Images of walkers from a project entitled 'Wandering In Place,' which depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of my cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and it is also my discovery of the dreamland that still is America.
'Wandering In Place,' depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of my cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and it is also my discovery of the dreamland that still is America.
In 'The Radicant,' Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that we are not defined by our origin but rather by our trajectory; that we are more like the ivy plant than the ancestral home, enrooting as we move. In Rebecca Solnit's book 'Wanderlust: A History of Walking,' she links the act of walking to the
 other, the outcast, the flâneur, the artist, saunterer, drifter or the transient, but also sex, speech, pilgrimage, prayer, prostitution, protests, communion with the land, and acts of anti-ownership. Throughout this project I use walkers, roads, streets and water as metaphors for transitional and adaptive space, as symbols of trajectory over origin.
Solnit’s Wanderlust & Bourriaud’s The Radicant – Redacted
We begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for us: the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden / And so walking begins as delayed falling... /
Wandering, at home with alienation, thinking made concrete, it is the means and the end, travel and destination. / Walking, where the land is most itself: an invitation, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor / We are radicant / taking form in the ‘Other’ / exploring the world to explore the mind / Exploring the world to explore the mind / Haunted by figures of travel, expedition and global dislocation, furiously coming into contact / changing by exchanging / through collisions and revisions / a mode of thought that assumes the shape that circumstances impress upon it and accommodates itself to the particular contours of the obstacle / Growing roots as we advance and adding new ones, setting our roots in motion / denying them the power to completely define us / translating, and transplanting behaviors / we adapt and grow according to our trajectory and become transformed by the places in which we exist / Who am I here? In this place how do I come to live? / How must I translate myself to this place? //
And so we take to the streets / the place for those who have no place / the site to measure sorrow and loneliness in the length of a walk / And there we find a sense of place that can only be gained on foot / we embrace a realism that requires not the observant walker / but the dreamy wanderer in place / where people and place become one another / each person a symbol of atmosphere / while place takes on a full-fledged personality // yes / it is the unpredictable instances between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it its meaning.