Walking Art: Iterable Strategies in the City
On March 4 and 5, 2020, the conference Gestures and Evanescences in Urban Space took place at UPV, where I participated as a guest. My contribution was the workshop "Walking Art: Iterable Strategies in the City," which consisted of a presentation followed by a collective urban activity. To provide context before moving to the action phase, the presentation explored walking as an artistic and political practice. It introduced numerous references, including Stanley Brouwn, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Allan Kaprow, Rosemarie Castoro, Esther Ferrer, and Fina Miralles. These various practices were organized around what I have termed iterable strategies—that is, strategies that are repeatable, recontextualizable, and open to reinterpretation. In the case of the workshop, these strategies involved maps, objects, and traces.Regarding the urban activity, among the different proposals considered by the participants, we carried out a wind drift, an urban action that involves walking with a piece of fabric that indicates the wind's direction and moving according to it. The goal was to replicate the fabric's movements, hesitations, and pauses with one's own body, adjusting the walking rhythm, veering in different directions, stopping abruptly, and so on. The wind was especially strong that week, with some flights canceled due to Storm Karine on that very morning, making arrival in Valencia uncertain. Rather than becoming an obstacle, the wind served as a catalyst, creating a small, circumstantial community that set out without knowing the route in advance, opening up possible multidirectional escapes.
We continued the drift to the Torre Miramar, located at the city entrance via the V-21. Inaugurated in 2009, it is a vertical structure with no clear purpose, a 45-meter-high tower from which the sea is barely visible in the distance. It stands in a roundabout with several fountains where water has stagnated, surrounded by neglected vegetation, and a 300-meter underpass blackened by the constant flow of cars. A monument to absurdity that I had been researching with a certain fascination, despite the apparent impossibility of access. Against all odds, we were fortunate to find the door open—a collective invitation to get lost in the ascent, a symbolic conquest of an empty summit, followed by a descent. The wind blew even stronger at the top of the lookout. Someone tied their piece of fabric there first. The rest of us followed suit.