Walking, Weaving, Writing: A Trialogue on Creating Multispecies Collaborations

“The Lost–and–Found’ symposium (2023–24) proposed to find new ways of revising art stories in search of potential changes. The symposia happened in Lisbon (6–7 December 2023), Warsaw (21–23 March 2024) and Riga (6–7 June 2024). One of the possibilities for participating in one of the events was to submit a proposal for a walkshop, a situated practice that is both a walk and a workshop. The three authors of this essay answered the organisers’ call by each imagining a different action in the urban contexts of Lisbon (the first symposium in the series) and Riga (the final symposium). As a situated practice, the walks and the activities proposed were embedded in and interconnected with the location in which they took place.^[7] The three authors presented three walkshops that were shaped by their distinct research interests and artistic practices.

The first walkshop was proposed by Marta in the Garden of Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. As an art historian and archivist, Marta has through her doctoral research been thinking and writing about processes of participation and the commons in museums and other cultural institutions. Her interest in poetry, non-formal academic writing and collective reading practices led her to “The Lost-and-Found” symposium. Among her texts are “Written in the sand: notes towards a participation archive” and “Museums: from accumulation to regeneration. Which place in ecology?”, both in Portuguese.^[8]

Titled “To be a Poet in the Margins of the Museum”, Marta’s walkshop took the life and pulsations of the garden as a creative impetus to virtually and poetically interact with the collection of the museum. In the afternoon of 6 December 2023, approximately 20 participants walked in silence, made collective readings, wrote poetry and drew.

Katarzyna is an artist, designer and researcher using several mediums: textile photography, performance and drawing. Since 2008 she has been working on “Urban trees”, “a long-term project where she explores the interaction of the needs of nature with the needs of people.”^[9] In her embroidery works, she embraces alternative forms of drawing and “writing” that could be seen in her latest exhibitions “Stories written with a needle” and “Landscape”.^[10] During “The Lost-and-Found” symposium in Riga, Katarzyna presented Group Affiliation Shell, a performance in which eight women artists attending the symposium shared a single multi-person garment made of stitched-together linen pieces. The group walked from the ISSP gallery located in the Berga Bazars neighbourhood through several city blocks. The performance created a collective organism of eight heads and sixteen legs that had to coordinate their movements, through their communal decision-making exploring the themes of community, connection and shared experience.

Elena’s walkshop was also conducted during the third part of “The Lost-and-Found” symposium on the same day as Katharzyna’s in a park near the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. The original walkshop score was slightly adapted for the purpose of this trialogue. In her work, Elena explores the entanglements of text, sound and space within the frameworks of performance, performance design and language-based artistic research. Her approach is informed by new materialisms,^[11] digital materiality^[12] and a contemporary revision of concrete poetry, particularly the spatialism of Ilse and Pierre Garnier.^[13] A performative articulation of her work is expressed through spatial scores.^[14] These scores act both as a framework for collaborative practice and as a protocol for the systematic exploration of aesthetic and theoretical questions that address the material entanglements of text and space.

Walking

The practice of walking was adopted and adapted for the walkshop as a way of interacting with the different places where “The Lost–and–Found” symposium took place. Since walking can be seen as a way to trace a line, to adapt to and feel the surroundings—textures, temperatures, humidity, sounds, architecture, nature, humans and non-humans—it is also a way of generating an embodied knowledge that is not fixed but that remains porous to the world.^[15]

Walking is, of course, a concept and a practice with a long history of thinking behind it.^[16] In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001), Rebecca Solnit quotes several authors and gives an analogy of walking and thinking^[17]:

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along. As though thinking were travelling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete – for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.^[18]

Walking is also a way of connecting with others and of perceiving the world through other lenses and gives an analogy of walking and thinking.^[19] To propose a walkshop for each of us meant to share a space, a movement, a practice, to become a body with other bodies and a multitude of beings in connection. We took as a starting point that walking has been an artistic practice to feel space otherwise, but we want to emphasise that it is also an ancestral and not human-specific practice. Bodies other-than-human walk too: dogs, elephants, ants, polar bears, as well as water, wind, clouds or roots of trees. We walk with each other and by walking we make worlds.

Weaving

For the purpose of this essay, weaving was employed as not only a method of literal textile production but also a metaphor for collaboration. Weaving relies on interlacing yarns or threads at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. As discussed by Catherine Dormor in her book A Philosophy of Textile (2020), processes of weaving are often used by thinkers, by Plato or Deleuze for example, to illustrate ideas.^[20] Others, such as Roland Barthes argue that text is made generatively “in a perpetual interweaving”.^[21] For the three of us, weaving signifies a way of interconnecting our three different practices, and through this, creating potentials to overlap different places (Lisbon and Riga) and processes of merging with landscapes and other-than-human beings. It is also a way to interweave different times, following Donna Haraway’s thinking on science fiction, where “looping threads and relays of patterning, this sf practice is a model for worlding. Sf must also mean ‘so far’, opening up what is yet-to-come in protean time’s, pasts, presents, and futures.”^[22]

Weaving worked both in literal and metaphorical ways. After individually performing our three walkshops during “The Lost–and–Found” symposium, we developed them for the purpose of our subsequent collaboration presented in this essay. Instead of being in situ with the participants, we had to adapt the walkshops since the three of us were now in different places and didn’t know each other. We became more porous and sensible not only to the landscape in which the walks were performed but, we believe, also to other spaces, cities, museums, our libraries, gardens. The walks intensified our sensitivity to, and permeability with, the surroundings. The imaginary thread tracing the path of our walks (intertwined with our conversations and shared experiences) provided the rhythm that Marta wove into the fabric of her eight poetic fragments.

Writing

Weaving, creating a texture, making a text involves interconnecting not only yarns and threads but also strings, worlds and words—and here we draw on Haraway’s words, “string figuring is passing on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. SF is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene.”^[23]

Our collaborative writing process is intrinsic to our work. It didn’t come after, rather it was happening simultaneously; we were already writing while walking our walks and weaving together our practices and words. The process of writing was collective, we were always writing after the exercises we interchanged: after the instructions given by Elena in an audio file, after the map Katarzyna inspired us to draw, after the box with instructions sent by Marta. Both this text and the poems are a result of this practice of writing “after” which turned into writing “with”.^[24] The writing is accompanied by the images of the map echoing our writing in the walks we have done and also in the way we approach writing as a visual and very personal device, which, unlike typewritten or Word documents, translates gestures, hesitations and rhythms and some believe also our personalities.^[25]

Three Simultaneous Beginnings

Interlacing the practices of walking, writing, mapping and audio-recording, the trialogue weaves the multifaceted fabric of this collaboration. The following descriptions trace the development of the trialogue from the initial walkshops to the weaving of the diversely mediated and processed archival material.

Marta Branco Guerreiro: To be a Poet in the Margins of the Museum

Drawing on her experience at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Marta proposed a walk through some spaces of the Gulbenkian Garden, envisioning new ways of entering the museum’s building beyond the conventional entrance points such as main doors.^[26] By poetically applying the potential of the in-between-ness of (im)materialities and (not only human) figures such as water, ghosts and roots, the participants of “The Lost-and-Found” symposium were invited to imagine forms of interacting with the museum interior and its objects.^[27] This (impossible) interaction was intended as a visionary fiction for a museum-to-be: a utopian landscape in which humans and objects could correspond to one another.^[28]

For the translation of Marta’s initial walkshop into the trialogue “Walking, Weaving, Writing” embodied in this text, Marta prepared a set of tangible instructions, which she sent to Katarzyna and Elena by post (Fig. 11). The instructions included poetic questions such as “How to translate a map?” or “Is walking a way of forgetting?”, and practical exercises like an invitation to a collective reading of the letter sent from Ventura to Clotilde in Pedro Costa’s film Colossal Youth (2006).^[29] They also included a proposal for writing an envelope poem such as those Emily Dickinson produced.^[30] The exercises were “translated” from the Gulbenkian Garden into new everyday maps of Katarzyna’s and Elena’s sonic explorations, and were articulated through various materials, such as handwritten notes, different kinds of paper, tiny stones, plant pieces gathered from the museum site in Lisbon, and literary, theoretical and cinematic references.^[31]

The materials were to be performed by the other two artists without a chronology and timeframe. The tactile instructions prepared by Marta emphasised the emotional impact of materials embedded not only in the environment of a specific geographic and architectonic site but also, and more importantly, on the site of written words, to foreground the materiality of writing. This emotional impact was to be transposed by Katarzyna and Elena into a similar architectural context in their respective cities. The process was facilitated by the instructions: Katarzyna and Elena, as the walkers, were invited to open the envelopes or scrolls with scores and to write envelope poems, infiltrate cultural institutions and imagine their alternative futures, draw the lines of their hands and write a poem in the form of these lines.

Katarzyna Laskowska: Walk at 6 am

Katarzyna’s drawing series presented a set of instructions, a visual scenario for Marta and Elena to stage a walk at a specific time (6 am) along a familiar trajectory that was part of their daily walking routine. The intention of the visual scenario was to create an emotional relationship between human and other-than-human agencies during a walk that is normally conducted with the sole purpose of accomplishing everyday tasks. Walking through familiar streets and places, Marta and Elena were prompted by the visual instructions (Fig. 12) of Katarzyna’s scenario to pay attention to their surroundings and discover new and surprising details, and to notice water sources and occurrences of urban nature. Through the filter of the early hour, very different from the rest of the day in regard to weather conditions and air quality, the walk at 6 am presented an opportunity for deep observation, reconfiguring the familiar and quotidian into a new speculative narrative. Each drawing of the visual scenario acted as a text: a set of stage directions dictating the procedure of the walk but allowing various medial and material possibilities for their reenactment.

Elena Peytchinska: Taking a Word for a Walk

The title of Elena’s walkshop alludes to Paul Klee’s famous description of drawing as taking a line for a walk.^[32] By taking a word for a walk instead of a line, the walkshop experiments with words as malleable materials whose meanings can be transformed through the agencies of the walker’s body and the walking site.

Marta and Katarzyna were invited to select a word (an operative verb) from an architectural glossary of basic spatial operations and follow the walking score’s instructions, which unfolded in two parts: the first part was to take place inside a building, while the second proceeded as a walk along the prompts of an audio-guided spatial score.^[33] Through this transition from interior to exterior, the walkers could explore how a word signifying spatial dynamics could be transformed through the agency of their bodies and walking pace. Taking into account the particular features and inhabitants of the walking site—the substance of the soil, urban infrastructure, weather conditions, plants, humans and “inhumans”^[34]—the walkers were encouraged to further explore the word’s malleability by transposing its operative dynamic into their surroundings. Finally, while still sensing the semantic and material qualities of their chosen verb, Marta and Katarzyna were asked to observe “inhuman” agencies, form an imaginary friendship with one of them, and draw a map of the surroundings from their inhuman friend’s perspective.

Weaving a Trialogue

During the development of our trialogue, we regularly scheduled online meetings, sharing our experiences of the reenactments of each other’s walkshops. Gathering texts, drawings, audio recordings and photos, we created an archive, which acted as material for the further development of our collaboration. Each of us reacted to and engaged with the archival material differently, choosing a unique medial and disciplinary approach: Marta transposed the critical impact of our discussions into a poetic flow, drawing on Tim Ingold’s view that “[t]he theorist can be a poet.”^[35] She further explored this poetic approach to theory by interweaving excerpts from two poems by Wisława Szymborska, “A Speech at the Lost-And-Found”^[36] and “Map”, who also considered maps a medium for poetic expression.^[37] Katarzyna created a cartographic notation by visually reenacting and quoting the archival material— drawings, texts, sounds—into a non-linear diagrammatic narrative. Referencing Kathy Acker’s cartographic writing in A Map of My Dreams (1977), Katarzyna developed an analytical method of interweaving our different practices, creating a map of the actual and potential relations between them.^[38] Elena generated sound drawings by recording soundscapes in interior and exterior spaces while performing Marta’s and Katarzyna’s walks. In her approach, auditory environments were interpreted through drawing gestures and marks, transcribing sonic experiences into visual form. Informed by Pauline Oliveros’s “deep listening” methodology, these sound drawings emerged as a transmedia practice where sound becomes material for visual and gestural translation.^[39] The recording device itself became a drawing tool—embodying what Salomé Voegelin describes as the three-fold corporeality of sound recording, “the technological body of the microphone, the recording body and the body recorded.”^[40] These recordings were later translated into notations that traced the walk’s trajectory through its invisible features—sound, temperature and tactile qualities—applying Linda Knight’s concept of “inefficient mapping”.^[41] Katarzyna then integrated the resulting notations into the fabric of her map, creating a multi-sensory cartographic document.

The material that emerged through our collaborative practice weaves this trialogue, embodying the encounter of our different ways of expressing ourselves theoretically and artistically. While the creative processes of writing and drawing appear as if homogeneous, they are, in fact, the result of several intertwined strings and correspondences between the three of us. Beginning with the initial walkshops enacted during the symposium and evolving through their further conceptualisation in our collective encounters, it became clear that our three distinct modes of artistic research are not isolated projects but interconnected parts of a shared practice. Our approaches interlace and belong to the same process of collaborative thinking and making, while also opening up possibilities for productive frictions.

The trialogue presented here is not merely a documentation of our walks or a theoretical framework for understanding them but a living testament to how collaborative artistic research can weave together practice and theory, individual and collective experience and human and other-than-human agencies. Through this understanding, we continue to trace and respond to the call of “The Lost-and-Found” and affirm the necessity of building new ways of approaching artistic practice and artistic research.