Building upon the framework of common experience, black women writers use myth to control and redirect the way that the African American woman subject becomes visible. When readers interact with and accept the mythic landscape arranged by the black woman poet, they abandon the mythic landscape organized and presented by white Americans and other privileged constituencies. The African American woman poet offers her myths explaining black woman's subjectivity as an alternative to the marginalizing sociopolitical constructs that aid those identity groups who enjoy “center” status in maintaining their privileged discursive position.
-Ajuan Maria Mance (1)
It has the ache, longing for greater, too. That's what makes our architecture and public spaces such sites for change. For revolution. For rupture. For love.
-Danielle Deadwyler
never and forever time: the transcendent endurance of Danielle Deadwyler
*in-progress
W a n d e r i n g
a s
R E m e m b e r i n g
wandering
As
Remembering
We share an historical and cultural lineage of following paths already traversed and made symbolic. We've followed wanderers who prescribed meaning onto places through ephemeral acts, like dance and song, letting the repertoire of them live on in our bodies through movement and oral storytelling (1,2). To walk in the same path as has already been interpreted, through pilgrimage for example, is “a form of spatial theater, but also spiritual theater, since one is emulating saints and gods in the hope of coming closer to them oneself.” (3)
After meaning was made through the body, built paths and architectural structures marked the symbolic and practical. The geometric measurements of the earth. The four directions of the world. They marked where water was or where notable people died (4). There would be no public brick-laid commons, no covered plazas, no temples to bridge heaven and earth without the meaning derived from transambulation.
Several art movements have followed in the literal and metaphorical footsteps of this lineage. Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Situationist movements built on one another by opposing or accepting ideas from their predecessors about walking as a form of artmaking.
European avant-garde makers, like the Lettrists, rejected Surrealism, moving away from a dream-heavy emphasis on the unconscious towards an effort to make reality playful. It is born from being critical of Dadaism and Surrealism that Lettrists and Situationists developed walking techniques to get to know the pyschogeographical traits of a place, how the physical makeup of a location affects the psychology of its inhabitants. (5) These movements have influenced the way some contemporary artists think and inform some of the fundamental cultural values around walking that Americans hold today. Class, race, and gender limitations across each movement make them less than universal and more than narrow-sighted. History and spirituality, especially for African and indigenous women, was and is experienced through walking. An artist I recently spoke with, who is traveling on foot across Georgia, tells me there is trauma and healing in the soil and the work is in tending to and walking the land. For Black, American and indigenous artists, the art of walking is one of connecting to the intangible, the invisible, a generational body memory. Mind, body, and history interact to inform something more than what can be gleaned from psychology.
The BeltLine itself is a path that was built from the body in motion on transit, or material goods in motion on transit. A contemporary example of following a path already laid. In the mid-late 1990s, Atlanta was at a boiling point in conversation about sprawl (6). How can we connect disparate parts of the city through paths, trails, and public transit? Contemporary urban designers are wondering how we undo the damage caused by highways, make it easier to get around without a car? Is it possible to do this ethically and designed with the most vulnerable of us at the top of mind?
The trails get us somewhere, but that’s not all they’re good for. Traveling around the city without a destination or a deadline, as a practice, can be transcendent, dynamic…fun. The wandering, experiencing space without the restrictions of “needing to know”, can move the walker, roller, runner, biker towards moments of timelessness, or no time, of subtle disappearances and mysteries unexplained by cognitive processes alone (7). Artist and scholar Ernesto Pujol describes the psychic lingerings of the bodies that stepped along a path before us as needing to be embraced, not dismissed. They, and other energetic pulses of a space, are “psychic markers” as unavoidable and as necessary as the sounds of woodpeckers along the Stone Mountain trail near my house. “They are a critical piece of the recorded and unrecorded, official and unofficial historical record while experiencing a walk through a site. If we believe in the stored muscle memories of a body, we should be open to considering that these extraordinary moments are the stored memories of the body of a landscape.” (8)
Sculpture and other material objects created by artists who mine the histories of a place and bring them to the surface can help us draw from those bodily remembrances, which may have even preceded our existence by generations. Iman Person, for example, recreated a lost river in Grant Park for Flux Projects (referenced in the introduction) that audiences could travel along and remember a long-forgotten landscape (9). By recreating a landscape that is no longer visible to us, Iman makes a bridge between time, drawing the past into the present and asking us to consider what this means for the future. A practice much-needed as we address the current effects of climate change and the Western world’s astronomical participation in making it worse. Person’s work makes memory physical. A sinuous fabric map in which the contents of our mind, or the contents of a history book or manuscript collection is made tangible.
1. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as An Aesthetic Practice, 2003
2. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2003
3. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, pg 68
4. Careri, 2003
5. Careri, 2003
6. Various authors, Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta, 2000
7. Ernesto Pujol, Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths, 2018
8. Ernesto Pujol, pg.69
9. https://www.imanperson.com/waterlust