What We Walk About When We Talk About Walking
Nikos Doulos
Walking Club 2020-2021
Walking is first and foremost a relational enterprise that calls for a constant dialogue between what constitutes the self and all visible and invisible entities, human and non-human alike. It implies an emergence into, and a traversing through an intertwined web of past and present occurrences; of summons, of memory recollections, of their endoscopic translations, of incidental encounters; instigated not only by the enchanting qualities of a given topology but also by the realization that we are destined to walk on where others have walked before us (taking that literally as well as metaphorically).
Ignited by these thoughts,What We Walk About When We Talk About Walking is devised as a collective study of bi-weekly perambulations set to traverse histories of walking enhanced by subjective narratives and views on the city as a body and our bodies as maps. It will further attempt to reclaim ‘cruising’ as a queer approach to ‘drifting’ (dérive). Our wanderings in flesh (and their discursive components) are to shape the study into two parts: four thematic sessions informed by textual, sonic and audiovisual references and three final sessions working and ‘walking’ towards a public gestural moment.
Walking comrades: Rebecca Solnit, Francesco Careri, Frederic Gross, Michel de Certeau, Merlin Coverly, Alexandra Horowitz, Jose Esteban Munoz, David Wojnarowicz and more.
(The title is an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short stories collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.)
October 28; November 11, 25; December 9; February 3, 17; March 10, 17:00-18:30, Outdoor
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Nikos Doulos is a visual artist, curator and educator. In his work, he creates malleable situations as participatory infrastructures and ‘soft’ knowledge generators. Walking holds a predominant part in his practice. He is a co-director at Expodium in Utrecht – an urban do-tank that utilizes artistic means to talk about the city. In 2011, and under Expodium’s umbrella, he founded NIGHTWALKERS – a participatory nocturnal walking project investigating the contemporary identity of the flanêur/flâneuse, performed in (among others) the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Hungary, South Korea and Greece. Nikos participated at Capacete Athens – a nine-month residency in Athens under the broader framework of Documenta 14 (2017), led workshops for UNIDEE - Cittadelartte Pistoletto Foundation (2016) and the University of the Arts, Uniarts Helsinki (2013 - 2017) and guest edited, together with Herbert Ploegman, Kunstlicht Volume: 39 - ‘Unpacking Residencies: Situating The Production Of Cultural Relations’ (2019). He is currently guest tutoring along with the rest of the Expodium members at the Spatial Practice objective of the HKU MaFA (Utrecht) and holds a position as a coordinator at the Dutch Art Institute/ DAI.