Falk:
The idea of the project was to get to know the city to which I am new and to connect to it - through running it. This idea didn't come from nowhere, but rather from different directions and thoughts: First, I feel that a huge part of the close connection I feel with the city I live in - Rotterdam - comes from literally "spending time on my feet", through running it. In fact, I know the city's routes on foot better than by car or public transport. I was wondering if I could connect to the city of Tilburg - the place where I would work for the next couple of years - through the act of running. Obviously, 3-4 runs per week in Rotterdam are not the same as one long run through Tilburg, but still the pure act of moving one's body with one's feet on the ground, through an environment while paying attention to it in as much aspects as possible gave me enough confidence that this could work.
Second, I was inspired by the ultra running projects of Rickey Gates, such as Transamericana (2017) and Every Single Street (2018). These projects are about exploring and experiencing surroundings (a country in Transamericana, a city in Every Single Street) through running them, about meeting people, connecting to them and learning from them, rather than about a competitive understanding of running. On the website of Every Single Street, Gates writes: "To walk a place is to truly know a place." I couldn't agree more.
When artists enter a new surrounding, a cultural or social context, and they aim to work in these surroundings in a way that relates in any particular manner, there are a variety of ways to connect with these new surroundings, environments and contexts.
If we come to a new surrounding, a new city to make socially engaged work there, what are possible ways to get to know this city, this local context?
Broad questions, which can have as diverse answers as there are practitioners aiming to connect. When Falk Hübner came to Tilburg in late August 2021, to start his work as research professor of Artistic Connective Practices, he decided to connect to this new environment, the city of Tilburg, through a rather simple act: to run through the city (in the language of runners: to run the city), through its neighbourhoods and areas, past a number of places that "should be seen" - not in a touristic sense of curating a "beautiful run" along the hot spots, but with the intention to get to know the city, a part of its history, and to become able to connect to it, at least to a certain extent.
Concerning running as a connective practice
Running is an ubiquituous activity in most Western urban areas and environments. People run for different reasons. The more obvious reasons, or at least the ones that come up frequently in conversations with runners, are instrumental: to stay fit and healthy, or as a balance to desk- and screen-based work. A view on numerous blogs and websites reveals that running is often driven by having some kind of goal in mind: Reaching a personal record on a certain distance, or becoming able to run certain distances in themselves, such as a 10K, half marathon or a marathon.
Philosopher and runner Mark Rowlands offers an alternative to this more instrumental perspective on running. He states: "If I run only because I want to stay healthy, or because I want to stay alive, then my running is work: an activity that is directed towards something outside it, something that gives it its purpose and value" (Rowlands 2013, 88). Instead of such an instrumental perspective, he argues that we run due to running's instrinsic value: running for the sake of running, for the sake of experiencing running
in itself. And running as play with one's surrounding:
In Rowlands case, running as a play with Scottish mountains, in our case, running as a play with (or as a playful way of discovering) the city that is still largely unknown to Falk.
After the project, a class of Fontys ArtCoDe students, under supervision of photographer Mariska van Zutphen spent several days with the ideas, concept and practice of Running Tilburg. In several groups, the students inquired different areas of the original route, did research on background, contexts and history, and finally created alternative mappings of these areas. The students found it most striking that they were able to visit the various places with a different kind of intention and experience, which made them more aware of where they travel on a daily basis.
"Reminding myself that I get to be alive, I get to be here, and… just the gift of life."
Sally McRae during a 100 mile race, part of her project Choose Strong, in which she chose to run 1 mile for every months of her mother's life, who passed away at age 43.
From this idea, we (Falk Hübner and Heleen de Hoon) created the first project of the professorship: Running Tilburg. The project and the idea to run the city happened in the first year of the professorship Artistic Connective Practices; a year in which the very concept of artistic connectivity still needed to be explored and developed. It is important to note that both the theme of connectivity and the title of the professorship, Artistic Connective Practices, were already a given when we started this work in Tilburg. Artistic connectivity as such is a notion that had been coined by designer and research explorer Cynthia Hathaway (2020), but had not been conceptually explored yet. So Falk decided to make a first physical and embodied step into connectivity through his non-artistic and non-professional practice of long-distance running, by moving his body through the city, its various areas and environments, and get to know them. This idea is not entirely without precedence, and is inspired by the work of ultrarunner Rickey Gates (see left below).
Heleen:
When Falk suggested to connect to the city of Tilburg through running, I needed to find ways to connect to this practice. Falk is an experienced long distance runner, training regularly and successfully completing marathons. The idea of spending time on my feet, exploring new surroundings by walking, resonated with me. The step towards running, however, would have to be made for this project.
This project (and those that may follow) explores how running can be a connective practice, and with and for whom. While running is something most people understand, does one need to be a runner to fully grasp it? I wonder if the distinctiveness of running, especially over longer distances, can inspire different kinds of encounters, as seen in the example of Rickey Gates.
To learn about running, I have been inspired by Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2009). According to him “Running has a lot of advantages. First of all, you don’t need anybody else to do it, and no need for special equipment. You don’t have to go to any special place to do it. As long as you have running shoes and a good road you can run to your heart’s content” (p. 45).
The way I understand running is a form of self-discipline - mind over matter. A runner can improve their practice over time, their endurance improves through repetition. Murakami seems to seek out the predictability of this process. Falk shares that you have to keep this process interesting by choosing the routes, running together with others, setting challenges, etc. Long distance runners are meticulous about their performance, constantly trying to improve, in a way competing against themselves.
Running strikes me as a primarily solitary practice - perhaps not the most obvious choice for a ‘connective practice’. Murakami describes running as intentionally spending time alone:
“The desire in me to be alone hasn’t changed. Which is why the hour or so I spend running, maintaining my own silent, private time, is important to help me keep my mental well-being. When I’m running I don’t have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody. All I need to do is gaze at the scenery passing by. This is a part of my day I can’t do without” (p.26).
Spending time with a city, as Falk planned to do for Running Tilburg, is a solitary experience in many ways. Yet, we wish to explore whether and how this “passing scenery” can also be a meaningful encounter with Tilburg. To broaden this perspective, we have looked for ways to open up this process to others, to those who run and others who want to connect with this practice.
Relation to walking
Running is also an alternative to the activity of walking, - both in fact activities of moving one's own body through environments - also widely practiced by artists, designers and researchers, although with key differences: being more physical, covering (much) larger distances, requiring training and more regularity in general.
There are a few obvious relations to walking within art and artistic research,1 as a method coming from architecture and social sciences. The simple act of walking as a research method is utilised in various disciplines, both in the humanities and particularly social sciences and geography, as well as in architecture and urbanism, art and design. We are not elaborating on this relation in this exposition in particular, but it is nevertheless interesting to keep in mind; see, for example:
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https://methods.sagepub.com/base/download/DatasetStudentGuide/mobile-methods-memory-park
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https://www.kabk.nl/en/lectorates/design/kabinets-walking-as-a-method
There are several initiatives and projects that aim to contextualise running as, or in relation to artistic practice as well. The "Running Artfully Network", for example, is an international network that is concerned with the idea "to reframe running as an artistic intervention to unpick our time of multiple global crises, and to create a more equitable and creative future" (https://www.runningartfullynetwork.com/, 9 October 2024).
We present Running Tilburg as a project that does not actually provide final outcomes already, neither in artistic work nor concrete arguments. The general idea of this exposition is thus not so much the presentation of such (finished) research results, but rather to document the project on the one hand, and to trace the various inspirations that informed the project on the other. Furthermore, we are thinking about what this offers in terms of ideas, as springboard for further work, or, as phrased in generic terms by Isabelle Stengers' (2018, 79): "What can we learn here?" In this sense, the research exposition is first and foremost a report and (light) reflection on the project regarding how to research connectivity, tools for doing research into connective practices. It feels as an "in-between" outcome, an "outcome-in-becoming", which leads to new ideas and projects that could not have emerged without this project, rather than anything final in itself; an opening towards a number of ideas, to be explored further in the future.
The aim of this exposition is to offer an attempt to articulate, communicate and share the experiences that emerged through this project and through the concrete process of running the city: by means of images, autoethnographic field notes, a map based on GPS data, the script for the run, and a number of reflections: both from Falk as the "experiencer", as well as from Heleen as dramaturge of the project. We invite you, the reader, to "run by reading along", so to speak, to explore the exposition and follow our experiences and reflections.
The project has taken place under the umbrella of the professorship Artistic Connective Practices. It explores running as a connective practice. The "artistic" has not specifically been part of the project as such, although this project serves as a springboard for a variety of ideas concerning potential artistic connective practices.
A first example of such a "follow-up" work is to be found at the very bottom of this exposition: A number of students from the ArtCoDe programme (Art, Communication and Design) at Fontys Academy of the Arts engaged with our project, guided by teacher-researcher Mariska van Zutphen. The students explored parts of the areas of the run and developed ways of mapping these areas. They were informed by their physical experiences of being on location and by Falk's story of his own experiences, as well as researching background, history and contexts of the locations in question. In this sense, their explorations are essentially a result of having shared our experiences (by means of telling about it, sharing the story, the ideas, and sharing the map, route and the script with the varying locations) and doing further work with it.
Finally, this work also found its way into the inaugural lecture "In Good Company" (2022), which outlines the conceptual points of departure, the methodological approach of "thinking together, collectively, in circles", and frames the notion of artistic connective practices in the form of three "conceptual clouds": the artistic, connectivity and practices. Much of this work has been carried out in co-creation with the "Connective Intra-Activiteam": Danae Theodoridou, Aart Strootman, Juriaan Achthoven, Jan Staes, Heleen de Hoon and Falk Hübner.
We chose to write the main text of the exposition in the I/we-form, which is the main thread. Due to the autoethnographic nature of this text, we included coloured notes here and there, which are personal notes from Heleen or Falk. These personal thoughts can be read as short comments or interventions on what is discussed in the main text.
The exposition includes the map of the run, drawn on the basis of the GPS data while running. The wide format of the exposition, including its "cornerstone quotes" is intended to let you experience just a slight bit of the distance, even if only on a computer screen.
The first important choice we needed to make in the process towards the run, and the actual track, was who to ask for meaningful locations to visit; who to include in the process of making the route. This also felt as an ethical question, as it is by definition "important to think through who you are planning to include - and who, therefore, you are planning to exclude - and why" (Kara 2018, 96).
We asked a number of colleagues at Fontys Academy of the Arts, from all parts of the organisation (heads of studies, teachers, support staff, researchers) who live in Tilburg. We hosted an informal gathering with this group over coffee and cake, to talk about the city and places that need to be seen or experienced. We invited them to "bring places with them", to suggest places together with personal narratives, reasons why they think a newcomer needs to visit or pass through these places. A physical map on the shared table was part of this encounter/session.
Falk:
Next to offering the places themselves, it was intriguing how a natural conversation about the city, its various places, neighbourhoods and regions emerged. Where the various participants live and lived in the past, and how they have experienced different areas of the city. In itself, we expected such a kind of conversation, but what was interesting for me was that through listening to all these stories and exchanges, connected to the physical map on the table, I was getting a more embodied idea of the city and its various part.
Heleen:
Many of our guests were eager to suggest places they thought would be ideal for running in and around Tilburg – long, uninterrupted roads, parks and natural environments. They were also confused about Falk’s plans and the total distance of the run: Are you going to do all that in one day?
With the proposals of the participants, we had the opportunity to get to know (parts of) the city through their eyes.
Falk, being the only one at the table unfamiliar with Tilburg, was visibly understanding more and more about the city throughout the conversation, pointing at the map, making connections to previous stories, recognizing neighborhoods and particular places.
Hello everyone!
Some of you know me already, some have likely only heard that I have started to work at the Academy of the Arts since September 2021.
And this is exactly the reason for my email, and for a small project: I am new here, new to this place, the school, and the city. Together with Heleen de Hoon I have set up a project to explore and get to know the city. As a passionate runner, it is the plan to do this running, to spend time on my feet and to encounter citizens of Tilburg.
You know the city all too well, as you live here.
So Heleen and I have thought of the following: We organise a moment to have coffee and cake together, on Wednesday, 3 November, between 13:00-16:00. You are warmly invited. We understand that not everyone might be available, and not for the entire time. That is okay. We will be there and will welcome everyone who is able to make it. You could also just come for a part of this time, or quickly drop by.
We do ask you to bring something with you. Not a piece of cake or your own coffee, but an idea: for a place, a neighbourhood, a specific building, an area, a park or a group of people that can always be found at the same place. Whatever it is, we are looking for places and stories we can take with us to create the route we will make through Tilburg. We like to ask you to bring ONE of these places with you, together with a short story why you chose for this place exactly.
Translated and slightly shortened version of the email Falk sent
to the Tilburg-based colleagues in October 2021.
As a following step in the project, we collected these various places and created a route through Tilburg, and from this route made both a GPS track file for the route to follow on a smartwatch, as well as a script to follow on a mobile phone during the run, to be able to keep track of the places and the reasons (and stories) to go to these places.
Falk made the conscious choice to run alone, in order to let the personal experience be as strong as possible, not hindered by conversations or on-the-go reflections. There were two points of encounter: First, roughly about half the route Falk met Heleen and coordinator Ingrid Westendorp at Zandpoort ("sand gate", up left in the map below), to check in, change clothing and resupply water and food. Second, Heleen and Falk met at about 46 kilometers out, in the Moerenburg area:
A green area, with lots of trees and fields, used by locals for walking and leisure. We were taking a brief walk there, too, while listening to the composition Moerenburg by "stadscomponist" ("composer of the city") Mathijs Leeuwis.2 We walked a bit while doing this and talking about the piece, before setting off to run the last part of the route, with Heleen accompanying Falk by bike.
This script contains the different places/locations, at times with a map fragment for easier access, and shorthand notes on the reasons for visiting them, or the stories connected to the places, to be used during the run (translated from its Dutch original). The names are all names of the colleagues involved in the collective conversation about the city, its places and stories.
0: Circushal Stappegoor
1: Koningsplein
Mariska took her photos of "real citizens of Tilburg" at the kermis here. The "most ugly square".
2: Vittorio Persian Ice
Try to make a stop here voor a chat with Vittorio. Anne: "When I was pregnant I could still do small walks, so I sat on the bench at Vittorio for a little chat."
3: Nachtzuster (Night nurse) / Carré
New cultural place to meet in Tilburg, suggested by Rhiannon and Sidney.
4: Market
During the time of the run the market is happening; an opportunity to hear people talking in the local dialect. Mariska: "It's [the dialect] so difficult to understand!"
5: Theresia-neighbourhood and -square
Geertje lives in this neighbourhood, where many (cultural) activities take place. A village in the city, mixed community, lots of interest, many citizen's initiatives. Includes a city garden, for which the community shares the key. A "garlic-feast" in September, with cooking and playing around garlic. A petting zoo, taken care of by the community. A wheelie bin exposition every Thursday, conceived by the Tilburg artist who has developed the Tilburg font.
6: Wilhelminapark - Textile museum - Pont
Location suggested during the conversation. In front of museum De Pont: "Sky Mirror" by Anish Kapoor. The textile museum is one of the few remains of Tilburg's textile industry (apart from the textile school).
6A. Kloostertuin Dionyssusstraat - Marietje Kessels monument
Liza used to live in this street. A playground for children, part of an elementary school, shared with people living in the neighbourhood. Includes a communal garden for which the people living here care.
The Marietje Kessels monument, a bronze hopscotch created by a local artist. Marietje Kessels was a young girl, raped and killed in 1900. So, a playground with history and stories. Inscription: "Ooit zal deze samenleving veilig zijn voor kinderen." ("One day, this society will be safe for children.")
7: Spoorpark
Location suggested during the conversation. Citizens' initiative.
8: Westpoint
Suggested by Sidney. Characteristic building for the "skyline" of the city, with its coloured lighting.
9: Kromhoutpark
Mentioned and suggested by John because of Tilburg's past as a garrison town. The watchtower has been preserved, as a remainder of the "Kromhoutkazerne."
10: Vredenhof kerkhof
"A very beautiful cemetery" (Christianne).
11: Kapel aan Delmerweg & Joodse begraafplaats
Suggested by Liesbeth. The official name of the chapel is: "Maria Oorzaak Onzer Blijdschap." The chapels are quiet places in the city, where it is evident to stay silent. "It is a public place, while you come there to get to yourself."
12: Warandepark & Grotto
The "Oude Warande" is a spider web; constructed with gardening techniques of Baroque architecture. In the middle of the part: Grotto artwork created by Callum Morton, and a café.
13: Stadsbos 013
A large area, mentioned a few times as a "nice area to run" - and to bike, walk, etc.
14: Reeshof ABC
Rhiannon grew up in the Reeshof, one of the first Vinex-neighbourhoods in The Netherlands. A nice place to live, but far away from the city. Noone is on the streets. Traffic jams at the beginning and end of each day to go in and out of the area. The different parts of neighbourhood have alphabetic names: "This is in the C-neighbourhood."
15: Zandpoort
Artwork by Geert van de Camp, from the artists collective Observatorium. Work has been initiated by citizens living in the Reeshof.
16: Draaiend huis / The Turning House
Artwork by John Körmeling. One of the most controversial works in public space in Tilburg, in first instance due to maintenance costs.
17: Noord / Tilburg North
Nobody suggested an actual location in this area of the city, but it has been mentioned quite often. Known as a socially complex area of the city.
18: Moerenburg & composer
One of the "really nice places to run."
Anne adds that the work of city composer Mathijs Leeuwis is installed here, to be listened to via a QR code, at Café Zomerlust.
"What was the point of these last few hours, these 26 miles and 385 yards? Was it really worth it? That is the beauty of it - there was no point."
– Mark Rowlands, Running With the Pack (2013), p. 181
"I became the neuron, the connector that I was wanting to be from the beginning of the trip."
– Rickey Gates, Transamericana