Apurahat ja residenssipaikat

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Hermeneutics of Walking. Walking as Motif, Practice and Reception Strategy in Modern Arts, with special consideration of Finnish Art

This project examines the aesthetic experience of walking as motif, artistic practice, and reception strategy in modern arts, with special attention to Finnish artists. Its materials range from paintings to photographs, to performances and installations, in which walking is entangled with questions of cultural and personal memory, identity and belonging. While the current research on walking emphasises the spatial dimension and within in pressing issues like sustainability and ecology, cultural and social interactions, as well as the transformation of rural and urban environments, this project ventures into aspects of walking that have not received enough attention like how its temporal dimension along other formal aspects like body posture, speed, rhythm of steps, or style are supposed to be entangled with symbolic, philosophical, psychological and historical overtones; or what role can play walking for the experience and interpretation of artworks and other aspects of spectatorship and research into arts. Special attention will be given to walking experiences in Finnish art from the so-called Golden Age to the present day, which sadly remains relatively unknown or disconnected from the history of walking art. Consequently, this project is also conceived as the development of a hybrid field between art studies and philosophy under the name Hermeneutics of Walking, with an investigation programme structured around the triad of artwork-artist-spectator and focused on how the formal aspects of walking are transposed into motif, artistic practice, and reception strategy. Through this programme I aim at showing how depictions and practices of walking may reflect or counteract developments in culture, society, and technology, and how can they shape the spectator’s sense of being in the world. The outputs of this project will be four research articles and the organisation and hosting of a two-day workshop on Hermeneutics of Walking with four keynote speakers.

This project was an investigation into the aesthetic experience of walking in modern arts, and examined thereby materials ranging from paintings to photographs, to performances and installations, in which walking is entangled with questions of time, space, memory (cultural and personal), and identity. A special emphasis was given to the work and practices of contemporary Finnish artists like Jari Silomäki, Juha Suonpää, Antti Laittinen, Hanna Saarikoski, and Kalle Lampela. The project was conceived as the development and application of a special art historical and philosophical approach to study walking in its triple function of motif, artistic practice, and reception strategy, hence with an investigation programme structured around the triad of artwork-artist-spectator. This method examines how formal aspects of walking like body posture, gestures, and speed and rhythm of steps are transposed into a visual motif, how they are perform in art practices, or how they can be used as part of an interpretation strategy to enquiry and understand movement in images. In the course of its two-year execution (2021-2023), the project expanded its research scope to include scientific images produced in the context of gait analysis, and therefore, it began to trace parallels between artistic and scientific images, practices, and interpretations of walking since the nineteenth century until today, more specifically regarding abstract imagery and the question of abstraction. The project produced three article manuscripts, and its biggest outcome was the curation of the workshop and exhibition ‘Walking Abstractions: A Walking Drawing Workshop in Lapland’, hosted at the Galleria Kopio | University of Lapland (Sep.-Oct. 2023), in collaboration with the visual artist Kalle Lampela.

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