat about her evolving projects on a walk through the ever-popular, St James’s Park. 22’27” 10.5MB

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Ivana Pinna talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in the medieval heart of Vic, in Catalunya; its narrow streets are not very conducive to recording an interview as sounds reverberate off the stone facades.

He set out originally to interview Thomas Keis and Ivana Pinna, who together have set up an artist residency on the island of Sardinia.  As you learn through the conversation, after the suggestion of Thomas, Andrew interviews Ivana alone.

As they weave through the bustling streets in search of ambient calm, their much interrupted conversation includes a discussion about “Artivism”, in which Ivana mobilised the community around her Sardinian childhood home in a walking protest against government plans to dump radioactive waste there. 22’39” 10.6MB

Photo credit: Tarek Dakwar
Photo credit: Thomas Keis
Photo credit: Thomas Keis

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Feature image credit: Tarek Dakwar

Yannis Ziogas talking walking

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Out at a restaurant in Gerona having dinner, late in the evening, Andrew Stuck discovers that his plan to interview walking artist Yannis Ziogas the following morning have gone awry as Yannis has to leave on the earliest flight.  So to interview Yannis in person, they had to do it there and then.  They walk near-deserted streets close to midnight, talking about Yannis’ unique bond with Prespa, on the disputed, remote northern border of Greece. 32’26” 15.2MB

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Clara Gari talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in Olot, Catalunya, in the company of Clara Gari, the founder of the Nau Côclea Contemporary Art centre and of The Grand Tour, an annual nomadic walking art residency that Clara has developed over the last eight years.  Previously having received public funding to run a conventional art centre offering exhibitions, workshops and talks, a political change meant the funding was withdrawn, and Clara struggled to keep the art centre alive.  Thinking out of the box, she reprised a personal walking journey she had made in 2003, in which she walked for three weeks on a 200 kilometre route that linked artists and friends, to create what she called The Grand Tour that now follows a spiral route through eastern Catalunya and the Pyrenees. 22’23″ 10.5MB

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Alex Middleton talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is in the company of Alex Middleton, one of the creators of Vespucci Adventures, that encourages people to put away their smart phones, to walk in the ‘great outdoors’.  He has come to Greenwich to walk around Andrew’s local neighbourhood and talk about how he and his co-founder have worked tirelessly over the last five years to build a business around a shared passion for walking.  It may be a passion, but as yet, it is not a profitable business.  The COVID pandemic brought trials but let them also develop the business in other ways, and Alex tells us what their plans are for the next five years, as well as offering some candid advice to anyone considering turning their walking passion into a business.  26’44” 12.5MB

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Charlie Lee Potter talking walking

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Charlie Lee Potter has had a lifelong passion for working with sound especially in creatively weaving soundscapes to evoke places. As a former BBC radio journalist and foreign correspondent, she knows how the sound of a place helps to tell complicated stories and has applied this to a fascinating series of podcasts recorded on walks called “Inside a Mountain”. However there is a lot more to Charlie than just working with sound, as Andrew Stuck discovers on the walk they take across Christchurch Meadows in Oxford. 25’50” 12.1MB

Inside a Mountain podcast art
Ridge & Furrow artwork
Ridge & Furrow artwork

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Hana Sutch talking walking

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Five years ago when looking for places to get close to nature with her toddler, Hana Sutch found it proved to be absurdly difficult.  Although through recommendations, she found One Tree Hill and Sydenham Hill Woods, Hana became convinced that what was needed was a simple app to help solve this problem facing many parents.  She applied her digital design skills and came up with Go Jauntly.  With an infectious laugh and an intriguing story to tell, Andrew Stuck and Hana quickly fell into a candid conversation, about how Go Jauntly came into being. This is a must listen for anyone, who like Andrew, has thought of creating an app, as Hana reveals just how tough it can be. 26’20” 12.3MB

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Fiona Hesse talking walking

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Fiona Hesse, is the guest curator of WALK!, the current exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Gallery in Frankfurt that includes work from more than 40 international artists.  Recorded over a Zoom call, it was Andrew Stuck’s pleasure to learn more about Fiona’s own journey to becoming a curator, her enthusiasm for contemporary art, and in how she  undertook a PhD on walking artist, Hamish Fulton. Hamish was one of the first Talking Walking interviewees back in 2008.  Although the opening of the WALK! exhibition was delayed by COVID, some of the artists featured were able to include work they had created under pandemic restrictions. Fiona reveals some of the criteria used to select works, offers a useful working definition of walking art, as well as suggesting a couple of walking art practices for listeners to try. 24’51” 11.6MB

Fiona Hesse
Hamish Fulton, 35 Walks Map. Europe. 1971-2019, 2019, Druck, 68,2 x 67,7 cm, © the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
Schirn_Presse_Walk_Diaz_Morales_Pasajes_III.jpg
Sebastián Díaz Morales, Pasajes III, 2013, Video (Farbe, Ton), Monitor, 12:30 Min. im Loop, Filmstill, © the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid

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Featured Image credit: Schirn_Presse_Walk_Chung_A_Thousand_Years.jpg Tiffany Chung, A Thousand Years Before and After, 2012, Video (Farbe, Ton), 09:01 Min., Filmstill, © Tiffany Chung

Ella Parry-Davies talking walking

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Ella Parry-Davies, a post-doctoral researcher at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, has been facilitating homemakersounds.org, a collection of soundwalks made with Filipina domestic and care workers employed “behind closed doors” in the Lebanon and the UK. In this interview, the ambiguity, complexity and unfairness of government immigration policy is discussed, as well as how recording and co-editing soundwalks develops an intimacy rarely found in ethnographic research. 21’12” 9.9MB

Recorded in February 2020 on a walk around residential streets in Swiss Cottage, London.  Published to coincide with International Women’s Day 8 March 2020

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STOP PRESS

Saturday 19 June 2021 Join Ella for “Home Makers: go for a walk with sounds made by migrant domestic workers” – read more about this forthcoming event.

Helen Ottaway talking walking

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Helen Ottaway is a musician and composer, and Frome resident for 22 years, who has been invited to curate LISTEN: A Season of Sound Art taking place in Frome from the 20 July until Sound Walk Sunday on the 1 September, 2019. In this episode, interviewed midway through the LISTEN, Helen explains how it came to fruition, its breadth of events taking place, and how she particularly wanted to include a listening walk and a geo-located sound walk. Helen herself, has been involved in creating sound art outdoors and is keen to include more walking in her future work.
21’24” 10MB

Listen: A Season of Sound Art runs until Sunday 1 September – check the programme of events here

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Photo credit: Frances Ottaway