WALC LISTEN CAFÉS

Παρακάτω ακολουθεί το κείμενο στα Ελληνικά.

In the Café, architect Stavros Sofianopoulos will present “Building the Chiapas Teachers Center” an initiative by the Greek Solidarity Team of support for the Zapatistas’ campaign “A School for Chiapas” [Centro de Capacitación  de Promotores Culturales Compañero Manuel (Chiapas, Mexico)]. The initiative will be presented in the context of Community based-art.

Schools for Chiapas was created in 1996 and this year has begun to work with other indigenous communities that are facing similar government-inflicted pressures, seeking to support their own processes of building autonomy in education and preventive health. Informed and moved by the models demonstrated over years in Zapatista territory, these efforts are shared by the community to benefit everyone.

In community-based education, adults chosen by the community learn skills in popular education so that they can share responsibility of teaching the children. For communities whose schools have been closed or are not accessible (due to violence), this model allows for education to carry on despite often precarious external conditions.

The event will be hosted by Yannis Ziogas, WALC Project director and Artistic co-coordinator. The presentation will be made in Greek, with an English translation made available. At the event a pdf in English and Greek will be available from here. Although technology, and AI specifically, is making great strides in benefitting cross-cultural interchange, Zoom has not yet conquered the Greek language, so we are unable to offer real-time interpretation from Greek to English or closed captions in Greek.

Στο Café, ο αρχιτέκτονας Σταύρος Σοφιανόπουλος θα παρουσιάσει το «Building the Chiapas Teachers Center» μια πρωτοβουλία της Ελληνικής Ομάδας Αλληλεγγύης για την υποστήριξη της εκστρατείας των Ζαπατίστας «A School for Chiapas» [Centro de Capacitación  de Promotores Culturales Compañero Manuel (Chiapas, Mexico) ]. Η πρωτοβουλία θα παρουσιαστεί στο πλαίσιο της κοινοτικής τέχνης.

Το Schools for Chiapas δημιουργήθηκε το 1996 και από τότε άρχισε να συνεργάζεται με άλλες αυτόχθονες κοινότητες που αντιμετωπίζουν παρόμοιες πιέσεις από την κυβέρνηση. Η βασική επιδίωξη ήταν να υποστηρίξουν τις δικές τους διαδικασίες για την καλλιέργεια αυτονομίας στην εκπαίδευση και προληπτική ιατρική. Εμπνευσμένες και επηρεασμένες από τα πρότυπα που αναπτύσσονται επί χρόνια στην επικράτεια των Ζαπατίστας, αυτές οι προσπάθειες μοιράζονται από την κοινότητα προς όφελος όλων.

Στην κοινοτική εκπαίδευση οι ενήλικες που επιλέγονται από την κοινότητα μαθαίνουν δεξιότητες στη λαϊκή επιμόρφωση ώστε να μπορούν να μοιραστούν την ευθύνη της διδασκαλίας των παιδιών. Για κοινότητες των οποίων τα σχολεία έχουν κλείσει ή δεν είναι προσβάσιμα (λόγω βίας), αυτό το μοντέλο επιτρέπει στη συνέχιση της εκπαίδευσης παρά τις συχνά επισφαλείς εξωτερικές συνθήκες. 

Την παρουσίαση θα συντονίσει ο Yannis Ziogas, Διευθυντής και Καλλιτεχνικός Συντονιστής του WALC Project. Η παρουσίαση θα γίνει στα ελληνικά, με διαθέσιμη αγγλική μετάφραση. Στην εκδήλωση θα διατίθεται pdf στα αγγλικά και στα ελληνικά από εδώ. Αν και η τεχνολογία, και συγκεκριμένα η τεχνητή νοημοσύνη, κάνει μεγάλα βήματα προς όφελος των διαπολιτισμικών ανταλλαγών, το Zoom δεν έχει κατακτήσει ακόμη την ελληνική γλώσσα, επομένως δεν μπορούμε να προσφέρουμε διερμηνεία σε πραγματικό χρόνο από τα ελληνικά στα αγγλικά ή υπότιτλους στα ελληνικά.

Walking Home / Walking in Transition sets the theme for the next International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa (WAC 25). 

This WALC Café offers a closer look at what you can expect in July 2025 and zooms in on its themes, context, place, the call criteria and what is offered to interested participants.

The Prespa International Walking Arts Encounters brings together artists who walk in response to a world marked by profound pain, loss, displacement, and environmental crises. In a time of overwhelming uncertainties, walking art may seem futile, yet it offers a vital escape from habitual ways of thinking and acting—creating space for new possibilities.  

The encounters are deeply rooted in the local —hosted in Prespes, by a community at the edge of Europe— and rely on listening, sharing, and giving to and receiving from a remote place of overwhelming natural beauty. Yet, the Encounters are equally trans-local, shaped by contributions from people across the globe. The Walking Arts Encounters emerges as much from their questions, themes, and explorations as from local experiments, gifts, and acts of sensuous solidarity.

Through acts of hosting, gathering, and interweaving in everyday life and local community, they nurture new ethical and aesthetic pathways, not attracting attention, seeking power, or aligning with solution-driven agendas, but embracing failure, experimentation, and care. 

The International Walking Arts Encounters is more than the sum of this all, an evolving ecology of practices, fluid subversions, quiet rebellions, and sensory provocations, made by people walking together. 

And this leads to the invitation, stories and testimonies, shared in this Café. By organizers, artists and local residents, filling out the framework for a new International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa this Summer.

Geert Vermeire and Yannis Ziogas, artistic coordinators,  will talk about the artistic context and concepts behind the International Walking Arts Encounters in Prespa, and elaborate on what you can expect as a participant during the week-long event this summer. 

Aspasia Voudouri, general coordinator of the organizing committee, will present Prespa a place and the organisational aspects of the event. 

Anastasia Polychronidou (Greece) and Molly Wagner (Australia), who were at the previous encounters and will return in 2025, will share their experiences as participating artists. 

Local residents Nikos Yannakis, biologist and former president of the Prespa National Park Management Organisation, and Thomas Manouris will talk about living in Prespa.

Join us for an engaging question-based collective discussion hosted by Action Synergy, where we bring together artists from Europe and the United States at different stages in their careers, each with a unique relationship to walking arts. While coming from diverse backgrounds and starting points, they have all embraced walking as a means of connecting with their communities—however they define them.

In this casual roundtable conversation, we will explore key questions:

🌿How can communities extend beyond the human?
🌿What elements do we wish to see more of in walking arts?
🌿How can walking arts be a form of care?

🎤 Our guests bring diverse perspectives: Robert Coleman explores ecological soundwalks and sound art, while Jo Scott uses sonic experiences to navigate changing landscapes. Rafael De Balanzo focuses on resilience and ecological transformation through walkshops, and Azucena Momo blends dance, sound, and participatory walking performances. Charlie MacRae-Tod engages in creative pilgrimage, connecting storytelling with long-distance walking, while Noam Assayag explores urban narratives through text, graffiti, and walking as a form of collecting and exchanging ideas.

Featured Artists Bios

🚶‍♀️Noam Assayag
I am a writer and a translator, born in Paris and based in Athens. Inspired by friends and strangers, my walking practice is curious about what’s on the walls and ground, collecting words and textures for future thoughts and collages. This street hermeneutics will use graffiti as samples and keywords. This scavenging will foster gifts and counter-gifts: activating cities together. @norkhat

🚶‍♂️Rafael De Balanzo
I am a transdisciplinary artist and scientist-scholar whose practice explores the complexity of our planet and theories of change through the lens of a resilience-thinking approach. Through workshops and walkshops, I engage participants in immersive learning experiences that foster deeper understanding and creative responses to ecological and social transformations.

🚶Robert Coleman
Composer and sound artist Robert Coleman’s work draws from numerous fields such as soundscape studies, site-specific art, field recording, and community and participatory arts. He is currently a PhD student at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, where he is supervised by an interdisciplinary team from Sonic Arts and Biological Sciences. Throughout this time, he has been developing his practice of Ecological Soundwalks, and in 2023, he founded The School of Wild Listening, a platform for the discussion and dissemination of ecological sound art.

🚶‍♀️Charlie MacRae-Tod
Charlie is a performer, filmmaker, and walking artist interested in exploring the relationship between performance, classical storytelling, animate imagination, and long-distance walking. His practice of creative pilgrimage seeks to explore various aspects of spiritual and mythological approaches to walking artistically—through, with, and into an environment.

🚶‍♂️Azucena Momo
Azucena is a multidisciplinary artist interested in body practices (dance, walking, among others), relational geographies, ecology, poetry, and participatory actions. In 2019, she founded her company Irregulars, with which she has created contemporary dance proposals in public spaces and performances about walking. Her love for orality and the blending of disciplines also leads her to work on sound, podcast, and documentary forms.

🚶Jo Scott
Jo Scott is an artist-researcher based in central Portugal, using creative digital practices to explore our relationship with the other-than-human world. Jo’s latest project is using creative walking practices to explore precarious and changing landscapes in an era of climate crisis, habitat, and biodiversity loss, with a focus on the forest plantations of central Portugal. www.joanneemmascott.com

We look forward to walking through these ideas together—see you at the Café!

Following the announcement of “WALC – a new future of walking arts – the largest cultural investment putting walking arts on the map” we are delighted to have as Café guests representatives from each of the consortium partners who put together the successful EU funding application for the Walking Arts and Local Communities project.

With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, and sets a new model for artists and organisations in community-based practices benefitting the rural and natural areas of all partners. WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers in a shared network practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, involving local inhabitants, engaging with local activists and nature workers, young artists, and curators, open for an international public.

WALC is setting an innovative model of trans-European cooperation, for community-based practices, based on walking arts. and the emergence of new art venues, beyond the established art market, through experimentation and new artistic networks, and as a fertile ground for contemporary and emerging disciplines. It fulfils the need for community-based art practices that strengthen one of the main purposes of art; renewing its relation to society, more needed than ever in our world of today.

Names and faces familiar to many walking artists, we hope to introduce them to people who have not yet considered walking art, they include Yannis Ziogas, Geert Vermeire, Clara Gari, Anna Luyten, Sylvie Marchand, Miguel Bandeira Duarte and Kostas Diamantis Balaskas.

We look forward to hearing their hopes and aspirations of how the WALC project may evolve. Come along and find out how you can benefit through involvement in the project.

The Walking Arts and Local Communities consortium partners are: Visual March to Prespes, University of Western Macedonia (Leader, Πανεπιστήμιο Δυτικής Μακεδονίας, UOWM, Greece),  walk · listen · create (WLC, Belgium), WalkLab2.PT at the University of Minho (UMINHO, Universitade do Minho, Portugal), Cultural Association Cochlea (Asociación Cultural Cochlea, CACN, Spain), Association Temps Reel (Gigacircus, France), Action Synergy SA (AS, Greece), School of Gaasbeek (De School van Gaasbeek, SvG, Belgium).

Thanks to the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant this Café is a free event – when booking your ticket, take a moment to bring your walk · listen · create profile is up to date, or add a bio to create one if you haven’t already. To keep up to date with the Walking Arts and Local Communities over its four year duration, make sure you are subscribing to the weekly walk · listen · create newsletter.

A video recording of the event will be made available in due course.

We are delighted to have William Sharpe join us as our Café guest. This time last year, his book on The Art of Walking: a history in 100 images was published to wide acclaim. So how did he come to choose which images best represented the art of walking, and what did he choose to leave out, and why?

What does a walk look like?

From cave art to contemporary performance, William Sharpe reveals that a depicted walk is always more than a matter of simple steps. Whether sculpted in stone, painted on a wall, or captured on film, each detail of gait and dress, each stride and gesture has a story to tell, for every aspect of walking is shaped by social practices and environmental conditions.

And what do we read into what we see?

From classical statues to the origins of cinema, from medieval pilgrimages to public parks and the first footsteps on the moon, walking has engendered a vast visual legacy intertwined with the path of Western art. The path includes Romantic nature-walkers and urban flâneurs, as well as protest marchers and cell-phone zombies. It features works by artists such as Botticelli, Raphael, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, Agnès Varda, Maya Lin, and Pope.L.

How have new ways of walking spurred new means of representation, and how has walking permeated our visual culture?

When booking your ticket, take a moment to bring your walk · listen · create profile is up to date, or add a bio to create one if you haven’t already. To keep up to date with the Walking Arts and Local Communities over its four year duration, make sure you are subscribing to the weekly walk · listen · create newsletter.

Free concessionary tickets are available – if you cannot afford the ticket price please contact us below:

Featured image: Sleepwalker, 2014 by Tony Matelli – Painted bronze

Walking arts today became a response to the deep environmental  global crisis we are facing today.  Walking is one of the keys to contextualize and deepen our understanding and relation with the living planet we live on and that we share with other species. We are not only walking our planet, as isolated beings, as explorers, but we are walking with the planet. The sounds, the living creatures, the plants, the geopoetics of every place are factors that connect us to a Nature that is experienced and lived in every step we take. The Walking Body 5 is stepping out of the time and space of the man-made environment, entering in a no man’s land of nature, bringing us back what was before and to where we belong. 

The Walking Body 5 brings 9 international artists together, with the collaboration and involvement of EAAD and schools in Greece (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Spain (University of Murcia). Each artist has their own connection with walking in a more than human world, Soazic Guezennec (FR), Maria Ristani (GR), Veronica Perales Blanco (ES), David Merleau (CAN) & Fred Adam (FR/ES), Geert Vermeire (B). Manuel Fernandes Miranda (PT), Natacha Antão Moutinho (PT) and Miguel Duarte (PT), in a week long process, interacting with community, the city and its environment, and leading to the exhibition “Walking More Than Human”. All activities at the Garagem Avenida gallery (EAAD) in Guimaraes, open to anyone interested, for 2 weeks.

The WALCafe on March 18th happens simultaneously on location in Portugal and online, introducing the topic through a conversation with the artists and the public. It will be a round table discussion in English, hosted by Natacha Mutinho, Miguel Duarte and Geert Vermeire.

When booking your ticket, take a moment to bring your walk · listen · create profile is up to date, or add a bio to create one if you haven’t already. To keep up to date with the Walking Arts and Local Communities over its four year duration, make sure you are subscribing to the weekly walk · listen · create newsletter.

We have invited Igor Binsbergen, soundwalker who believes that “Listening” (compared to “Seeing”) is a neglected child in our culture but strangely more powerful in many ways, and Laroche (aka Luce Choules), an itinerant artist founder and coordinator of the international artists’ network the Temporal School of Experimental Geography whose practice involves moving over and through places, to inspire us at the dawn of the Walking Art and Relational Geographies Conference in Girona and Banyoles, in Catalonia, Spain.

A conversation about itinerancy, about paths, about our complex relationship with the dynamic processes of the earth, highlighting the impermanence of environmental and social structures. We will follow in the footsteps of the Grand Tour project, which for 10 years has been travelling the Catalan lands on foot.  The event will include soundscapes generated by the walking on the Grand Tour.

Join us for a coffee some hours before the start of the Walking Art and Relational Geographies Conference at which conference curators, Geert Vermeire and Clara Gari will unveil the highlights with a glimpse of the programme: keynote lectures, walkshops, processions, walks, cinema and much more in five dizzying days. At the conference, Luce will be delivering a keynote live performance using a format of projected imagery and narrated script to invite an audience on a poetic journey across the natural, managed and urban territories of Europe and beyond.

When booking your ticket, take a moment to bring your walk · listen · create profile is up to date, or add a bio to create one if you haven’t already. To keep up to date with the Walking Arts and Local Communities over its four year duration, make sure you are subscribing to the weekly walk · listen · create newsletter.

Women walking, The city, At night, is a performance series in the form of collective walks between women. It was began by Eléonore Ozanne in Seville, Spain in September 2022 on the night of the ‘Harvest Moon’, and has subsequently taken place in 11 cities across Spain.

They aim to investigate and think from the lived experience about the presence of our body, at night, in public spaces. With the idea of creating an aesthetic and relational experience of walking, the walks are guided by chance, following the path marked by the full moon.

“What if we get together to go for a walk at night?” asks Eléonore, “a collective walk, at night, between women in several cities at the same time.”

Guided only by the light along the path of the trajectory of the full moon, women walk together, creating both a poetic and vindictive experience to explore what their bodies mean, at night, in the city.

This event will be hosted by Clare Qualmann, founder of the Walking Artists Network.

Launching a new international series ‘Anna and the Verwandelingen’, a sequel to the successful editions of ‘Anna and the Field Reports’, Anna Luyten will be chatting with historian, painter, performer, writer, pianist, doctor of arts, collector and walker Koen Broucke. 

His walks lead him to unexpected encounters with history and art. For Broucke, walking is not just a physical activity, but a way of connecting with the past, nature and the stories hidden in landscapes. His hiking accounts are personal travel stories, but also reflections on time, space and the relationship between man and landscape. His unique observations invite us to look differently.

Koen Broucke spent years walking in the footsteps of forgotten soldiers, discovering ‘wounded landscapes’ and wrote his PhD in the arts ‘Under the pink darkness of the battlefield’ (KU Leuven, LUCA School of Arts, Glasgow School of Arts, 2014-2019). He is a walking, painting chronicler. He follows the river Meuse, tracks, people and things along the way.  This week, his exhibition Op Drift | Flights to Kampen 1914 – 2024 opened in the Dutch town of Kampen. It is 110 years since World War I caused one million Belgians to flee to the Netherlands. Kampen is one of the places they ended up. Broucke paints their portraits and starts with the story of his great-grandmother.

verwandelen (Dutch forgotten word) 1 to make different, to change 2 to become different, to change 3 to move – German (ver)wandeln – ie. as walking ‘to walk quietly’, from °wanden ‘to go, to pass over’.