Walking the forest imaginary: a breath between us

Poitras Santos_A BREATH BETWEEN US_POITRAS SANTOS_2019.jpg

Walking the forest imaginary: a breath between us is a permanent site-specific audio artwork that invites the audience to walk into the forest imaginary populated by things magical and unseen. Regarding the ancient and present role of moss in creating oxygen and storing carbon, helping to keep our ecosystem in balance, the artwork invites participants to wander pathways through the woods while listening to a hybrid essay culled from research, on-site investigation, and original poetic fragments. (photo: Greger Ståhlgren)

Crafted uniquely in response to Alingsås Nolhaga Park (Sweden), with the support of Kulturforeningen Tornet, as part of the Goteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) Extended.

YOU CARRY THE WORLD

Poitras Santos_You Carry the World_credit Laura Reeder_2.jpg

Considering story as a mobile form of refuge, YOU CARRY THE WORLD invited participants on a collective walk on the island of Aghios Ahillios, in the Small Prespa. Following orchard paths, we walked to the ruins of the Panagia Porfyra Monastery, and up the hill to the Cross of Saint Achilles. Considering the location as a site of ecological and spiritual refuge, and regarding how stories themselves provide shelter for lost things, bearing communal, historical, and ecological information within their codes, we exchanged our own stories that provide shelter.


(photo: Laura K Reeder)Created for the Made of Walking V/Walking Encounters Conference in Prespes, Greece, University of Western Macedonia, Greece.

WALKING PRACTICES/WALKING ART/WALKING BODIES

I’m delighted to be participating in organizing this exciting walking encounter/conference in Prespes, Greece this summer, July 1st to 7th, 2019.

The Department of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia in Greece is organizing the International Encounters/Conference WALKING PRACTICES/WALKING ART/WALKING BODIES”. The International Encounters/Conference will be held in the Prespes area Greece. Prespes area, a unique environment with two lakes (Megali Prespa and Mikri Prespa), is the locus where the field research of the walking art project Visual March to Prespes, is taking place. This walking art project is organised by the 1st Painting Workshop of the School of Visual Arts of the University of Western Macedonia. It was initiated in 2007 and the current International Encounters/Conference is a culmination of its activities, in collaboration with MADE OF WALKING (V) and the Milena Principle.

Key note speakers:: Phoebe Giannisi and STALKER/Osservatorio Nomade

headline-.jpg

On Walking On

A review of Cole Swensen’s On Walking On by Julie Poitras Santos at the Cafe Review.

Literary history is replete with writers who walked and who wrote about walking, from early pilgrimage accounts to contemporary records.  Cole Swensen tackles this voluminous history in a book of poems about many such writers, interspersed with prose poems regarding walks of her own.  The volume is organized loosely chronologically — beginning with Chaucer and ending with contemporary writers Iain Sinclair and Will Self — and it contains longer poetic sequences about the work of Rousseau, Thoreau, Sand, Woolf, Walser, Sebald, and poet Lisa Robertson. …

618oeDu-BjL.jpg

Saunter Trek Escort Parade… (S.T.E.P.)

I’m delighted to be a part of this exciting exhibition of walking-related works at the Queens Museum and Flux Factory curated by Moira Williams, Christina Freeman and Emireth Herrera

Saunter Trek Escort Parade…S.T.E.P…. seeks to be an overlapping convergence and entanglement of walking, walk-based works and programming, mobilizing throughout New York.  S.T.E.P… embraces the many ways and bodies we walk while asking how walking as a creative act can challenge notions and open conversations around visibility, gender, labor, exploration, counter-mapping, colonialism, feminism, motherhood, contesting borders, community building, calling out gentrification, street harassment, (dis)ability, carbon debt, who sets the pace and measurement of the world, the power of dreams, and our entanglements between all of these and one another. S.T.E.P…. is open to all people of all abilities.

Poitras Santos_magnetite in palm.jpg