All in a Day's Walk - From Slowing Down to Walking Fast

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Abstract

‘I have always been a fast walker. I have not always been a walk-faster.’All in a Day’s Walk was devised as a month-long performance in which I would live entirely within the distance I could walk away from home and back in a day, eating only the food that was grown, processed and obtainable within that distance. As a first foray into tracktivism – my own neologism for a synthesis of two distinct (and inherently slow) practices: the aesthetic arsenal of an artistic (rural) walking practice stealthily redeployed to facilitate (activist) conversational encounters with strangers in the dialogical arts tradition – it was designed as a frame to draw attention to the loss of rural infrastructure. As a dairy-allergic vegetarian in the floods and frosts of a Herefordshire December, it became a loss that drew attention to my frame: an unexpectedly bleak, long-drawn out fast that slowed me to a stand-still. A slow epiphany emerged: what happens to an activist pedestrian practice in the space of deceleration between slowness and stillness? With reference to somatics, slow food, walking and running, I consider the efficacy of going beyond slow in an activist-pedestrian-dialogical performance practice: if ‘speed institutes a process of collective forgetting’ (Lavery 2005: 150), how can slowing or stopping reverse this trend towards a collective (and embodied) remembering, and render an environmentalist performance practice more powerful for being infused with a more-than homeopathic dilution of the urgency of ecological crisis? www.allinadayswalk.co.uk

Keyword(s)

activism; performance; slow; walking

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