Walkography, an approach
Chi ha familiarità con la pratica della ricerca nelle scienze umane sa che, contrariamente all’opinione comune, la riflessione sul metodo spesso non pre-cede, ma segue tale partica. Si tratta cioé di pensieri in qualche modo ultimi o penultimi, da discutere tra amici e addetti ai lavori, e che solo una lunga consuetudine con la ricerca puó legittimare. Giorgio Agamben (39)
Walkography is a construction that takes shape as its practical and experimental work advances. For that very reason, the texts and publications gathered here will certainly contain inconsistencies and explicit doubts — nothing other than the result of this continuous searching, erring, trying and recalibrating: the result, that is, of an open and transparent research process.
Beginnings, and a few founding principles
The first version of Walkography was born in 2016, as a “project to produce perceptual-artistic maps representing walks and excursions, privileging aspects tied to perception over geographic-spatial data.”
It was the result of ten years of research on walking and its representation, and it began to put into play some of the principles on which Walkography’s theoretical structure still rests today.
1. PERCEPTION FIRST. The perception of a territory precedes its recording. During exploration, every deliberate act of documentation is kept to the minimum necessary, leaving perception the greatest possible freedom. To explore is fieldwork, and it deserves the same seriousness as any other work.
2. WELCOME THE UNFORESEEN. The unforeseen is not endured but sought: through new routes, new timings, new ways of being in the landscape. Each exploration is not a self-referential subjective act, but a relation between the subject and what surrounds it. The unforeseen is where that relation becomes visible.
3. EXPLORATION MATTERS MORE THAN THE MAP. Tiredness, comfort, happiness, fear, unease: what the body records along the way is not noise to be filtered out, it is signal. Subjective sensation has a precision of its own, as legitimate as any quantitative datum. Relying on it too adds complexity and rigour to the work, not arbitrariness.
4. THE MAP AS ABSTRACTION. Every map — even the most rigorous topographic chart — is an abstraction of the territory it claims to represent. Walkography places geometric abstraction and perceptual abstraction on the same plane, producing cartographies that do not aspire to be absolute representations, but narrations of what was perceived.
Walkography today
The 2016 version remained a project with very few realisations. After a handful of explorations, the moment I tried to make the cartographies and the materials that rendered them, I found myself constantly limited by the topographic map — always starting from a strictly conventional representation: the route, the topography, onto which I added layers that tried to represent the perceptual side of the experience but that, except at a few specific points, ended up being interpretations of the topographic map itself.
Thinking of walking as simultaneous reading and writing, yet needing not to distract perception, I came to think that a device able to return environmental and physiological data during the walk — removing entirely the worry of keeping a record, and so leaving perception even freer — could be a use of technology consistent with the project.
This way, at the end of the exploration you have a set of data that allows an almost automatic drawing of a first map. That, however, is not the finished product but the starting point. On this first map it becomes essential to make interpretations — to alter the parts where our memory of the walk asks us to record certain aspects differently and specifically, to layer on notes, sketches, accounts.
It is a map that replaces the strictly topographic base of the conventional chart: a first “topography of perception.” But, like any map, it has to be worked, altered and interpreted to become eloquent.
If on one hand this cartography is a specific, personal narrative of an exploration — a personal reading of a territory crossed in a specific period, under specific conditions, as personal as they are environmental — what would happen if it were used as a method for collective dérives?
Could we arrive at unprecedented readings of neighbourhoods, territories and cities?
Could we get past the coldness of the data-driven approach and complement it?
Could we have descriptions of territories that let us compare how different collectives experience them, and open — with them and among them — a constructive dialogue that lets us design public space better?
And what if, one day, we could have an atlas of perceived territories?
Comparable to one another, yet where the datum — far from being absolute — becomes a basis solid enough to ground a narrative of spaces that is as rigorous as it is subjective?
Walkography exists to explore these possibilities, one walk at a time.
39.Agamben, G. Signatura Rerum - sul metodo. Venaria Reale (To): Boringhieri, Bollati, 2008.
