The Deveron Projects' Slow Marathon 2020

As is stated on the Deveron Projects website (https://www.deveron-projects.com/about/slow-marathon/), the Slow Marathon is "Deveron Projects' annual 42km/26 miles themed walking event, composed of a conceptually led walk, expanding upon a theme or an idea related to our curated programme, in effect taking it for a walk. It is followed by a day of talks, films, food and discussion, in relation to the chosen project. Celebrating the human pace, it is both an endurance event as well as a poetic act that brings together friendship, physical activity and the appreciation of our landscapes in their geo-political settings.

Slow Marathon began in 2012 in collaboration with Ethiopian artist Mihret Kebede who attempted to walk from her home in Addis/Ethiopia to Huntly. The Addis to Huntly and back walk, was abandoned as visa restrictions, border controls and deserts got in the way. Instead, Mihret decided to walk the total 5,850 miles distance with many people to reach the distance metaphorically".

In 2020 I decided to participate in the annual event and registered to log my walks for the duration of the project. The project has now reached completion with 319 walkers registering 40544.94 kilometres in total. I personally walked 206km, which equates to 4.9 marathons. 

I walked mostly in the morning though I also went out for several evening walks, all of which I enjoyed enormously, revelling in the opportunity to walk unhindered through the local neighbourhood meeting lizards, birds, bats, dogs, cats, chickens and a duck along the way.

For anyone who combines walking within their work, whether it forms the artwork itself or as an arena in which to generate work or even as an opportunity to formulate or clarify ideas, I would recommend becoming involved in future Slow Marathon events. 

https://www.deveron-projects.com/slowmarathon2020/

As the walk progressed, Glasgow based artist Man Tajik conducted a related project: 'Under One Sky', https://www.deveron-projects.com/under-one-sky/. 

Iman intends on amassing a collection of sky photographs that were taken while out walking. Considering the many walkers participating in the Slow Marathon project around the world, the cumulative assembly of sky photographs would assist in constructing a global artwork representing the same sky that we all live under regardless of where we live in the world.

In support of Iran's project I took 20 photographs of the sky during my walks and uploaded them to his project dropbox. Below are the sky photographs I took:

Ways to Wander: Walk No. 9 - Walk With Me

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.

 

The book can be purchased here:  https://www.triarchypress.net/waystowander.html

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.