WALKSCAPES: Walking as an aesthetic practice, Francesco Careri

In Walkscapes, Careri expresses his idea of walking as a tool to transform and perceive the landscape.
Through this book, Careri shows that walking and architecture are linked. That walking is a creative
act capable of symbolically and physically transforming space.
At first, he describes what walking was for primitive nomads: a necessity related to survival. Later,
he describes the action of walking as something taken up by avant-garde artistic movements, such
as the Dadaists and the Surrealists, who made "walking-visits" to banal places in the city. At that
moment, the action of walking starts to become an aesthetic tool and a tool for the perception of
our spatial environment. With Land Art, walking becomes a true instrument of art. Careri concludes
that nomadism and sedentarism are in osmosis and that, therefore, cities are the result of a co-
presence of empty spaces (nomadic) that can be drifted and full spaces (sedentary).
Careri introduces his reflections on walking as an aesthetic practice, he makes a journey through
history through man's own wandering, resorting to the biblical story of Cain and Abel and reviewing
it from an architectural perspective. He affirms that the two brothers embody the two souls into
which the human race was divided from the beginning: the sedentary, represented by Cain and
dedicated to agriculture, and the nomadic, embodied by Abel and dedicated to sheep farming. He
identifies Cain with the man who subdues nature to build something artificial, while he distinguishes
Abel with the man who plays at creating relationships between nature and life, and it is in this game
that Abel experiences a new universe around him, walking to control the flock is transformed into a
series of cartographies of the terrain, which will later give rise to the birth of the so-called landscape
architecture.
At the dawn of history, man was part of the universe of wandering and nomadism, but it was from
this universe that the first object placed in the human landscape was born: the menhir, a large stone
driven vertically into the ground. The placement of the menhir meant transforming the landscape,
since the stone is not in a "natural" position. He approaches the placement of the menhirs almost as
a human foundational act. He therefore understands the route, the space traversed, as the first
aesthetic action that allows to organize the territory of nature with human keys. Therefore, for Careri,
walking is an art that contains in its bosom the menhir as well as architecture, landscape, or sculpture.
And it is only walking the action that allows to reintegrate all of them in a unitary way. In any case,
the transcendental act will take place with the construction of the menhir. He understands, therefore,
that the space traveled is prior to the architectural space, which has important repercussions that
are key to its understanding, and to intervene on it by building something geometric, creating
something around it.
On this basis, Careri explores three fundamental transitional moments in the history of art, focusing
on them from the special perspective of walking. The first between Dadaism and Surrealism, the
second from the Lettrist International to the Situationist and the third from Minimalism to Land-Art.
It was born in Paris, a group of artists adhered to the Dadaist movement who met to start a
movement that aimed to inaugurate a series of urban excursions to the banal places of the city. This
action was considered the first urban ready-made and gave something empty, and not an object, a
symbolic value; Dada went from bringing a banal object to the space of art to bringing art
(represented by artists) to a banal place in the city. Dada simply brings the artist to the place, does
not intervene in it by making changes, leaves no physical traces except a photo of the artists in the
church field posing conscious of what they were doing: nothing. The place was chosen because it
was an abandoned field, which could symbolize any abandoned and banal green space that had no
reason to exist.
Three years later, Dada organizes another intervention in real space, which will mark the transition
to surrealism. Surrealism uses the walk as a way to investigate the unconscious zones of the city,
that is, those that escape design and constitute the untranslatable in traditional representations.
After the Dadaist "visitation" and the Surrealist "walk", the Lettrist International coined the term drift
to indicate the construction and experimentation of an alternative way of living and inhabiting the
city, which was also a purely aesthetic action that fell within the Dadaist logic of anti-art. The term
drift was first introduced by Gilles Ivain, who spoke of a mutant city, constantly modified by its
inhabitants, in which there would be a continuous drift leading to total disorientation. However, the
drift theory is taken up by Guy Debord, who defines it and gives some rules, such as establishing
beforehand which environmental units are to be analyzed, fixing the dimensions of the research
space and establishing that, at most, the drift must be carried out by three people who have reached
the same level of consciousness, since the meeting of these three people must lead to objective
conclusions.
In December 1966, Tony Smith, along with a group of students, overcame the nets of a construction
site and began to walk along a road under construction, and from there began his reflections: "is the
road a work of art or not" and then "if so, in what way? Two artistic currents respond to Smith's
reflections: minimal art and land art. With Smith's walk, sculpture acquires more and more ground in
the modification of the territory, while before the land was modified by architecture, now it is the
sculpture of the artists of the land that modifies it. The spaces in which these transformations occur
are empty spaces, devoid of architecture and human presence, it seems a desire to restart the history
of the world.
A year after the publication of Smith's journey, Richard Long made "A Line Made by Walking," a
photograph of a grassy field trodden along a line. In this work there is a co-presence of sculpture
(the line) and walking (the action), but there is also an absence of everything, an absence of the
action, the body, and the object, but what is unmistakable is the result of this action, Long's
intervention is deprived of any technological input as it only transforms the earth's surface and in a
totally reversible way. For Long, walking is an action that is recorded in the place and draws on it a
certain figure, and that can be reproduced on a map, but for the artist the opposite is also possible,
and thus transmit the experience.
In the same years of Smith's travels and the work of André and Long, architects were trying to
understand what was happening in the cities in front of them. They realized that a kind of urban
form of cancer was attacking the cities: a space was developing around them that they did not
hesitate to call "urban chaos" in which a general disorder reigned, formed by a juxtaposition of
ordered fragments. Observing these disordered territories, they realized that, in addition to the
architectural artifacts, what had become an important presence in these spaces was the void that
turns its back on the city and organizes a parallel life, but this void is inhabited and experienced and
acquires a fundamental importance. Observing a photographic area of a city, what is most noticeable
is its expansion; starting from a more compact central core, islands are "expelled" detached from the
rest of the built-up area, which often become centers equivalent to the main core and form a
polycentric system, an archipelago. Moreover, the different parts of it develop at different speeds, in
fact, while the center is more static, the periphery is characterized by a greater dynamism, a greater
frequency of transformations.
Today's cities are different from those of the last century; other cities have grown up around them.
If, for example, we were to walk through a sectioned city of the last century, we would understand
whether we were heading towards the center or towards the periphery thanks to the difference in
density; in today's cities this recognizability is missing, this rarefaction no longer exists, but rather,
for example, we would find built-up areas alternating with unbuilt-up areas and different densities,
and it is no longer recognizable which direction we are taking. In the modern city we seem to have
realized the New Babylon by the superimposition of empty corridors within the consolidated city, the
New Babylon lives from the amnesia of the contemporary city, it is a sequence of connected sectors
immersed in the city, no longer superimposed on it. The nomadic city lives in osmosis with the
sedentary city and offers its presence as a new nature. We should design a nomadic city in the
manner of the Neo-Babylonians: transform it during the journey and transform it playfully from within.
The beginning and the end are the Stalker group of which he was co-founder and which emerged
from young architects in the 90s.
Their proposal: to search for the unconscious city in no-man's land, diffuse and lost, to experiment
with it. To do so, they resort to transurbance: walking and exploring the territory, creating
unconventional maps.
They carry out research and actions on the territory, with special attention to marginal areas and
urban voids, abandoned spaces or spaces in transformation. These investigations are developed at
different levels, around the practicability, representation, and design of these spaces that we call
current territories. The apparently irresolvable contradictions around the possibility of preservation
through abandonment, of representation through sensory perception, and of the design of the
instability and mutability of these places are addressed.
These territories are difficult to understand, and therefore to plan, because they lack a place in the
present, and are therefore foreign to the languages of the contemporary. Their knowledge can only
come through direct experience, they can be witnessed rather than represented, the archiving of
such experiences is the only way to map the present territories.
Perceiving the gap, in making such a transition, between what is certain, every day, and what is
uncertain, yet to be discovered, generates a sense of disorientation, a state of apprehension that
leads to an intensification of perception. Suddenly space acquires a sense, everywhere the possibility
of discovery, the fear of an unwanted encounter. The gaze becomes penetrating, the ear is ready to
listen.
To wander through the actual territories on walking, this is the chosen way to be in these unmediated
spaces, to participate in their dynamics. Nomadic research, destined to know while crossing, without
regimenting, without standardizing, and defining the object of knowledge, so as not to stop it from
becoming. To cross is a creative act, it means to create a system of relations in the chaotic
juxtaposition of times and spaces that characterizes the current territories. To cross means to
compose in a single cognitive path the strident contradictions that animate these places, in search
of unprecedented harmonies.
To intensify perception, to be ready to listen, is a necessary condition for the territories to reveal
themselves to those who want to cross them. To be ready to perceive the unconscious language of
change, to question without the pretension of describing and identifying. It is current transcendence,
as an inexhaustible perception of the existing meanings in continuous movement.
The identity of an empty space is as important as a built space. Understanding abandoned areas as
spaces with the possibility of a future. The unconscious of the unplanned city, the periphery of the
city. The contrast between the full and the empty, the nomad and the sedentary.