Walking Webs

A series of walks for the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography 2022

Walking Webs, hosted by Mathilda in Greifswald, Germany, was a project for the seventh 4th World Congress of Psychogeography, which took place in the summer of 2022. A series of walks to create a series of postcards, from anywhere in the world. Following the idea of 'walking together apart'.

photo by Anna

The 2022 congress' programme was dispersed, taking place wherever participants lived or chose to be. While some events happened at a certain place and time, others were walked asynchronously, with results being shared afterwards.

Walking Webs was one of the latter. An invitation to create webs through walking, both in shape and in mind. To create a network by following a common thread. And to make local discoveries.

Participants traced their steps in the abstracted shape of a spider's web (see instructions below), added photographs and thoughts on their experience, and exchanged these like postcards. #4wcop22 #walkingwebs

Here's the collection of postcards created during the summer:

All maps and photos with kind permission to be shown here.

Patrick S Ford in Leeds, UK

Blake Morris in New York City, USA

Jackie B in Dublin, Ireland

I chose to do my walk on Sandymount Strand in Dublin.

To celebrate the 100th year of its publication I am currently reading Ulysses by James Joyce. I chose Sandymount inspired by a comment made by one of the books protagonists, Stephen Dedalus:

"Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand? Crush, Crack,Crick, Crick"

As I walked I thought about webs connecting time and place. About what has changed and what endures. About walking in the footsteps of those who have gone before me. Some of my images are long distance vistas giving a sense of eternity. Some capture the connection between time and place, now and then, such as an image of a house where WB Yeats was born and an image of the crumbling remains of the Sandymount Baths built in 1863.

I did the directions on different days, depending on the weather and the tide. Mostly I walked alone, as I tend to do. But for the walk north I was accompanied by my daughter and three year old granddaughter. Walking with a child made the experience more spontaneous and sensory. We stopped and started, walking back and forth, north, south, east and west, all at once. We scooped sand in our hands, collected sea shells and splashed in the water.

The strand itself is covered in shells and as you walk your footsteps do actually crush, crack and crick. As such I was also very conscious of texture in the environment as I walked, from the sweep of seaweed along the sand to the intricate brickwork of Edwardian Houses in Sandymount Village.

Attaching my images to the map I can see my web isn't one a spider would be proud of!

But it reflects how the pace I walked at was constantly changing as my attention was captured by the space I walked through. Sometimes my 10 minutes took me a short distance, sometimes much longer.