Reflections on walking and the disruptive experience

Kenneth Russo

Our main interest is based on understanding spatial relationships from first-person experience, from our virtual and real body. Through the act of walking, movement in real time, we become cursors that dash across the interface of reality. A continuous process that brings us closer to the production of meanings, new relationships and representations, and also a dialogue with space and time, and the network. This article seeks to present a series of disruptive experiences, documented by the authors themselves, which constitute an exploratory framework of space to discover different symbolic interrelationships, and sketch out constructions of the common space in haptic, political, social and cultural mode. It offers a repository of unexpected, intersubjective encounters, from the empirical practice of walking, which arouses new perspectives to be able to interpret circumstantial spaces, to lose oneself in ‘non-places’, or reflect as to how to approach the landscape and/or the city by opening new imaginaries that add value to the ‘glocal’ place that we traverse and/or inhabit.

- Introduction

- Action: walking

- Historical becoming

- Time and space: walking

- Walking towards the non-place

- Walking as a relational act

- Walking in the interface

- Conclusions

- References

Historical becoming

In the book Fleurs du mal (1857), Charles Baudelaire introduced us to the concept of the flâneur, a character who walked purposelessly, open to all the vicissitudes and impressions that came his way as he walked aimlessly, a vital attitude; a different way of relating to reality and to the world. In this moving contemplation, the individual, attracted by the rhythms of the city, became integrated with the space and experienced an interpretation of his surroundings. In the avant-garde art period, movement and speed were also two elements that were greatly present in the performances of the Dadaists[1] (Fig. 1), and in their reinterpretation of flânerie through their symbolic actions and urban "walks" (1921) in that space not yet converted into what Guy Debord would later refer to as spectacle. According to Francesco Careri, a member of the Stalker group, the stimulation of the andare a Zonzo, referring to wasting time wandering aimlessly (Careri, 2002, p.186), implies the idea of travel and discovery. An exploration in the first-person of the continuous city, in which the figure of flâneur transcends the aesthetic experience to transform the space from walking and imagining, turning territory and city into landscape. In this sense, later (1955) would follow the practices of situationist dérive, or drifting, where urban space will be built as a collective exercise, making an indeterminate journey using the body as a phenomenological tool, unlike the approaches of the urban planning of capitalist power and its repressive apparatuses. (Kotanyi and Vaneigem, 2007).

[1] As Tristan Tzara wrote in the Dada manifesto (1918): “We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order.”

Fig. 1 — Documented walking experience in the Montparnasse cemetery. Paris. Grave of Tristan Tzara (Dadaist poet). (Source: author's own compilation).

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