Walking and wandering around in an open space can be an exceptional experience. Whether enabled by social status or driven by necessity, walking represents a way of self-liberation and freedom.
The simplest forms of movement such as walking, wandering, and strolling have become cultural topoi. Still, by examining their contemporary practices, we can better understand what defines our current present in crisis and possible futures.
It is well-documented that many ancient philosophers walked when discussing the great questions of existence. So, this form of movement became a structure for developing thinking. Beyond these philosophical structures, walking served as a psychological remedy. For a long time, monks recommended it to each other to alleviate melancholy, while religious pilgrims tested their physical endurance through their long walks – often crossing continents – to experience the transcendent.
During the Enlightenment, Rousseau’s ‘Solitary Walker’ used movement to exercise self-reflection, while Kant structured his daily life through regular walking. For the Romantics, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer suggested metaphysical plains beyond mere existence, meanwhile, the strollers of the landscape garden through its buildings and landscape fragments saw the ideal representations of distant worlds known only through the lenses of colonialism and the colonial power allowing for this knowledge and representation.
In 19th-century art history, the emergence of the urban wanderer, the flâneur, also points to the new desire for freedom from social constraints through the act of walking. Similarly, during the 1950s and 60s, the Situationists used free strolling lead by chance to create a ‘psychogeography’ defying consumerist habits of the society of spectacle. Hopes of (self)liberation also inspire the collective journeys of hikers, demonstrators, and refugees. Through their rhythmic movements, they exist in a transitional state: distanced from their everyday realities, far from their final destinations, in the calming sense of open spaces.
The contemporary artworks on display depict the desires, fears, and necessities linked to various types of walking. They also explore the repetition of certain rituals and question the validity of earlier artistic forms, figures, and historical experiences. Poetically and philosophically, they suggest the individual’s potential for spiritual, psychological, and political development through these forms of movement. This is done critically and often with humour.
In the new post-epidemic era of biopolitics, we can finally move freely in our urban space, and the female version of the urban wanderer, the flâneuse, can also emerge. The potentials of female roles are pointed out through Friedrich’s Wanderer against the backdrop of computer games and horror films, while in another work the painter gets lost in mountains and seas of fog. As the dynamics of both capitalism and populist representations of political power destroy the natural landscape and force young people to emigrate, we are reminded of solastalgia.
When traditional media is forced to remain silent, embroideries – a traditionally female activity – can tell the stories of demonstrations and demonstrators. Rap music can narrate the story of fleeing young adults seeking refuge. The exploitation and change of our natural environment can only be survived by our symbiosis with other lifeforms or through the formation of ever-moving communities.
This way the possibilities of freedom and survival are revealed. At the same time, by entering and experiencing large, open spaces, we cannot simply free ourselves from our physical and mental confinements but also transcendentally experience our being at home and finding our home in the world – in one word, the fulfilment of presence.