Cities, houses, rooms, doors; homesickness. In her installations, paintings, and drawings, artist Astrid Kaemmerling makes constant reference to the intimate experience of home, as well as its absence. Nevertheless, she is also a "walking artist." Walking as a form of art first appeared in Europe as a soughing echo to the monumental American earthworks. Walking artists pushed forward the dematerialization of the artwork in search of bodily explorations of the unfamiliar, changing landscape.1 This legwork has them constantly on the move, always leaving. But why does Kaemmerling keep on walking if she misses that place called home?
Astrid Kaemmerling. 100 Days of Walk & Talk, 2017; walking performance, San Francisco, California. Courtesy of the Artist.
Information of this kind was collected in Kaemmerling's two-month Enos Park residency project, Walking Enos Park: Who Is Your Neighborhood? (2017), in Springfield, Illinois. The project included more than thirty one-hour, one-on-one walks with residents of Enos Park, a historic neighborhood undergoing urban-renewal processes after three decades of significant physical deterioration and changing demographics. While ambling, locals were invited to examine the history of the area, observe its present, and imagine a potential future brought by the urban-gentrification efforts. This walking-as-research approach, tested by the artist previously in the project 100 Days of Walk and Talk (2017) in San Francisco, allowed for unrestrained attention and trust to take place between artist and dweller, something highly valued by the latter and which—according to Kaemmerling—is not often easily attained in group sessions.
Astrid Kaemmerling. Walking Enos Park: Who Is Your Neighborhood?, 2017; solo exhibition, Visual Arts Gallery, University of Illinois Springfield, Springfield, Illinois. Courtesy of the Artist.
Astrid Kaemmerling. Enos Park Uncovered, 2017; artist-led, one-hour audio walk, Springfield Art Association, Springfield, Illinois. Courtesy of the Artist.
These beliefs led Kaemmerling to found both the Walk Discourse and the International Community of Artist Scholars, where her observations are diversified by other voices, and footsteps. The Walk Discourse, co-founded with Bay Area artist Minoosh Zomorodinia, provides a space for walking artists, researchers, and enthusiasts to exchange tools, methodologies, and practices that challenge and inspire the different approaches to walking art. Every second Sunday of the month a group "walkshop" is hosted. The five walkshops that have already occurred allowed participants to drift simultaneously in both urban and virtual space (through Dérive App, designed by Eduardo Cachucho and Babak Fakhamzadeh); visit sixty-eight of San Francisco's privately owned public open spaces (led by Walking Public); reflect on the systems of power that operate on the edges (led by artist Annie Albagli); collect the city's soundscape (led by Michal Wisniowski); and explore the fleeting and enduring landscape of Chinatown (led by Shirley Huey).
From Kaemmerling's constant interaction with walking artists, she observes that "walking artists set out to create a union between institutional conformity and activism [...] By placing their practice in the space in-between, they are able to provoke the system from within."7 This medium allows for a subtle reclamation of a slower pace, and a celebration of unique places within the gentrifying, privatizing, vehicular space.
Astrid Kaemmerling. The Walk Discourse, Walkshop #4, 2017; artist-led walk. Courtesy of the Artist.
Walking together can be a critical tool for instigating change and traversing boundaries of identity and ideology. As walking artist Simon Pope remarks, "Walking alongside becomes a means to negotiate a flow — of conversation, of movement. Moreover, it becomes symbolic of an ideal type of relation, where moving together, shoulder-to-shoulder, conveys the potential for mutuality, parity, or equality."11 Perhaps, only through shared local undertakings that are born out of a multifaceted, inclusive approach like Kaemmerling's, will we be able to create safe, resting places for those who wander across boundaries and borders.
For more information on the practice of walking artists, see http://www.walkingartistsnetwork.org.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6.
Astrid Kaemmerling, "Walking the Gentrifying Streetscape: Artistic Practice In San Francisco's Mission District" (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, College of Fine Arts, 2016), 282.
From an interview with the author on January 24, 2018.
Astrid Kaemmerling, "Walking the Gentrifying Streetscape: Artistic Practice in San Francisco's Mission District" (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, College of Fine Arts, 2016), 48.
From an in-person interview with Emilie St. Hilaire by Astrid Kaemmerling at the "Beyond Justification" conference in San Francisco, California, January 2018.
Simon Pope, "Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking," C Magazine, 2014, http://cmagazine.com/issues/121/walking-transformed-the-dialogics-of-art-and-walking.