P.1 Social Practices (Digital) Dérive + Contamination: Solvitur Ambulando, It is Solved by Walking
To Walk (Work) Together
How can we go on a walk together, even when this is not possible?
When we walk, we do not all move in exactly the same way, yet we still share an experience in common. Working together does not have to mean losing the agency — the ability to choose, act, and feel empowered — that comes from being individuals. Walking together means finding ways to share an experience while still holding space for difference. In this course, walking was approached as a form of attention and listening: listening to our environments, to one another, and to the conditions shaping our movements and encounters.
The course invited participants to explore what it means to be part of something collective and how this can be represented through a walk, a conversation, or an exchange. What are the contours of a shared experience? What does it feel like? How can individual and collective forms of sense-making emerge from acts that may appear ordinary or commonplace? The knowledge and experiences generated through these explorations were approached as research methods that could continue into future projects and artistic practices. The tools explored throughout the course included walking and movement, postal systems and mail art, digital research methods, documentation practices, and archiving.
Developed during the COVID-19 lockdown for first-year bachelor students in the Social Practices minor programme, the course responded to a moment in which gathering physically within the school and classroom was no longer possible. Beginning with walking as a method, the course considered how it might still be possible to think about togetherness, co-creation, and the cultivation of connective communities at a distance. The concept of the dérive informed both digital forms of meandering and physical movement through urban spaces, encouraging students to reconsider their immediate environments from new perspectives.
Teachers proposed a series of participatory walking experiments combining mail art, performance practices, community listening, and somatic writing exercises. Rather than culminating in a single final project, the course developed a shared digital archive platform where students uploaded visual documentation of their experiments as a commons. These visual materials became part of a collective resource that participants could return to, rework, and transform into new artworks and collaborative propositions.
Alongside these practice-based experiments, the course included lectures exploring diverse walking practices across artistic disciplines, sensory experiences, and community contexts. Topics included sound and exploratory walks, deep observation, walking as community mapping, walking as resistance, and walking as a collective listening practice and vehicle for social change. The course also examined the idea of the digital dérive: how we move, wander, and navigate through data spaces, and how artists and activists use data as both material and critical terrain for artistic and political practice.
Tutors: Marijke Appelmann, Karlijn Souren, and Michelle Teran
Walis Johnson’s walking project in Brooklyn traces the historical roots of gentrification in the neighbourhood by mapping the legacy of redlining and discriminatory lending practices that prevented African Americans and other communities of colour from accessing home mortgages and business loans in New York City and urban communities across the United States.Mail Art Assignment: Send a postcard based on a conversation that you have just had with your peer in the course. The only artistic restriction is that it fits through a mailbox. Mail Art Assignment: Draw a map of the route that you took on the way to the mailbox.Writing experiment: Structure a poem according to city streets. Take a five-block walk, writing one line of text per block. Write about what you are hearing during your walk.Digital Journeys: Select one of the three following assignments to go on a digital journey. a) Write a travel review for a trip you didn’t take. b) Using Google Maps satellite view, stitch together a new city. Give it a name, and invent laws for it. c) Attempt to fine the shortest route from one Wikipedia artist (of your choice) to another (of your choice) by clicking on links in the page (make notes of your route). Walking assignment: Capture togetherness in an individual walk. a) Take a photo of the sky. b) Collect a family of seven objects or details that you see. c) Reflect upon your walk when you get back home.
Dear M., dear E., dear L., dear Y., dear K., dear Z., dear O., dear R., dear L., dear O., dear J., dear N., dear D., dear L., dear E., dear D., dear J., dear R., dear L., dear C., dear K., dear M., dear S., dear C., dear M.;
Thank you for your theory reflections. I read, with pleasure, through all your comments, insights, questions, and ideas. I’ve decided to answer everybody back in this letter. I had this idea that this letter might function in the same way as the collective archive you helped build up together. That perhaps in this way, one might encounter some moments of commonalities and synchronicities, counter-perspectives and divergences emerging from that conversation that can only be had by that particular collection of people in the (Zoom and otherwise) room.
Regarding questions, I think of the notion of the loving question, a proposition put forth by regeneration practitioner Wangui wa Kamonji in a workshop on healing that she gave at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Wa Kamonji refers to the potential of questions as “wild creators” that can “look up horizons that are not yet met”. Rather than thinking of questions as leading to a result of some form of resolution, one can think about the power of questions and questioning as means for keeping within the flow of life.
Therefore what I read in your reflections are many questions, and possibilities, and unmet horizons. And that keeps life interesting and ongoing and opens up to new beginnings.
On beginnings: Many of you didn’t quite understand the point of the texts and practical exercises, but they started to make sense as time progressed. It often (but not always) happens that way. What began as a big jumble, or seemingly random, makes sense the further one goes along the path. Or sometimes you just get lost. But that’s okay too. Or to put in your words, ‘living the now, living the day, living the two weeks of living the world.’
When you wrote regarding Social Practices, ’a practice in dialogue with’, I also thought about this experience of ‘living in the now’. Some of you mentioned it as a ‘practice of being in conversation with people’. I also feel that your comment was quite insightful when you made the relation between individual and community. But it could just as well be in dialogue with non-humans, resources, spaces, systems, and the environment. One can think about dialogue as a type of radical interdependence, that we are all entangled with our surroundings and the world. That we are never, ever, separate. We learn in dialogue. This relation also comes to mind when I think about social practice.
Think about claiming places as spaces of learning. A city street can be a place for learning, but where else? How about a park? A forest? So let’s try to map it out a bit. Maps are cool. I could talk about them forever.
Many of you wrote about walking. You wrote about walking without a set destination and walking as an ‘experience of indefiniteness’. You were walking as awareness and walking as listening, feeling, and hearing, of the ability to see small details. You spoke about walking as a movement that creates storylines. How your steps, as well as observations of others, might make their way into future designs and illustrations.
You spoke about walking as a form of writing. That the streets were filled with conversations, and all that was needed was a long walk to make a poem from the city. It made me think of a particular scene in the novel ‘Sexing the Cherry’ by British author Jeanette Winterson which you might like, but I digress…
You spoke about walking as learning, learning while walking. You are walking as opening up a way of doing research, walking as a way of knowing, organizing thoughts, or going at things from different perspectives. Walking as a way of unknowing, walking as unlearning. Walking as attunement, as presence, as being in the present. You spoke about ‘flipping the schedule’, of what happens when you do something you would typically do, but in reverse. That perhaps by disrupting everyday patterns, you could experience them anew or even begin to question why those patterns even exist at all.
You also wrote about ‘walking as a woman at night’. You were walking with a ‘strut in your step’. You were walking as a form of resistance and walking as a collective as a sense of belonging. You immersed yourself in a moment of being together in protest, moving through the street, bringing people together. You were walking during lockdown and walking as exploring new ways of being together, being social. You were walking as place-making.
There were some comments about mail art. And then a reflection or two about how the mail produced was the result of two strangers who then became friends. It was more about how the small stories we tell each other become connected to massive and profound things. A little chat might lead to a larger conversation about the state education system or mental health and self-care in lockdown.
Július Koller was an artist mentioned a few times. So I guess he struck a nerve 🙂 Stepping off from Koller’s work where he makes a postcard to the city, you consider the act of writing a letter to ‘anybody that might have anything to do with social practice, as a teacher, student, or researcher’. I savoured this formulation.
Some of you did not include a reference to an artist or other practitioners in your text. Perhaps you might not see the point in this exercise, but I would like you to think about how your work connects to a broader frame, a larger context.
This broadening — which we might also think about as deepening and expanding — is also part of learning, thinking about how one might situate one’s practice in the world. Who are you in dialogue with? Why do you want to do the work that you do? What artists, designers, thinkers, activists, citizens, grannies, neighbours, dogs, birds, trees, soil, practices, thoughts, ideas, theories, etc., might help you deepen and think more in-depth into the work you might be developing in the present and near future?
Lastly, I would like to respond to the following question you posed. It’s quite a long one, but here goes…
Your question:
“A question I have for social practise is whether or not you, the teachers, think of yourself as people who understand the world around you well enough to be able to teach others how to look at the world? Is there a moment where you say to yourself “Ah, now it all makes sense!” or does the world just continue to baffle you? Does that ever get easier or does the world seem to get more organized as you get older?
My tentative answer:
The world does not get more organized, or safe or secure, or stable, as I get older. It gets even more entrenched in its complexity and its unraveling and in what is truly at stake. Whereas before I might have tended to arrive at answers quickly, now I find myself sitting with questions and finding means and pathways to address these questions. Mostly I stay in the process, which is maybe why I like teaching so much. So, no, I am not able to teach others how to look at the world. Or maybe I am, but only in the way that I try to find and bring together other voices, other guides committed to the loving questions, of finding ways to question the world. I am trying to engage with curiosity, generosity, dialogue, exchange, and building knowledge in common. Since we only had two weeks together, I opted to start very simply with a few texts, methods, exercises, and practices.
If we had more time together, we would have had, even more, an opportunity to build up a space for learning and for collective inquiry. If we were not in lockdown, we might have met in a forest or a park where we could call in other teachers present that are nonhuman. We could have gone on silent walks together, for several hours at a time and move slowly and collectively with the same question asked multiple times: Who am I? Time is an essential ingredient, as well as spaces of informality. We could spend infinite moments mapping out a baffling world, finding the loving questions.
But thank you for your question. And it makes me think about other ways to start and other possibilities, for future courses, and future teaching opportunities.
So now I reach the end of this email. Let me end by saying that if you want to talk about maps, or walks, or storylines, or questions, or birds, or social practice, or other stuff, don’t hesitate to get in touch. It has been a pleasure.
