On Walking

The artworks on this website are inseparable from the research practices that inform them, which involve an investigation of identity in different contexts and places. These walks, meanders, and related research practices open up possibilities for new imaginings, and they facilitate concrete outcomes in the form of exhibitions, publications, and “living” archives.

Research, for me, is an embodied form of immersive inquiry centered around particular themes. Walking is my primary research methodology. It is a mapping strategy that lends itself towards re-patterning, unraveling aspects and attributes of a place, its spatial character, and its relationship to my sense of self. My concerns, academic and deeply personal, are about place, time, memory, and subjectivity. This interdisciplinary way of working is a reflexive form of agency since it involves a processual engagement with space; it is a way of making sense and deriving meaning from a place over time. Some of the works are at the center of the process of non-representation of my concerns and longings. They form the heart of my affective(ed) knowledge of these places; walking on the margins is, most significantly, a mode of expression that functions as a reformulation of my imagination and my art practice.

The allure of walking is bound to my discomfort of an (un)known place. I am intrinsically bound to the place in which I find myself and compelled to investigate its meaning and its resonance to my person, often as an outsider. The practice of walking varies in its purpose, pace, and rhythm, and nurtures creative and critical relationships to a place. The very act of bodily rhythm, the intimate orchestration between body and environment through affective motor and sensorial processes, not only opens up the present for contemplation and savoring time, it opens up the past and imaginative spaces. This is the remarkable fabric of W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, where the walk and its spaces are an intermittent thread to a narrative that visits other places and times. Similarly, identity is an evolving narrative, an ongoing dynamic reformulation that takes into account the complexities of a place. The rhythms of walking produce the possibility of restructuring our sense of place through complex animations, encouraged by many variables. I am fascinated by the way our bodies (senses) create new relationships in walked landscapes, facilitating and reconstructing different notions of who we are.

Time, space, and the self are synchronously centered and decentered during my walks, fostering an experience of transience and a relinquishing of stereotypical notions of the self. These walks function not only for the exclusive merits of research but as metaphoric transactions with a place, engendering a sense of belonging that is both transformative and vital. By undertaking immersive research, that which is unknown, obscured, and potentially disorientating is unexpectedly revealed. Walking includes selective moments that transform the quotidian to reveal resonances with a place. My works are rich person-landscape orchestrations in which the becomings of the walking self unfold in conjunction with new places and identities and offer affective, imaginative possibilities beyond the notion of a static, “fixed” self.