Sound and Music

Walk the Walls: A 12 hour walk from midnight till noon, 6km around Plymouth on Friday, 22 January 2010
 
Walk the Walks was a 12-hour excursion and performance that was part of The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow festival curated and organised by the Plymouth Arts Centre and the Marian Abramovic Institute in Plymouth. As one of the many activities taking place in the three day festival, the walk provided an opportunity for participants to engage and an idea of the experience of one of artist Marina Abramovic's durational and often physically enduring performances. Walk the Walls is based on Abramovic's 1988 performance where she and her partner at the time, Ulay, embarked on a journey across the Great Wall of China. Beginning from opposite ends of the 6000km wall, Abramovic and Ulay travelled across over months to ultimately meet together in the middle. Apparently performed as an expression of their love, the long wait to gain permissions to access the Great Wall and the strain of the performance lead them to separate (rather than come together) following the event. Similarily, Walk the Walls perhaps resisted greater experience of the environment due to the lengthy duration.
 
Scaled down to 6km, the image of the Great Wall is superimposed over a map of Plymouth etching out a path across the city that is to be experienced over the span of 12 hours - from midnight until noon. Artists and organisers Tony Whitehead and Simon Persighetti take us on an unusual and often surreal journey around Plymouth - taking inspiration from Situationist ideas of drifting and a sound walk as a durational performance. As explained by Whitehead, the idea of the walk is to sensitise the participants to the environment through a shared experience. Participants are encouraged to focus on the walk and the experience of the city and to forget ideas of the past and futures to concentrate on the present being-in-the-world. The idea is to de-familiarize the self with the city, and one way of doing this is to do the walk at a time from which people do not normally walk - after midnight. We have become accustomed to the city as a place for work, the side walk as a place for walking, the mall as a place for shopping. Is it possible to see these places as it is and to explore the urban terrain without any goals or aims, but rather allow the city reveal itself to us?
 

Armed with a stick of chalk and a mobile phone, the walk was documented in real-time and blogged on a Tumblr site. To say the least, by the end of the 12 hours, we did have an experience of Plymouth that most residents have never had. Though fatigue, cold and discomfort (possibly from being unprepared for such a trip), restricted mental capacity to truly focus on the walk, it was truly an enduring experience, which I am glad to have completed rather than to have resigned early on. It became less about psychogeography, experiencing the environment as a missionless drift (we had a direct path to follow with the guidance of Whitehead and Persighetti), but more about enduring the 12 hours and walking as a performance and collective experience, which we will not likely forget.
 
 
Links:
 
http://www.plymouthartscentre.org/art.html
http://walkthewalls.tumblr.com/
 
 
Simon Persighetti is co founder of artist collective Wrights & Sites on site-specific performance and writer/publisher of An Exeter Mis-Guide and other mis-guide tours. http://www.mis-guide.com/
 
Tony Whitehead is an environmentalist, sound artist and educator. Through workshops, events and performances he explores sound within the sound, environment and the everyday. He is writer of blog - Soundings. http://www.tonywhitehead.org/