The Wandering Walk is a site-specific installation located on the South Fyn Danish Island of Ærø. It engages with the familiar practice of walking as a mode of perception to explore and enrich the complex and shifting relationships between humans and nature. The installation is focused around the celebrated northern region of Vitsø. Frequently walked by locals and travellers for its idyllic beauty and natural offerings, it is the site of extraordinary landscape manipulation and re-appropriation.
The audio guide comprises two hours of sounds divided into 17 tracks (additional introductory tracks can be listened to in advance). With located signage to cue the audio tracks, the walker is guided through both mapped and unmapped routes engaging with Vitsø beyond its immediate beauty, to bring into question subjects once thought of as known.
The Wandering Walk audio: “Observe the tree trunks around you…”
Script [extract]
When you imagine nature, what do you see?
The rural landscape, over which you now partially gaze often plays a vital role in the individual and collective construction of this image.
Our perception of the ‘natural’ landscape, as a constructed system of signs and symbols, is related to information from sensory perception, conventions and classifications.
The idyllic landscape.
Or
The landscape of vested interest?
The landscape of recreation.
The periodic landscape.
The artistic landscape.
Or
The landscape garden?
The resilient landscape.
The resourceful landscape.
The participatory and the collective.
The photogenic.
The un – photogenic.
The landscape of memorial.
The landscape of future memorial.
Landscape management is a demonstration of nature’s submission to our will. Its repetition illustrates our desire to maintain this submission. Its discontinuance reminds us of our own mortality.
The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.
Landscape is to be found, not in the nature of things, but in our minds eye; it is a construct that serves as a means of perception for any society that no longer lives directly from the land.
This walk does not take place in nature, but in the image of nature.
As you sit and look out the window, you are bombarded by a reel of images.
Modern modes of transport have changed the significance of the journey, putting more focus on destination as well as changing the significance of the walk.
When we walk, we go through a process of selective framing and filtering. On returning from a walk, one remembers the things one should have seen.
All images were taken by the artists and participants of the Wandering Walk. The audio track was recorded for the installation, and are two of the tracks that participants listen to on the walk.
This is part of RHYTHM, a section of The Learned Pig devoted to exploring rhythm as individual and collective, as poetic and biological, and the ways that rhythm dictates life. RHYTHM is conceived and edited by Rachel Goldblatt.