Defamiliarizing a Walk

Abstract

This article chronicles the development of walking workshops through a technique of defamiliarization in order to dislodge the taken-for-granted and open up walking to experimentation and novelty. We work with these concerns to consider walking as a research-creation methodology that composes inventive connections of a relational ethics that enacts a shared ecology of living and lived practices. Walking is not just about directional movement, traveling to or from a place. Walking’s movement is also affective: emergent; sometimes imperceptible; and a performative practice of knowledge in the making that is coproduced by more than human matter. Walking is thus open to novelty. Two of the authors in this article share their participation in these workshops, experimenting with ethico-aesthetic architectures of borders, spaces, and transitions that choreograph movements in places.