We undertook our fieldwork in Walthamstow Marshes and the nearby Springfield Park. We set a deadline for the completion of traces a few weeks after that. Our prompts, chosen for optional orientation in our walks, were the following:
the most simple way is to walk a different path (the second way is to give it another name) James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall (Pamenar Press, 2022) Walking, eating, touching, listening, waiting, sounding… like an ecotone. Artur Vidal, score extract, 2025
Artur Vidal, who lives nearby, has long experience of open-air performance on the Marshes and in Springfield Park. He offers two traces: a score and a recording, both entitled ‘The Words in the Thicket’. The score is based on voice memos made in Spanish as Artur walked on 9 February, and then translated into English. It includes a visual/ text score that focuses on moments of hesitation in the recordings. The sound work is a vocal realisation of the score made by Artur, Stephan Barrett and Adriana Minu. <a href="https://walkinginair.bandcamp.com/album/walking-in-air-in-walthamstow">walking in air in walthamstow by Artur Vidal</a>
James Davies is currently engaged in a long walking project based on Ordnance Survey maps. For Walking in Air in Walthamstow on 10 January, he walked further than any of us, passing close to the reservoirs. He generated a series of phrases that emerged from his experience and our conversations – eg ‘Going to is desire, like a second glass of wine’ – and presents these in the form of a short text-based video, ‘Going to’. (Animation by Hugo Middleton.)
This sound work derives from live processing of ambient sound on Walthamstow Marshes. Will positioned himself in Horseshoe Ticket, close to the River Lea. He set up his recording device to process incoming sound with a granular effect. He left the device running and walked around the area, using Bluetooth headphones to monitor the audio. All of the recordings made that day failed for technical reasons, so he returned the following day and made this recording using identical settings. <a href="https://walkinginair.bandcamp.com/album/walking-in-air-in-walthamstow">walking in air in walthamstow by Will Montgomery</a>
Four distinct traces emerged from Emmanuelle’s activities on 10 January. Her text ‘Walking in Air Walthamstow’ begins with a description of her preparation for our activity. She supplements the concept of the ‘ecotone’ (an ecological boundary, also important for Artur and Will’s traces) with that of the ‘sociotone’, which describes a social or cultural boundary. The next section of the text is a transcription of words improvised while walking in air and thinking aloud in and around the bandstand in Springfield Park. A third section written the following day reflects on our activities, placing them in the context of our first Walking in Air, five years ago.
The text concludes with a list of French and English ‘vrais-amis’ (terms shared across the two languages). This list forms the basis of a video made at the bandstand at Springfield Park on 9 February and a short text built around these words and generated through an interaction with an AI assistant. Another short video documents Emmanuelle’s ‘whistle-walking’ around the bandstand.
