Wallking

Well I presented my first conference paper… and it went quite well.

Here is the abstract.

WALLKING – On Sunday 7th March 2010, I led a small guided walk around Exeter following its city walls.  Seventy percent of the city’s perimeter still remains and the purpose of this tour was to walk the remaining thirty percent back into existence.  Armed with John Hooker’s famous city map from 1587 and a small guide book we circumnavigated the city with the wall acting as an incomplete text. Pedestrian performer and academic Carl Lavery once stated that when drifting through the city his separation from place paradoxically produced an attachment to it (2007:46).  How did the presence of the wall affect our ‘separation’ and ‘attachment’ to the city? This paper will examine the performativity of this ‘wallking’ and is part of my ongoing research into the relationship between psychogeography and pedestrian performance.

20 minutes of talking about walking a wall, and there was still lots left to mention.

It made me think about the whole nature of the guided walk and the tensions found between being tourist and witness from seeing and feeling. I also for the first time actually observed how easy it is easy to slip into the realm of political walking and how it is almost (some would say completely) impossible to side-step this. It also made me realise how freely I use the word anthropomorphise, and how this may not be the most suitable term for describing performative geographies.

My next plan is to do something on Sculpture walks or Maps (as that is a big thing at the moment).

The full paper can be found here.

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