Abstract

This article explores walking as a research practice in the urban public space of Amsterdam. This text brings selected observations and prototypes from artistic research together with experiences of participants from the "Walking back to Amsterdam" walkshop during the Walking as Research Practice (WARP) Conference in 2022. It is my drift between the vision and the reality of life lost and found in broken artefacts in the city, from a general look at the body of the city to discovering its details and dirt from the cracks. I aim to look through a magnifying glass held by a walker, who regulates the zoom for us. The idea is to help understand public space as overlapping layers of the many spatial dimensions – with a particular focus on the materiality (physical space) and the imaginary (symbolic space) – that act as social tools for new possibilities of a common future (Huber 2015). This drift asks for the creative potentiality of an ex-centric public space and for the power to “co-create communication” with other-than-humans.

“Dear participant and found matter,

At the beginning, before our wandering, please stop for the moment and recognise your present, inner emotions. With this package of feelings you will start your drift with broken artefacts. While walking, keep in mind: yourself, your movement, your surroundings and feelings. Stay curious, that will help you to shift your perspective.”

Before each walkshop, I try to land well on the place, or site-specific situation, and define where I am and what is going on around me. To be as aware as possible, to awaken curiosity towards the unknown with participants and other-than-humans encounters. From this moment we can dig deeper and try to find the tactile relation to something that resonates with us, at the moment. To imprint the shape of the artefact in soft clay or make a frottage of the texture on paper with graphite.

This is the perspective of a visual artist and eccentric mediator. I curate dialogues between object and imagination in public space and translate other-than-human speculative stories so they can be heard. I walk with the point of view of a female flâneur or a modern mudlark.

I read the surroundings of urban public space as the scenography of human traces and signs (Van der Tuin and Verhoeff, Traces, 196-8). All these layers become poetic and political in aesthetic and meaning. The human traces lose their identities and become material for curation of new thing-power (Bennett 2010), which fabulate with those who want to discover them. Walking and wondering from the perspective of matter reveals knots in between broken artefacts and dirt (Van der Tuin and Verhoeff, Dirt, 78-80).

Focusing on downtown Amsterdam, walking seems a natural activity, even expected by the city's body, to explore and penetrate it. Masses of tourists, visitors, students, workers and inhabitants roll through the streets and bridges over the canals to take in the atmosphere of the place every single day. Collectively tracking signs from the past and leaving new traces, this constant exchange has been performed in the city since the 13th century. Amsterdam’s local nickname is Mokum. The name comes from the Yiddish word for place, macom. The place mainly concerns the physical image and people's perception though not necessarily with the people-place permanent association. In this context, Amsterdam carries as many places as encounters, steeped in multilayers and intercultural heritage. There is a collection of reveals, full of traces of ancestors in language, architecture, art and people's memories. This public space gathers stories, remarks and the human and other-than-human perspectives brought by objects, animals and weather, which together become physical and symbolic common space for various participants. When we look more precisely, we discover forgotten, lost and hidden micro-traces, abandoned in the layers of the city. To retrace them, we must first walk in or land in the place and become part of it. Then we will build up our layers and leave our own traces.

The verb ‘to walk’ owes its etymological origin to the Middle Dutch verb walken, which means to knead, to press, or to full. These activities seem very logical and timely, because what else are we doing to the earth or in between sidewalk breaks? By the weight of our bodies and with the help of gravity we push the matter under us. We knead, imprint, trample and leave traces, whether we want to or not. Additionally, we press any thing deeper, beneath our feet, e.g. seeds, environmental fossils or broken artefacts. We leave our footprints on top of each other, laying down matter. When we shift our focus to the horizontal encounters on the ground, we have a chance to look at our surroundings from a frog’s perspective. We see layers of before-invisible bodies, already left behind, brought by someone from another continent or from the next-door apartment. From this perspective, wandering becomes an act of intuitive networking between found traces and a drift between places and imagination to reach new speculative relations.

The small things that seem to be external to categories are trying to speak up. They are not objects anymore; they are too small for recycling and not yet fossilised. Too big for dust, too small for trash, spontaneously produced from human daily activities, placed somewhere in between environmental debris and architecture. This sense of non-belonging matter allows for re-imagination and speculation. Since they are constantly moving, they don't belong to any place, but they are replaced. They represent the traveller's state of belonging in between, but without going home someday. This permanent placeless state of the small things is creating a kind of trace with a common identity of constantly changing and assembling matter, a vibrant group of separated, broken artefacts (Bennett 2010). Can we see the city from the junk bug perspective and learn from our common traces? Can we learn how to dig deeper in our imagination to the matter world? Can we learn how to co-create communication with other-than-humans in public space? 

Together with a group of participants, I was trying to answer some of these questions. As part of the Walking back to Amsterdam program at Vox-Pop, commissioned by the Walking-with Amsterdam WARP Conference 2022, I guided the performative walkshop with speculative artefacts in the Binnengasthuisstraat. We were looking for a relation between our current emotions and found matter. To save the temporary relations with otherness of the artefacts, I asked participants to use two methods of imprinting. This included imprinting the shape of the artefact in soft clay or making a frottage of the texture on paper with graphite. All these materials were suited to create a visible communication in between the body of the participant, the transitive material of clay or paper, and a temporary shape of a trace. The collection of saved imprints of the artefacts opened up the imagination and allowed us to share the stories, creating new interpretations and questions in the last part of the walkshop. Some participants found their personal relationships with artefacts, others started to fabricate the discoveries. That process helped to understand urban public space as a body, caring much more for imagination and reconstruction than we would have if we'd witnessed the events we were researching firsthand. Christine, a participant of the walkshop said: “I found this walk poetic and as an outcome we created a strong incidental bond between everyone by making them walk and share their stories.”

The poetic aspect of walking in public space is kneaded and pressed already by many generations. We should walk repeatedly and focus on the debris of daily life. We should sometimes slow down or even stop, extend our antennas and listen to our surroundings through our various senses. For new possibilities of a common future, we desperately need new interpretations, voices of other-than-human narrators (Tokarczuk 2018), shifts of perspective, disturbances of logic to open our imaginations. To connect already-existing dots, before invisible. To make visible dreams for new collective possibilities. Perhaps, the hint is not logical, singular nor unclear. Perhaps the hint is collective, civil, intuitive and speculative. It is the voice out of I, out of time and gender, and the plurality of the broken artefact(s). 

Hence, returning to the reflection of the participant, this incidental bond during the walk is an embodied example of a real possibility for co-creation of kinship with seemingly, until now, invisible or uninteresting beings. Wandering and looking for traces, awakening memories, and participating in simultaneous group action surprises our expectations. Through the methods used during the walkshop together with various matter, we increased the common social imagination of trust and disturbed routine for new future spaces of speculation. This perspective highlights a multitude of voices of unheard traces and speculative memory of matter. These voices are stretching the boundaries of curiosity and reveal affective relations with dirt as an opportunity for a new sociomaterial future in a manifold socio-environmental crisis.

While I walked in the city, the artefacts became the symbolic space of eccentric broken matter and dirt. I want to value matter and to create a counter-narrative to the anthropocentric one, valuing matter because of the material or physical benefits it can provide for humans and making other worlds visible through the creative power of imagination, self-representation and collective storytelling through vibrant materials. Can we then practise other-than-human relations with eccentric elements of our surroundings? What if traces have a voice and feelings that we do not hear? How can we reshape the imagination through walking, imprinting and collecting traces of a wider view, or even be able to escape time frames and land borders?These voices may be revealed by listening through our feet and by the coming layers of our future traces.

The essay is republished. The first time was published and edited in Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam 2023 in Walking as Research Practice (WARP): Special Issue WARP x Soapbox Journal.

References
Bennett, Jane. “The Agency of Assemblages.” Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke
University Press, 2010, pp. 20-38.

Tokarczuk, Olga. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2018.” NobelPrize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture. 02.02.2023

Huber, Laila. “Topographies of the Possible.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, vol. 24,
no. 2, 2015, pp. 34-54.

Van der Tuin, Iris and Nanna Verhoeff. “Dirt.” Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, pp. 78-80.

Van der Tuin, Iris and Nanna Verhoeff. “Traces.” Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, pp. 196-8.