This event brings together four researchers who walk as part of a creative practice:
Place-awareness and eco-poetics
Alec Finlay will introduce his work in the field of ecopoetics and place-awareness, including that undertaken in the Scottish wilderness, primarily the Cairngorms and Glenmoriston, and WILD CITY, a collaboration with The Walking Library for the city of Glasgow in 2018. Finlay’s work includes an exploration of stalking and climbing, surveying rewilding and innovative pinewood regeneration projects, and working with place-names as records of past, present and future ecology. Finlay will also draw on his use of place-awareness to deal with constraints on his walking due to long-term illness.
The Walking Library: walking and reading
Dee Heddon and Misha Myers will introduce their ongoing creative research project, The Walking Library. The Walking Library explores the relationships of reading, walking and environment, setting books and landscape into dynamic relationships, writing and rewriting both in the process. Founded in 2012, The Walking Library has curated a number of editions, including The Walking Library for Women Walking and The Walking Library for a Wild City, which was created for WILD CITY, a collaboration with Alec Finlay. WILD CITY explored what ‘wildness’ means in an urban context and aimed to encourage place-awareness through participatory walking and reading, place-names, translations and community maps. The Library’s most recent edition, The Walking Library for Forest Walks, launched during COVID19 has prompted a move to virtual walking.
The Loiterers Resistance Movement
Morag Rose will introduce The Loiterers Resistance Movement, a Manchester based psychogeographical collective she founded more than a decade ago. The LRM is interested in creative walking, public space, and sharing untold stories of the city. It embarks on drifts to decode the palimpsest of the streets, uncover hidden histories and discover the extraordinary in the mundane. It aims to nurture an awareness of everyday space, (re)engaging with, (re)mapping and (re)enchanting the city. In this talk, Rose will discuss how the LRM has continued to walk and work during COVID19. She will also introduce some guidelines she has compiled to support access to/in walking art.
Biographies:
Alec Finlay is an internationally recognised artist and poet whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. Much of Finlay's work considers how we as a culture, or cultures, relate to landscape and ecology. Through permanent and temporary interventions, integrative web-based projects, and publications, Finlay weaves together generous experiential works, often collaborative, sometimes mapped directly onto the landscape, embedded socially or accessed online. Recently Finlay's work has focused on place-awareness and ecopoetics.
Professor Dee Heddon holds the James Arnott Chair in Drama at the University of Glasgow and is author and editor of numerous publications including, Autobiography and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2008), Devising Performance: A Critical History (with Jane Milling, Palgrave Macmillan 2005), Histories and Practices of Live Art (with Jennie Klein, Palgrave Macmillan 2012), It’s all allowed: the performances of Adrian Howells (with Dominic Johnson, Intellect, 2015). For many years she has explored the use of walking in arts practice and, in 2012, with Misha Myers, inaugurated the creative-research project, The Walking Library.
Dr Misha Myers is a Senior Lecturer in Art & Performance, Course Director of Creative Arts and Research Fellow in Deakin Motion Lab at Deakin University. Through her research she seeks to empower isolated and marginalized groups including refugees and asylum seekers, women and rural communities. She works across an inter-disciplinary field of applied and digital performance, socially engaged practice, digital humanities and cultural studies of migration, belonging and place. She is a co-investigator on an ARC Discovery Project ‘Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art’.
Dr Morag Rose is a walking artist, activist and academic. In 2006 she founded The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement). The LRM are a Manchester based psychogeographical collective interested in creative walking, public space, and sharing untold stories of the city. The LRM host monthly, free, accessible communal walks and special events from giant cake months to games of CCTV bingo. Morag is a lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Liverpool and has exhibited, performed and published widely.
Livingmaps Network is an independent not for profit organisation, we receive no core funding. Our main income comes from live events which we have been unable to organise this year. We are asking for donations of £3 – £5 from people who wish to attend our online events to help us cover our running costs. We greatly appreciate your support.
WHEN: February 24th 2021, 18:00 (GMT)