Ramblings: A walk in progress (or the minutes of the International Society of the Imaginary Perambulator)

Abstract

In this paper, seven writers experiment with ethnographic and artistic responses to each others’ walking practices. We employed various forms of ethnography, sharing our attempts to transform a walk into other objects, all the while performing together. We are trying to push the representational limits of an ethnography of walking, reflecting on the various modes of inscription available to us. In this sense, this chapter is a report on our knowledge engagements with walking practices. The conversation between and within the passages sheds new light on our individual efforts but also produces knowledge that speaks about walking as a practice and an experience. At the level of transforming experiences into text, our paths kept intersecting through key metaphors that emerged from our individual observations. Without deliberately setting out to do so, we found ourselves approaching arts-based practice as research. This chapter is not to be seen as a conclusive result of our findings but rather as a manifestation of our collaborative meaning-making. It is (at its heart) PROCESS as both beginning and end. Moreover, it is a questioning of the dominant cultural modes which have a tendency to pedestalize the final product.