n.24 marzo /giugno 2021 Walking Without Walls, and Beyond: A conversation about art and walking with Claudia Zeiske di Elisabetta Rattalino Only what's human can be truly alien. The rest is mixed forest, undermining moles, and wind.1 Wisława Szymborska, Psalm, 1976 Claudia Zeiske is a curator based in the rural market town of Huntly, Scotland, where she founded the socially-engaged arts organisation Deveron Arts (since 2016, Deveron Projects) in 1995.2 During her 25 years of work with Deveron, Zeiske and the teams that have supported her work have developed over a hundred projects with local, UK-based and international artists. In Huntly, her curatorial approach has evolved over the years in response to Deveron’s changing relationship with the town and its needs as well as to global transformations.3 Its key features, however, have remained constant: art projects are linked to the town but they also address global issues by making them locally relevant; they promote experimentation that transcends disciplinary, political and social boundaries. Walking as an artistic practice can embody all these possibilities - or, at least, it does according Zeiske’s practice. Since the mid 2000s, artists’ interest in walking has increased in the UK and abroad. Their artistic antecedents can be traced back to Dadaist and Surrealist “anti-walks”, to the Situationists, and, later, to the works of British artists, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton.4 This field of artistic research was soon integrated into Deveron’s programme, with works such as Hamish Fulton’s 21 Days in the Cairngorms (2010), Rocca Gutteridge’s Walkingand (2011-2012), Ethiopian artist Mihret Kebede’s first Slow Marathon (2012), Scottish poet Alan McPherson’s Minor Paths (2012), and Austrian artist Michael Höpfner’s Walking Off The Grid (2012). In 2013, Zeiske set up The Walking Institute.5 As American artist and scholar Blake Morris observes in his book Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium, The Walking Institute is one of the three networks recently initiated in the UK that foster experimentation, discourse and encounters in this field.6 Specifically, the Institute’s programme investigates walking as a medium, a research tool and a means of exploration and expression, by commissioning artists’ new work as well as inviting professionals from different walks of life to Huntly. Between 2017 and 2018, I worked at Deveron Projects, curating its public programme. During this time, I was involved in the development and production of Walking Without Walls, a collaborative digital residency with a local artist, Rachel Ashton, and a Gaza-based Palestinian painter, May Murad.7 This project tested the potential of walking and of digital, internet-based technologies as a means of exploration and art-making within very different political and socio-cultural contexts.8 Raising questions about political borders and property boundaries, Walking Without Walls is the starting point of this conversation, in which Zeiske and myself discuss projects and themes at the core of Zeiske’s recent curatorial programme. ER: When I arrived in Huntly, in September 2017, Walking Without Walls had already started. Could you tell me what was the original idea behind the project? CZ: I have always been interested in Human Rights, in fact, my early career was in Human Rights. It was only when I came to Scotland that I moved into the arts. And the arts offer fantastic tools for discussing difficult socio-political topics, such as climate change, migration, xenophobia, and public health. As part of my curatorial work, I travelled extensively to meet artists from around the world. With Deveron, I was interested in finding visual artists, musicians, craftspeople, and other creatives who could be interested in tackling these topics in Huntly and within the communities living locally. During my travels in the Middle East, I came across several interesting artists, but it was clear to me that they would never have the chance of coming to Scotland for an art residency, or even for a visit. No visas, living in war zones, being refugees in other countries… This made me think: how can we arrange to work with artists that could never come to us? Firstly, I set up a year-long programme of online talks, inviting artists who could not travel for political reasons. Once a month an artist presented their practice in the country they lived in. These artists were: Saddam Jumaily, an Iraqi artist from Basra, who took refuge in Amman/Jordan; Hasan Youssef, a writer from Damascus; Ghaith Adib, a Syrian designer who took asylum in Lebanon; and Adalet R. Garmiany, a Kurdish Iraqi artist based in the war zone of Erbil, in Iraq. Among these speakers, was the painter, May Murad, from Gaza. Gaza is one of the most inaccessible places on earth, with neighbouring countries Israel and Egypt strictly limiting freedom of movement. Many Palestinians living there have never left the 140-square mile strip of land. During her talk, we learnt that she had never had the opportunity to leave her homeland, nor could we even ever visit. Meanwhile, we had recently met a landscape painter living in our area, Rachel Ashton. We were intrigued by her personality, but her painterly work was difficult to align with our curatorial strategies: due to our socially-engaged practice, we had rarely worked with studio-based painters. And then the idea came: We proposed to bring the two together through walking and the use of digital technologies with a simple task: they would take each other on walks in their respective areas, painting each other’s landscapes. ER: Since its premises, the project has used walking as a means of exploration. This resonates with 19th century en-plain-air artists’ landscape painting – looking for a suitable spot to pain, if it was not for the complex political circumstances of Gaza and limits posed by the digital technologies… CZ: During the first phases of the project they learnt about each other’s lives, habits and environment. Then they selected peculiar aspects of each other’s landscape to represent. Rachel Ashton painted what May could show to her of Gaza: her grandmother’s garden; the entrance to Nuseirat Camp, a refugee camp located in the Gaza Strip; the generator that allowed May to have electricity during the power cuts imposed by the Israeli government. Gaza overlooks the Mediterranean sea, but its beaches are patrolled by the militia: people do not even imagine walking along the coast for leisure [fig. 1]. So, Rachel painted a seawall, built by the Palestinians to protect the shore from the waves. Meanwhile, for the first time, May Murad painted green hills and snow scenes, but also wooden fencing and field gates, learning a different – Scottish – way to roam the land. ER: In their paintings, we can see how the land is inscribed with the practices and histories of power(s)… It is also interesting that their works acknowledge the mediation of technologies adopted to the making process – thus implicitly reinforcing their geographical and cultural distance. Rachel, who in her painterly production tends to cover every single inch of the canvas, made her views of Gaza emerge from a white background, as if they were a vision. Her paintings reflect the fragmented nature of the digital exchange. Adopting a different visual strategy, May painted the frame of WhatsApp on a few her canvases, reminding the viewer of the limited experience she had of Rachel’s land, and thus her unfamiliarity with the not-so-bucolic landscape of Scotland. Beside testing the digital potential for painting making, what about the experimental ways in which the artists used walking? CZ: During their walks, both artists also collected herbs, wild flowers and other healing plants. Taking inspiration from the German philosopher, economist, and anti-war activist, Rosa Luxemburg, who created an herbarium while imprisoned for her beliefs, they produced two artists’ herbariums, in both Arabic and English.9 To May, the herbariums became a way for the artists to reconnect with local traditions; in Rachel’s case, it was an opportunity to widen her knowledge of plants’ healing properties. ER: Flipping through the pages of the herbariums books, I remember noticing the presence of similar plants in both herbariums: the Taraxacum Officinale, for instance. After all, plants know no political borders.10 But Rachel and May’s walks were also practice for the final event of the project: a Slow Marathon, right? Could you tell me a little about the Slow Marathon as a key event in your annual programme for Deveron Projects, and how this idea of plotting a route became a tool for the exploration of borders in Walking Without Walls? CZ: Deveron Projects has organised an annual Slow Marathon since Ethiopian artist, Mihret Kebede’s 2012 Slow Marathon project. It consists of a 42-km (marathon-length) cross- country group walk in the Aberdeenshire area of North-East Scotland.11 For this long walk, we work with an artist around a theme and plot a route following existing paths or creating new ones using Ordinance survey maps, produced by the National mapping agency of Britain. Although named ‘Marathon’, the walk is ‘Slow’, without the pressure of timed competitions. It is a time for individual reflection, as a 42-km walk offers plenty of time for thinking. It also promotes convivial exchanges, as around 100 people from all walks of life participate every year, and there are plenty of refreshments along the way. We also provided food for thoughts on the topic of the walk, as we organised a themed conference (The Pathmakers’ Gathering) before it took place. A similar model was adopted for the walk that brought Walking Without Walls to a close in April 2018.