WALC LISTEN CAFÉS

In this online café, we brought together four artists and practitioners working at the intersection of walking, health, and care to explore how walking is shaped by lived physical conditions. Rather than focusing on walking as an individual ability, we ask how walking becomes a practice of adaptation, resilience, negotiation, and relational care.

Through artistic practices, participatory projects, and lived experience research, our speakers will share how walking can be redefined when the body does not align with dominant norms of speed, independence, or productivity — and how walking arts can open space for different ways of moving.

Guests for this event are Genevieve Rudd (UK), Pam Patterson (CAN), Leena Raudvee (CAN) and Katerina Pistola (GK)

Video recording of a conversation between Julian Hoffman, author of Lifelines – searching for home in the mountains of Greece, and Annemarie Lopez.

When Julian first arrived in Greece’s remote Prespa region, his Greek was “almost non-existent.” Walking became a form of literacy for him—a way to learn the language of the land by tracing the steps of others, reading stone walls, abandoned houses, plant communities, and animal tracks. “Walking was a way in,” he says, “a way to begin to belong.”

Today, walking remains central to Hoffman’s work as a nature writer documenting Prespa’s changing environment in books like Lifelines. The pace of walking allows him to attune himself to the subtly changing patterns of the landscape.

Through our new WALCAfé series, WALC invites you to explore how Walking Arts plays a vital role in well-being, both individually and collectively, physically and mentally. 

Our first conversation will focus on Walking Arts and Mental Health. We are delighted to have with us four speakers who bring diverse insights from research, therapeutic practice, community engagement, and public health perspective: Leon Clowes (UK), Tricia Enns (Canada), Alexandra Rodriguez (USA), and Alba Sauleda (Spain). 

Alex Rodriguez is a Public Health PhD candidate at the University of Florida, and through the UF Center for Arts in Medicine, she has contributed to national and international research, including centring arts engagement as a health behaviour, defining arts participation for public health, and co-authoring a WHO report on arts and health in the US. In addition to her research, Alex is a Think Tank Board Member for the American Journal of Public Health and developed UF’s Honors course, Leveraging the Arts to Promote Public Health. Learn more here

Leon Clowes is an artist and researcher. Via practice research at London College of Music, University of West London, his PhD examined the use of autoethnography to self compassionately draw from difficult lived experience. In this talk, Leon will refer to reflect on the making of Empirical Evidence of the Existence of Angels and how this might be opened out to co-create work with other people in addiction recovery. The piece is built from 11 days and 11 hours of walks around central London while only two months into his addiction recovery journey.

https://www.instagram.com/leonclowes

Alba Sauleda is an artist-researcher, PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona, whose work investigates artistic methodologies through the lens of mad studies. Aiming to propose new imaginaries of madness, she connects the aesthetics of walking arts with the history of psychiatric practice. Through assemblage poetics and spatial displacement, her research seeks to generate reflections that challenge institutional reliance on forced hospitalization and uninformed treatments.

https://www.instagram.com/sauledaalba/

Tricia Enns (she/they) is a designer, educator and artist currently calling Tiohtià:ke/Montreal (Quebec, Canada) home, although they tend to be a little bit nomadic (when life allows). As a cis-fem-person with a queer body (and heart) and living with chronic pain Tricia has, more recently, been exploring questions of connection, care, and (be)longing. Her practice often uses creative cartography, debris, video, deep listening, electronics, sound art, handmade paper, other textiles, walking, scores, and zines. Their practice draws on participatory approaches to complexify what and how we know. Learn more at triciaenns.com. 

This collective dialogue will explore:

• How does personal experience become a driver for community engagement?
• Questions of access: Whose bodies are recognized in public space, and how can Walking Arts open new possibilities for those living with mental health challenges?
• How can Walking Arts be integrated into therapeutic and health systems?
• What kinds of creative outcomes can emerge from walking practices?

This is not another conversation on walking’s positive impact on health. This is an open dialogue that asks: Who has access to Walking Arts, and how can these practices be made available to those who need them most?

This free online event marks the beginning of the WALCAfé series. The second episode, in January, will explore Walking Arts and Physical Health, while the third will be shaped by dialogue and feedback from participants in the first two conversations.

We warmly invite you to join us in this exchange and discuss together the future of Walking Arts & Health.

The recent protests in Serbia and Greece in part started as the expression of collected grief over railway disasters. The resulting marches not only represented deep discontent with the actions of the respective governments, they were also expressions of solidarity and resistance.

For many, walking is not only as an artistic practice, but also a deeply political act. We are truly living in interesting times, and in the light of the many powerful protests unfolding around the world, we are inspired by the collective energy of people gathering in the public space, expressing solidarity, resistance, and, dare way say, hope.

Join us for a powerful evening, part walk, part reflection, part testimony, as we explore how walking becomes a tool for communal grief, solidarity and resistance in response to human tragedy.

This online café will explore the intersection of walking arts and political marches, a collective listening and conversation featuring influential walking artists whose work delves into social justice, environmental grief, and embodied storytelling.

Nohad ElHajj is an independent researcher whose work bridges art, politics, and social change. With a background spanning Lebanon, South Africa, Scotland, and Kuwait, she harnesses walking and participatory processes as platforms for dialogue, human rights narratives, and community partnership building.

Marta Moreno Muñoz, fresh from returning from the Global March to Gaza, and creator of the trans-European performance-walk 2020: The Walk, brings her practice of walking as climate activism, having led long-distance mobile testimonies for Extinction Rebellion. Marta channels collective responsibility through embodied route-making and accountability in public space.

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman is a multidisciplinary artist‑walker whose projects mobilize urban geographies to hold memories of violence, displacement, and social rupture. His walking interventions act as living archives, mapping intergenerational grief across architecture and history.

Tom Jeffreys is a writer and editor predominantly covering contemporary art and culture, with a particular interest in work that engages with ecological concerns. His books include Signal Failure and Walking, and he recently co-organised The Edinburgh Walk for Gaza.

Our moderators are Babak Fakhamzadeh and Mary Marinopoulou, who will guide our speakers and audience through reflections on how walking amplifies mourning, fosters solidarity, and stages creative resistance.

Walking is often perceived as a simple, everyday act. Yet in moments of crisis, grief, and injustice, it can become something far more profound; a means of reclaiming presence, of honoring loss, and of reaching across divides to form bonds of solidarity. In the face of environmental degradation, political violence, and historical erasure, walking can become an act of resistance: quiet, deliberate, and deeply embodied.

We will discuss practices that stretch the boundaries of art and activism. How solidarity can be enacted not just in words but through shared motion, and how resistance need not be loud to be powerful.

This café will be held in a horizontal format, an open conversation where speakers and participants will exchange stories, inspire each other, and reflect together.

Let’s walk, listen, and learn, across geographies and struggles.

Hosted by Clara Gari of Nau Côclea.

Join us for the online presentation of the upcoming Grand Tour 2025!
This year’s route will take us from the Maresme to the Pyrenees, through the Montseny, Les Guilleries, and Osona, weaving a collective journey of artistic creation and shared walking, with more artists than ever. As always, the Grand Tour is not just a walk, but a laboratory of slowness, encounter, and transformation.

We are delighted to announce the participation of Christina Schultz, our guest artist in charge of the Library on the Move, and Carla Farreny, poet, writer and vertical choreographer, who will introduce her Suspended Conversation on the second day of the walk.

Come discover what lies ahead, step by step.
And you can also study the journey plan in our website.

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 is growing to a global action. This year the Harvest Moon falls on 6 and 7 October. Eleonore returns to a Walking Arts and Local Communities café to invite you to walk with her by the light of the moon.

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 is hosted by Eleanor Rycroft, producer of Night Walk: Walking Clifton Downs and Ladies Mile at midnight.

Eleonore will host a Harvest Moon Reflections café after the action on 14 October.

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 is growing to a global action. This year the Harvest Moon falls on 6 and 7 October. Eleonore returns to a Walking Arts and Local Communities café to invite you to walk with her by the light of the moon.

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 is hosted by Eleanor Rycroft, producer of Night Walk: Walking Clifton Downs and Ladies Mile at midnight.

Eleonore will host a Harvest Moon Reflections café after the action on 14 October.

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!

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.