We launched our project by undertaking, documenting and reflecting upon a preliminary ‘walking in air’ excursion, in response to a call from Performance Research magazine, published in the ‘On Air’ issue (Vol. 26, No. 6). With Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Will Montgomery.
This first Walking in Air activity emerged as a response to texts by Tim Ingold and Luce Irigaray. Both Emmanuelle and Will have a background in the relations between text, music and environment. Will works in the fields of poetry and music, while Emmanuelle has specialised in conceptual writing, performance, new musical composition and artist-publishing. We began the project when many lockdown restrictions were still in place, so our consideration of air was complicated by our immediate awareness of airborne infection. At the same time, the skies above London were almost silent. We had planned to do this together on the Sussex Downs, and then write up our experience as a co-authored document. This would be a piece of collaborative new writing with associated visual and sonic materials, narrating aspects of our thinking and our walking. Instead, because of lockdown social distancing and travel restrictions, each of us, on the same afternoon, embarked on a separate walk in south London: Will in Battersea Park and Emmanuelle in Whitehorse Meadow in Thornton Heath.
Some traces of our fieldwork are available here. Walking in Air, Performance Research ‘On Air’, Vol 26 issue 7 (Sept 2022) collaborative illustrated text available here.
