Walking as spatial painting

Text: Bill Psarras © 2014

There are times that words cannot fully describe feelings or situations. It is this moment that the performed action of walking, the produced noise between feet and surface and the rhythmicity come to present an evolving melody on foot. It is a physical friction between body and surface that brings forward a poetic friction between the tectonic plates of street and walker’s soul. In my work ‘Urban Halo‘ (2013) (image below), my walking explored further performative ways between my feet and urban surfaces. When the working materials I chose became so basic (i.e. surface, movement), it was a challenging process of trying to go back to the basics. The materiality, the asphalt, the feet movements and rhythms became what I could call the “spatial colours” to speak aesthetically within place.

The enunciation of feelings takes place on the move; a spatial story where senses handle the threads of intensity by coloring the lived experience in place. The artist-flaneur/flaneuse becomes the performative enlivened pen that tells a story without words. Instead, it is this ‘non-representational approach‘ – to echo Thrift (2000) – a theoretical platform that has shifted the understanding of embodied, temporal and multi-sensual geographies and spatial practices. Therefore, I argue that walking and flaneur is able to tell stories on the move – a kind of live ‘storying‘ to echo Fraser (2012) – through a bodily gestural vocabulary. Every step becomes a letter and rhythm contributes to the formation of words and sentences.

Source: Urban Halo – Bill Psarras © (2013)

Bibliography

• Fraser, M. (2012). Once upon a problem. In Back, L. and Puwar, N. (eds.) Live Methods, London: Wiley.
• Thrift, N. (2000). ‘Non-Representational Theory’. In Johnston, R., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. et al. The Dictionary of Human Geography, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 556.
• Bill Psarras (2013). Urban Halo, 5:59′ walking performance, audiovisual, narration. Commissioned by Onassis Cultural Foundation ‘Visual Dialogues 2013‘ group exhibition, Nov. 2013-Jan. 2014, Athens (Greece).