The 'Walking's New Movements' conference was held at the University of Plymouth, UK from Friday 1st - Sunday 3rd November 2019 presenting an opportunity for participants to 'discuss the latest developments and future prospects for radical walking and walking arts'.
The three days were occupied by paper presentations, provocations and events related to walking arts and psychogeography.
As I was unable to attend the conference in person I sent a conference poster outlining my ongoing walking performance 'No holiday'. On the poster I outlined an introduction to the performance and images of various recorded versions of the performance along with internet links and QR codes that would allow viewers to access the recordings as hosted on my YouTube channel.
My conference poster was displayed on the 3rd floor, between rooms RLB3030 and RLB304 and is included below:
Score No. 49 - Waylaid Walking in the book 'Ways to Wander' by Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind, currently being interpreted by Dr. Blake Morris, is 'Waylaid Walking' by Dr. Charlie Fox.
Blake is re-enacting all 54 walks to be found in the book.
This score is inspired by the practice of Walter Benjamin. As the score states: "Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions." (Walter Benjamin from One Way Street).
Benjamin wandered around the shopping arcades of Paris, allowing the environment, people, objects to trigger thoughts, feelings and responses. As I am currently residing in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, I chose Ben Thanh Market for my own personal dérive. The following images and thought fragments came out of that walk.
My walk aimed to coincide with the walks by Blake, Sandra Cowen and the Loiterer's Resistance Movement taking place in the UK.
For direction, the score advises: 'As you walk along alight on the poor objects that illuminate the use and embodied history of a place; arrested by the thoughts conjured out of that object, material or surface, record that idea or you thought-feeling as a fragment of words'.
Ben Thanh Market
1. Mid-afternoon, Ben Thanh Market is open and should be thriving though many units facing to the exterior remain unused. The shutters that provide a link between the exterior and interior of the market are padlocked creating a fixed though decorative wall, leaving the gates of the market as the only breaks in the facade.
2. The Terra-cotta decorative screens on the exterior of the market were perhaps ventilation screens to keep the market interior a little cooler. If so, the screens have now been blocked from the inside. Has the space behind the screens become occupied and do the new tenants wish to keep their goods more secure?
3. The market entrance was once marked by the combination of stepped arches and iron lattice work, both painted in an attractive, contrasting colours. Nowadays, this grand decorative solution has given way to gaudy, plastic banners stretched haphazardly across the portal. This is the way to attract today's customers.
4. Hidden away above the entrance is the secret office, the windows barred. Night and day the low-wattage light tube flickers but no movement within can be discerned. Is the market management meeting still in progress? or did it ever commence?
5. The market in full swing, the walls and arches that have witnessed many sights over the years slowly crumble through lack of maintenance. The sales staff cannot maintain their concentration as they daydream and think of other things.
6. As the morning transitions into lunchtime, the fresh food area becomes a hive of activity. Customers and market staff alike order cà phê,phở, and/or bánh mì. *
The out-of-date cartoon plush toys will have to wait.
7. Over at the wet market section, there is a plentiful offering. Besides live crab, prawns and shellfish of every description, it is possible to buy fish either alive and struggling in the plastic bag or semi-dried and arranged in woven baskets. These milk-eyed fish lie still and do not stare back.
8. Very little is wasted and everything is presented without frills. As this is the final area to see, at the tail end of my visit (so to speak), I wonder if the market has shown me everything? I doubt it, I am sure there are many more tales to be told here...but that would be for another day.
*Vietnamese style coffee, soup noodles (usually with beef), sandwich made with crispy French style baguette.
The long-term interpretation of the 'Ways to Wander' book by Dr. Blake Morris continues and I was able to participate once more from my location in Vietnam.
This time the walk was No. 48 in the book, a score written by Tobias Grice that (as the book describes) 'engages in utilising a tourist mindset in a familiar environment, exploring issues held in plain sight'.
When recreating one of these scores it is necessary to contextualise the score to fit the particular environment in which it is being enacted.
I walked from a housing development close to the Vivo City shopping centre (that was nearby the area I studied while working on the 'District 7 Strata' digital print) to the Crescent Mall further along Nguyen Van Linh - taking in the Ho Lake Park in Phu My Hung.
Walking Route - 28.11.2018
As I walked I bounced the lime green tennis ball across different surfaces, noticing the different sounds made as the ball bounced, how the different materials affected the bounce and, as the bounce was reduced to a roll, how the ball continued to move across this and other adjacent surfaces as well as how and where the ball came to rest.
Screen captures from video recordings taken during the walk
I conducted my walk on Wednesday 28th November 2018. Blake walked this score during the same week together with Phil Smith and Clare Bryden.
I recently contacted Dr. Blake Morris of the Walking Artist Network (WAN) who is investigating the walks featured in the wonderful book 'Ways to Wander' by Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind as part of his practice-based research (Blake also contributed one of the walks in the book - No.28). He plans to walk all of the 54 various walks in the book, one each week and I expressed my interest in participating in one of them.
Blake invited me to join him for walk No. 9 - 'Walk with me' by Helen Frosi (soundfjord) on March 3, 2018. The plan was for Blake and Marina White Raven to walk in London while simultaneous walks were taking place in Spain (by Elia Cervera Bravo and Amery Kessler) and Hong Kong (which is where I come in).
As we walked, we would be able to write comments and poetic reflections that follow the theme of the original walk, and post them onto twitter, tagging the others so that there would be an exchange of comments during the walk..
The time difference between London and Hong Kong is 8 hours so in order for this to work I conducted my walk earlier in the day and scheduled my posts using the hootsuite app. Each of my posts were scheduled to be online later in the day, during the period when the others were walking.
The event lasted around 90 minutes and as I walked, besides posting photographs with accompanying comments, I also made sound recordings and collected colours using the citypalette app.
Once all data from the day had been collected by Blake, he consolidated much of it into the next episode of his overall project. Walk No. 9 had been written in the form of a poem and in response Blake managed to combine several of the exchanged comments into another poem.
The two poems are seen here, the pink background (named by Blake 'Sickly Sky') was one of the colours collected by him during the walk.
Blake's walk poem
Walk with me by
Helen Frosi (SoundFjord)
(text distorted due to the photograph)
As Blake investigates each walk, he completes a card reference for each one and posts it on his blog (links here and here)
Blake's reference card for the walk
Here are the photographs I posted onto Twitter along with the accompanying comments:
1/11 'A good beginning, the delayed Chinese New year peach blossom blooms today'
2/11 'Gateway leads to a desolate house, I move on...'
3/11 'These days even the trees are restless, some of them uproot themselves and leave...'
4/11 'Passing the little Temple, from now on I will try to stay within sight of the sea, the sound of the waves is comforting.'
5/11 'The line between the sea and the land, why do I feel so comfortable being close to the edge of something?...'
6/11 'The raised pathway makes me feel as though I am on a catwalk, but the only audience I see are birds...'
7/11 'An entrance to a seminary. Inside, nature is groomed into formal rows while outside lies chaos, and beauty.'
8/11 'A fallen tree but this is not an end. For nature this is another beginning.'
9/11 'A gentle slope, not a climb...an inclination!'
10/11 'Returning now to the streets where I began my walk I find a painting created by nature - the finest, most honest artist.'
I also made four sound recordings during the walk:
1. Cantonese radio playing outside the Temple, birds singing in the background.
2. Birds singing, radio faintly heard in the background.
3. Soloist bird along with bird chorus accompaniment.
4. Young boy playing basketball alone in a playground at the end of my walk.
Sound files here:
Sounds edited together with accompanying images here:
...and the colour palette I compiled during the 90 minutes:
11/11 'Colours collected during my walk.' 3 March 2018.
