Nine films explore a dizzying array of responses to walking and landscape, both urban and rural. From Rachel Henaghan’s sensual, sensory delight, Elan, to Fiona Cullinan’s witty, super-short Roadwords, from Andy Howlett’s engrossing Escarpment, to Kate Green’s musical Mindwalk.
In Andrew Howe’sCinderloo we delve deep into history, Adele Mary Reed takes us on a visually delightful tour of Coventry whilst grappling with ideas about art and the commons. Fiona Cullinan shows us how it can be to walk as a woman in the world, …kruse takes a surprisingly eloquent pen for a walk, while Simon Jefferies’, WalkaDay is an upbeat celebration of walking and Walkspace.
Saturday 11th May, 7pm. Tickets £6.50 price includes a programme. There will be a licensed bar available all evening.
Walking Shorts is hosted by …kruse who hopes that if people enjoy this sort of thing it might become an annual event, perhaps with talks and walks thrown in too. If you have any queries or questions please email susankruse(at)yahoo(dot)com
Address: Playhouse Cinema, Leominster Community Centre, School Road, Leominster, Herefordshire, HR6 8NJ
Leominster is accessible by train from Birmingham either via Shrewsbury or Hereford. There is free parking at the Community Centre and in Broad st car park, behind the Community Centre.
The second Walkspace short film night will take place on Friday 16 June as part of the Walkspace 23 group show. The show runs from 3 June – 1 July at Artefact, Birmingham and it celebrates the diversity of practices of our 40+ membership.
A significant number of our members work with film and moving image and so we decided to dedicate an evening to this art form.
Expect video essays, poetry films, artists’ moving image and Super 8 ambulations, covering everything from hyper-urban strolling, female risk calculations, tree-mapping, cross-city walking, “psycho-geology” and Rural Otherness.
Doors open at 7pm and admission is on a pay-what-you-feel basis.
Still from Cross City Walks by Andy Howlett and Pete Ashton
We are delighted to announce that the first ever Walkspace short film night will be taking place this Thursday, 17th February at Artefact in Birmingham. Our collective of walking artists has ballooned since our humble beginnings in early 2020 and this event will showcase some of the moving-image work produced by the membership.
Expect hand-drawn animations, video-essays and super 8 pilgrimages, covering everything from motherhood, walking in lockdown, wild swimming, “extreme noticing” and the Cinderloo uprising of 1821. Featuring work by Adele Mary Reed, Andrew Howe, Fiona Cullinan, Daniella Turbin, Laura Babb, Andy Howlett, Rachel Henaghan and Pete Ashton.
The night kicks off at 7pm and admission is on a pay-what-you can basis. Tickets on the door.
Cover image from “Mother Anglia” by Adele Mary Reed
We wanted to celebrate this overlooked landmark, its construction created the Motorway system and it is vast. We spent two years meeting up in Birmingham (we live in Edinburgh & Sussex respectively) and explored the site on foot throughout the seasons. We both grew up in the Midlands and Spaghetti Junction was part of our childhoods.
What we found was two Junctions. Beneath concrete superstructure lies an older, darker junction ,a network of rail line, river, canals and foot/cycle paths intersected by feral undergrowth.
The Junction is part of a wider series examining places of significance throughout England. We are working on a project looking at the Thames Estuary and in the future we want to look at the border with Scotland.
About the Artists
Emily Inglis and Rachel Owens go on walks and make art; their creative collaboration is based on a thirty year friendship and the interplay of tensions and class differences contained within it.
For the past several years I’ve been working on a feature-length essay-film about Birmingham Central Library and the death of Modernism. The film is called Paradise Lost, History in the Unmaking and it could be described as a psychogeographical detective story in which I investigate the ruins of yesterday’s future in an effort to understand the forces that shape a city. If this sounds like your sort of thing then book your ticket to the online premiere now! The event is on May 24th as part of Flatpack Festival and is followed by a Q&A hosted by Christopher Beanland, author of Concrete Concept.
In an interview with Flatpack I talk about the film’s themes and give some insight into the creative process, including the central role that walking has played throughout.
Paradise Lost is essentially a feature-length video stroll. It’s structured like a walk, in that it sets out without a clear sense of a destination, and it meanders a bit and discoveries are made almost by accident. Bit by bit the story is pieced together and hopefully it all resolves into something satisfying by the end.
As an Australophile, I enjoyed watching Beau Miles video, ‘The Commute: Walking 90km to work‘, in which he ditched his car and walked to Monash University in Melbourne to deliver a lecture about adventuring. Fresh from the adventure, so to speak. Or not so fresh given the nature of the commute.
It was recommended to me so I’ll recommend it on to Walkspacers.
Beau Miles (bit of nominative determinism there) is a modern-day explorer who is trying to resurrect that feeling of adventure without having to fly half way around the world to do it. “I walked 90km to work a bunch of years ago to see if a stripped-back adventure could give me the kind of buzz that far away, exotic, heavily planned expeditions have given me over the years. It did.”
For the walk he appears something of a jolly swagman, setting off with no food, water or shelter, and living off the stuff that people throw away or inadvertently lose to the roadside. Part of the fascination is seeing what he will find and what he will stoop to eat… it is sometimes horrifying to watch him eat old food or half-empty plastic bottles of pop. He must have a stomach of iron or a carefully honed sense of smell for decay.
But he is not a hobo, not poor and not an itinerant in need of work – and therein lies a different distaste for some. It’s not that he sets out to be a swagman – and yet it clearly forms part of the rules of the walk in order to generate adventure.
It created a lot of discussion and debate in our household around the privileged nature of the walk and the filming vs the insights gained, issues highlighted and human challenge overcome.
Personally I was interested to see what thoughts that walking for two days with no funds, fuel or food would bring. About walking and humanity and philosophy and plastic littering and the basics of survival. There are things you get to thinking about when you push yourself this way that wouldn’t occur to you otherwise.
A few quotes that struck me:
“If there is one thing that is rhythmical it is walking. You know. It is so repetitious … You really just become a metronome.”
The paradox of being anti-littering but living off the litter that he hates: “First sit down. Quite serendipitous when someone throws away a couch. Bastards.”
Why do this at all? “It’s about putting value on such a thing, much like baking your own bread or taking karate lessons. I think that experiences like this are the essence of being human, which to me is our ability to question everything we do.”
But also there is the personal development: “Everything changes you. You cannot take away what just took place. That is now with me, it is part of me, it part of the fabric of Beau, it it my world view, it’s how I teach, it’s how I see the world, it’s how I see that road from that point on, and yes a lot of it will filter away as I get further from the walk, but it’s still there.”
Check out Beau Miles’ YouTube channel: He does a lot of crazy stuff from sleeping 30ft up a 100-year-old gum tree to seeing if he can build a cabin for his wife during the pandemic without her knowing.
New Walkspace member Daniella Turbin has set herself the ambitious target of walking every square of the UK Ordnance Survey Maps. This sixty second animation documents her journey along the course of the River Severn and comprises sixty hand-drawn frames created from photographs taken on a 35mm film camera.
“The River Severn runs right the way from North to South Worcestershire, joining the village of Upper Arley with the town of Tewkesbury. As a walking artist I decided to take this journey by foot and create a video in response to this journey.”
I’ve used Mind (the charity) both personally and as a professional mental-health worker a lot over the years – they’re just about the most useful resource in Britain for mental health support. So I’ve decided to walk around my local park every day throughout January to raise money for them. This might not seem much but it’s this type of simple activity that keeps a lot of us going. To make it a bit more of a challenge, however, I’ll be taking my camera with me each day in order to make a diary-film about this experience within my local environment, which I hope can be an additional and beneficial outcome for others. It’ll involve walking, looking, listening, talking and maybe even some singing…
That was my mission statement when I began this project at the start of January. One of the fun things about setting yourself simple restrictions, however, is allowing the improvisation of daily making within an uncontrollable environment loosen those restrictions almost immediately. This is my second attempt at a long-form diary film within the past few months and I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to embrace a lack of preciousness and the idea that what we cannot plan for can be often more interesting and rewarding than what we think we want.
You can watch the film, which is updated weekly until the end of January, here:
And your donation would be greatly appreciated here.
About Owen
Owen Davey (sometimes known as OD Davey for musical purposes) is a Manchester based writer, director and performer, working in song, film and the gallery. In 2014 he founded Video Strolls, a nonprofit that curates art and film events that explore place and journeying.
He is currently an AHRC North West Consortium funded and Disabled Students Allowance supported PhD candidate at the University of Salford, doing practice-based research into ‘The Enfoldment of Song and First Person Filmmaking’.
On Christmas Eve I met up with local podcaster and author of At Walking Pace, Nyla Naseer for a walk around Highbury Park. Nyla captured some of the walk and conversation on video for her walking-themed YouTube channel. Part interview, part impromptu tour of some of the park’s curios (including an “Angry Wall” and a Twin Peaks-style tree circle), we hope you enjoy this little wintertime jaunt.
I made a film looking back at my experience of walking during the pandemic. From the isolated strolls of lockdown, through the gradual stages of easing, and on to the tentative re-emergence of collective walking; this is my suburban exploration. Originally made for the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography for which I only managed to complete a rough cut, this is the final version with lovely sound and music from Bulbils and OD Davey.
Walkspace 