At every prior walk , attendees had been asked to somehow illustrate their journey to the venue. A collage of these personal notes, diagrams and sketches was displayed at The Platform site, another one of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s pop up space adjacent to The CarWash.

For this ‘final hurrah’ at The Carwash, Alisa having each month invited a different fellow creative – filmmaker, audio artist, poet, photographer, etc – to document the walks, there was a plethora of visual, text and video documentation on display detailing the multifaceted experiences and encounters WALK engendered.

Also present, the ‘Demolition Project’, Alisa’s ongoing collaboration with writer-performer Debbie Kent whereupon people are invited to ‘demolish’ on the large map, i.e remove or re-locate an element of, in this case Greater London, that rankled with them.

Before embarking on a final collective walk, there was a very different journey to be had in The Carwash. London-based culinary creative Barney Pau presented a peripatetic tasting experience whereby partakers could savour a sapid bill of fare based on urban foraging.

The final Sunday was without doubt a day to remember but we also caught up with Alisa to talk in more depth about her motivations and inspirations.

Walking is a key element of your art practice but it’s about much more than movement, your modes of encountering urban space are bound up with various tactics that enhance or re-focus participants’ attention. Why?

Why! [Laughs…] Where do I start? It starts in the here and now but also has a much longer history for me, at least the impulse as to why I’m offering what I’m offering. And actually, in terms of method and conceptualising [the practice], that came later. At first it was just action driven. I think one of the main impulses is, especially the focus on the everyday and mundane walking comes from my life history. When you don’t have much power or control over your situation, your environment, my practice asks how through small shifts of attention, shifts of what you’re looking at, you can assume some agency and have a different relation to place, even though you haven’t had a chance to change that place or the situation.

So my practice comes from all the way back to my childhood experience of living in the suburbs and growing up in this sleeping/dormitory district. But then also moving to the UK and having to live in places that were really unliveable and unhomely. And slowly making the streets and the city my home. Of course, while at home you can shift furniture around and decide how things are and, in the city, quite often you can’t. So, it was about exploring like, okay, I don’t have any money for transport, but I can set myself the task of walking to the edge of the city and see what happens. Or I can walk the same route every day, like I had to for uni and take a photo every time I turn left on that street and see what comes up.

Also, later I took up parkour which has this motto, ‘treat obstacles as opportunities’. And parkour comes from a bunch of migrant kids growing up in the Paris banlieues, and they’re trying to escape their circumstances. There is something about when you can’t change the environment and you can’t change the situation, you can’t change your agency within a place, what can you do through just shifting how you interact with it, or how you look at it?

So, through these walks which sometimes look very playful, fun, nice and interesting, but at the beginning of a walk I always plant the idea that there is also this political element associated with ‘playing’ in the city, looking at things differently, focussing on different senses and not using the city as it intends us to. Which, of course, has a long tradition in Situationist practices, I’m just twisting it and making it my own.

Andre Breton, who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto and the contentious peripatetic novel Nadja, was principally concerned with freeing humans from the constraints of reason and questioning societal norms. What are your aims?

Well, I must confess that I come from an art historical background, my first degree was in art history so I’m quite aware of a lot of these references. But it also comes from when I started doing performance and I switched into making. These things like walking to the edge of the city, or taking buses to the last bus stop, they originated from me having to kill time and survive in the city. And later I read about flaneurie, etc., and I thought, this is amazing, I’m not alone. It was quite reassuring, but it worked that way round, not that I read about it and then started doing it. But, of course, reading about it helped contextualise things and then explore things in a more structured way.

So, it started out having to just hang out in the city, spend time but without having money which immediately makes it also a very different way of using the city, it’s not what it usually intends us to do. As to my aims, again it’s not something I would identify beforehand, when I started doing performance it was about sharing some of these tools with others. But now I think I can frame it in a more rigorous way where for me it’s a lot about continuing this tradition of questioning who the city is for? What are the power relationships in the city? I always say a walk in the city sounds so innocent and so leisurely but it’s never neutral. It’s all about who can walk where, and at what time? What do you need for walking in different seasons? So, the whole flaneur thing has its limitations. You have to ask the question, who can be the flaneur?

The aim now, I’m not trying to impose it as a mission, but I do believe that by offering all these performative, playful and poetic ways of engaging with the city, hopefully it does give participants at least an awareness, a toolbox to feel more connected and empowered. Especially in big cities like London. And quite often I do work with people who’ve experienced migration, people who don’t feel like they have any effect on the city.

It’s all about, what if through these very sort of gentle practices that are rooted in our everyday, can it soften the edges? Hopefully, it gives some sort of entrance, access to or agency within the city. And I must say that recently I’ve been interested in working with or trying to bring the power-makers into the game as well. That is, I’ve been doing walks for people who work in councils, or are urbanists, architects, etc. Because while I’m really happy and I know this work is useful, where we can do this everyday empowering and playing with the city, I also feel that from my perspective as an artist I would like to challenge policy, but still use art as a tool to do that.

Thomas De Quincey championed walking under the influence of opium to explore his own consciousness while traversing the streets of London. So, his walks were as much about self-discovery as confronting external dangers and wonders. What might people in your walking workshops expect to discover about themselves?

I would say, especially with the BUILDHOLLYWOOD walks that I’ve been leading, it’s a two-hour session, once a month, they work for me almost like a small catalyst for a lot of things. Because in my practice I quite often do work with endurance, it’s very long walks, 24-hour walks. Or I would lead people on 3-hour blindfolded walks whereas in our walking sessions we might do 10 minutes each of various activities, so it’s like tasters of things. So maybe it’s not so much self-discovery, like through physically pushing oneself as far. But I would say through this specific series of walks participants get tasters or a toolbox. Still, I think it’s important because not everyone will want immediately to commit to enter that space of really pushing oneself. In terms of structure, I found these walks really are an important addition to my practice. Because I hadn’t done this before, I’ve either done long performative things or workshop things and the BUILDHOLLYWOOD walks fall in between.

Also, and this is something I’ve learnt from experience, even though I might have a certain intention for every walking score – I call them walking scores but in workshops I’ll usually refer to them as walking instructions or prompts, easier language – what I’ve definitely been learning, and it’s still an ongoing journey, is that no matter what I imagine a walking score will reveal to oneself, it always goes way beyond what I imagine. Because I can never know what’s going on for everyone. And the beauty of the score, the prompt(s), it’s a very fixed framework or structure, quite rigid in a way but also by everyone enacting it and doing it their own way, it has this endless feel, it’s different for each individual participant. You know, we’ll do something, and I’ll get feedback which is completely unexpected. Also, quite often I do get feedback like, it was therapeutic, or meditative, things that really I’m not intending but I know they might come up. And I always leave it open, so for me a blindfold walk is about tuning into the soundscape but for someone else it might be all about the smells, or certain memories, and that’s great. I’m never trying to controll the experience.

Contrary to De Quincey the psychogeography writer Iain Sinclair – who preferred the term ‘psychotic geography’ to describe his work – counselled against walking under the influence. He thought you could train yourself to be hyper-sensitive to the effects of geographical location on behaviours and emotions. His walking resulted in blends of fiction, documentary, poetry, accounts of contemporary experiences and concerns re. the city as well as recording its historic and psychic reverberations. Can you share some of the material outcomes that result from your walks?

Yes, and I’d like to pick up on this phrase ‘poetic’, I quite often get this response. And I take this phrase from one of my teachers Franko B who says, ‘the personal is political’, for me that really works. The walks afford this personal and poetic space but then it always has a political element as well. What really impresses me is that sometimes the smaller the shift, the bigger the effect. So, it’s not about big gestures, or big sparkling moves, it’s not about like a carnival, you know, like us dressing up and walking somewhere. It can be just tiny gestures like let’s walk this street only looking down, never looking up. It’s a tiny shift that’s almost invisible from other peoples’ point of view. But the shift in perception as to how you see the city and how you see yourself reflected in the city can sometimes be so huge.

Why I’m interested in this specifically is – maybe on our series of walks we’re a bit more visible because we’re in a bigger group – but in most of my work the actual action of us doing something is usually very invisible. For me this is an important element because it doesn’t stand out too much to passersby, and it doesn’t ask too much from the participant because again not everyone is ready to be so visible. For me being able to be invisible is an important part of it, an important access moment. I used to make a lot of audio walks because I was interested in this idea that you’re just looking like someone wearing headphones but you’re on a completely different journey in the city.

Regarding material outcomes, there’s a tension in my work because, of course, I come from this radical tradition of performance art where I like the fact that there is almost nothing left, nothing’s happening except this moment of us walking through a place, that immediate encounter. I used to do mostly one-to-one works walks, which is even more intimate. But, of course, the way the art world operates there’s a need for documentation. What’s changed is me starting to have a bit more resources because, as I said, for me walking began from the practical position of not having access to resources because I come from both like a really working class family but also the family that was affected by fall of Soviet Union and economic migration. So, there’s definitely a financial element to it, where I was like, okay, I don’t have anything, but I can do everything with nothing.

Now that I’m starting to have more resources, yes, some is going towards documentation but to be honest, I’m still very clear the experience will never be literally documented. What I’m more interested in is what I call traces. This fits well with walking practices. Sometimes I have different structures embedded within the walk that leave a trace. I work a lot with mapping. Or sometimes we’ll take one photo along the way and that’s a trace. For these BUILDHOLLYWOOD series of walks I’ve had an incredible resource and privilege, which I’ve not had before and it’s been amazing, so for each walk I invited a different friend, an artist who might not usually be thought of as having practice as documentators,  but they are artists and friends whose work I really admire and feel connected to.

For each of them I gave a very open brief: to attend the walk, and either participate fully, or witness. It was up to them to come up with any sort of trace or response. And it’s been fantastic, really enriching because I’ve had responses ranging from poems to collages to audio files to Polaroid, photos, film and video. Also, I’ve learned when I have the money it’s good to commission a written response. So, it’s all about these different after tastes, ripples and traces rather than any conclusive documentary object.

At the final event we will have a map, consisting of all the maps that people have made at the start of each walk reflecting on how they got to The CarWash on that day and it’s amazing to see them all collaged together. And finally, because I’m always working with others, I’ve almost never made a walk where it’s just me walking, it’s always about inviting others and their responses become very much part of the work, respecting how they want to be represented (or not!) in the final documentation. Or how they can also withdraw at any point is all part of taking care of the work.

Walking and art have a rich history: Guy Debord and Situationist International experimented with the dérive in the 1950s (and subsequently inspired artists, architects and urban planners as well as activists). There was Hamish Fulton and Richard Long’s conceptual / land art walks in the 1960s and 70s. Marina Abramovic and Ulay famously walked the length of the Great Wall of China in 1988. Janet Cardiff began her walking practice in the 1990s. Can you recommend any 21^st century artists who deploy walking as part of their art?

Yes. My practice has been developing in parallel with the growth of walking art. And I feel now I can see some key milestones in that journey. It’s been 12 years I’ve been committed to making walking art. The field has changed so much, what’s been written about it. I have a theory about why. The artists you just referenced are mostly men walking around documenting things, it’s also very specific and I could feel for me there was something missing, something I could orientate towards.

And yes, Janet Cardiff was the first inspiration for me. An early piece I made at university was almost my attempt to be Janet Cardiff, failing and then realising how I’m different and needing to find my own ‘voice’. But yes, I did start by creating an audio walk because I was obsessed with her Missing Voice piece in the Whitechapel Gallery. There’s the issue of gender which was very visible, most books being about white male walking artist. Also, a lack of any compilations of accounts of walking related artworks. There was one book which was key for me, ‘The Art of Walking: A Field Guide’ published by black dog publishing. It now costs 300 pounds on internet, I’m really glad I have it! It was the first book to be fully dedicated to walking art that i encountered.

Then people started to appear around me, for example Clare Qualmann was very important and inspiring. She was one of the people who started the Walking Artists Network and co-organised an event called Walking Women at Somerset House in 2016. And now by coincidence she is my PhD supervisor which makes complete sense. She’s an important voice, her work ‘Perambulator’ experimented with how far she could walk away from her child in a pram before people started to be alarmed. Rosanna Cade was another influence, she made a really significant piece called ‘Walking: Holding’, a one-to-one performance based on her lived experience as a queer person in Glasgow walking holding hands with her girlfriend.

I really like the ambiguity of calling myself a ‘walking artist’, it immediately poses questions. And it used to be weird back in the day, I mean even 6 years ago. I would always be this one-off walking artist on the edges of a performance art festival. But things really changed with Covid, that was a peak for walking art because suddenly it was the only thing you could do. We all remember the ‘one walk a day’ rule! Suddenly all sorts of people contacted me because they remembered this weird girl they met who’s doing something called walking art. I had so much work during those two years, it was insane, while a lot of my artist friends obviously were out of work.

I did so many projects, even choosing to decline some because they seemed only superficially engaged with the practice. So suddenly everything changed, there were walking art commissions. The academic world also caught up: currently there are at least two funded walking art PhDs in the UK. In Berlin there’s a whole organisation dedicated to walking art called The ReRouting Project. At the moment the wealth of the discipline is overwhelming. Everyone is really seeing the potential of it. Endless walking art conferences, and the number of books! Initially I had literally every book which was published about walking but now I can’t keep up. There’s a well-known l series of books Documents of Contemporary Art published by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press and the last one they did is titled ‘Walking’. It’s edited by Tom Jeffreys and, of course, it’s sitting on my shelf. My work is included in two books, one called ‘Walking from Scores’ and the other ‘Going Out. Walking, Listening, Soundmaking’ both edited by Elena Biserna. So, yes, the amount of reflection and writing on the subject has proliferated. I’ve just now come from a Walking Art Conference in Greece. It’s really changed in the recent years.

Famous for incorporating walks into his practice, the artist Francis Alÿs has said, “A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.” It seems today in our speedy, slippery, screen driven culture, strolling or wandering is a kind of resistance. You’ve said you see your practice in socio-political terms.

Yes, Francis Alÿs is a big inspiration for me, although in the recent years I became a bit more distanced from his work. Again, he went to so many places, did so many things but it begs the question, who is able to go where and why? A lot of my work looks at who is a stranger? Who is local? Who cannot be somewhere? For all my residencies, embedded in my going somewhere is a moment of entering, it’s about access and invitation. Sometimes it’s about the impossibility of being somewhere.

So, I still really love Alÿs’s work but I started to establish a bit of a distance from it, to ask questions of it. I’ve done a lot of distance walks where walking is happening at the same time in different places. I really believe in the power of this. Walking is such a fragile act, it’s almost nothing but in my experience, it actually holds quite a lot. Idea of simultaneous distance walks came as my response to multiple homes, crossing of borders, visas and experiences like that.

I think especially these days, with multiple wars, conflicts and crises plus really complicated ideas about ‘home’, even literally in terms of housing, being in one place, I feel walking explores this quality of in-betweenness, being in constant relationship to a place but not arriving and not claiming the place. Being really aware of your relationship to it as you pass through. One of the reasons I chose walking as a medium is that I knew I could get away with passing through. In my youth I did urban exploration and trespassing, so I know how it works. As soon as you stop moving through a place and stay there, you’re dealing with a completely different relationship to a place. You know, I’ve led walks in guarded areas but as you’re moving you’ve already disappeared by the time the guard comes out. So, I have been working with this idea of fragility, ideas of home, or testing where one can be, or settle, or be for a long time. For me there’s a power in being ‘in between’, in transit or wandering, not arriving fully. It’s a potent place, this being in multifaceted relationships to a place.

We haven’t touched on this yet, but, inspired by Laurie Anderson’s song, I’m fascinated by the idea that walking is falling. Stripped to the very basics, for me, walking is about a deep metaphysical, metaphorical, philosophical phenomena because technically every step is a fall. When I teach students, I always show them videos of robots falling over. It’s a funny but also profound way to show how complicated walking is. It’s the hardest thing to teach robots Technically, every step is a fall and there is a moment of being in the air and commitment to the unknown. You can see this in babies learning to walk. Inherent in every step is this moment of trusting the unknown. I hope it becomes clear from this conversation that I live with this friction, this productive tension between how mundane and simple walking appears, we don’t think about it at all, we just walk. But then how deeply complex and political it is too.

Another point to note, and it’s important to me, is that most of the people I work with are not from an art background or those who would identify as an art audience. I’ve worked in contexts with no relation to art and I’ve found that walking is a very accessible, easy way to start a conversation before you go into the magic of it. With these BUILDHOLLYWOOD walks what’s been the best thing about them is that they were advertised using flyposters in the street. And by about let’s say the second or third walk I’d say seventy-five percent of the group attended because they’d seen the posters in the street. As one of the participants mentioned: if you noticed the poster, it means you are already in the game of walking the city and paying attention. This resulted in very diverse groups of people attending the walks. Which meant it was hard work keeping it all together, managing very different expectations, but also full of unexpected engagement and discovering all sorts of things for themselves which I could not have envisaged. It has really been a dream come true for me to have people come to the walks this way.

And, drawing towards the end, can you tell us about your favourite walks IRL and walking related artworks? In film, sculpture (Alberto Giacometti’s walking figures!), literature, poetry and any other medium you care to think of…?

I’m one of those people who are inspired by lots of things and people. Someone who really influenced me is Graeme Miller who was my main tutor when I was at Goldsmiths. I feel like I became a walking artist straight out of uni because of him. He has a very sensitive relationship to walking and I always say that maybe if I hadn’t met him or he hadn’t been my teacher I would still have gravitated towards a walking practice, but it might have taken a lot longer for me to get there. Thanks to him I realised I already had a practice, I didn’t need to invent one, I just needed to recognise walking as a practice, and he helped me do that.

The work I tell everyone about when I’m teaching is Graeme’s work called ‘Linked’. It’s an audio work sited in Leytonstone and it comes from his experience living in a house that was knocked down. Half of the street disappeared to give way to a new highway. The other side of the street is still there and what he did was, quite a lot later, he interviewed many of the displaced residents who used to live on the street. Out of these interviews he made a sonic composition that can be experienced via radio receivers and headphones.

You can see why I like it: people, conversations, memories of a road, also the political side of an enforced demolition. But also, the way the work was made is really inspiring for me because it’s not a straightforward audio work, transmitters are put on the lamp posts, so he had to work with the council, it’s not a guerilla style installation. It’s embedded within the structure of the neighbourhood. The transmitters are streaming a signal 24/7 even now. As a participant on certain days you can pick up a receiver from the library and you have a map. With this piece it’s just a route and you don’t know when the sounds will be picked up. So, you’re just walking and suddenly you hear crackling of the signal, you have to approach the location to receive the sound clearly. Your body in motion becomes part of the work. You’re hearing stories, it’s also quite a long walk so it’s not about having done all of it, it’s not about one coherent narrative, it’s the unexpected discovery of different voices.

I have done quite lot of work around broadcasting and radio walks so for me there is something really connected about broadcasting, radio and walking. Something about the ephemerality yet resilience of both – it can cross borders and distances in a different way, it can connect people, but it also relates to the urban infrastructure. A lot of my work is about the infrastructure of cities, the hardware, how things work, the wires and underground city. So, yes, this is Graeme’s piece which had been extremely influential because it has all the elements that are important to me.

Finally, we know walking in different urban or rural spaces can induce various feelings: calm, nostalgia, apprehension, awe… When I joined one of your walks, after people had taken part in the ‘imaginative constraints’ or exercises you invite them to undertake along the way, the main mood amongst participants on their return was a degree of fellow feeling, even a communal joy! How do your walks make you feel?

Yeah, it’s true that a kind of magic occurs, some sort of mood shift. I really feel that when we come back from a walk there’s something invisible. It goes beyond language. And to be honest, I’ve had the experience of thinking a walk hasn’t gone very well. But then later people will give such beautiful feedback that again I was reminded you can never assume what people experience or how they will react. I thought they weren’t engaged but then I realised it was a very nuanced experience and people were taking time processing the walk.

In relation to this, though I said I never walk on my own in actual performances, all of the work is made by walking. All the inspiration comes from me walking on my own. But I do have this rule that even if no one turns up to a walk then I will still do it on my own. When I’m walking with someone else, one-to-one, it’s always a unique experience. That’s why I like walking scores, the same route is never the same. Because I do get bored quite easily but with my practice, I feel I could never get bored. The same exercise, the same prompt I’ve been doing for ten years, the result is never the same. Different person, different weather, different place. We didn’t talk about weather. That’s a whole other element to my work.

I’m definitely never walking wholly for someone else, and I’m not trying to control the experience as such. While I’m really busy preparing for a walk or working on some walking commissions and that could be multiple projects but still when I need to decompress, or have a moment, have a think, I actually go on a walk. Or, you know, when I’m grieving or have a problem, I’ll go for a walk. It’s often the way I conduct intimate relations, friendship is a big part of my walking art practice. I gravitate to walking for so many different reasons, and it’s still working. I’m using walking both as work but also to rest from work. I just have to walk, to the extent that sometimes I’ll wake up at night and have to go out for a walk.

Something continues to keep driving me. And, as I say, all my thoughts, all my ideas come from walking. I can never sit down and think of an idea, and there’s all the personal things, emotional things, the friendships. So, yes, the personal and what I offer to other people is indivisible. Maybe that’s why it works for me but also why I’m able to continue sharing it as a collective practice, walking together and hopefully reimagining our potential futures through our desire lines, solidarity walks and shared footsteps.

Creative documentation by Svitlana Dolbysheva, Timothy Maxymenko, Deacon Lui, Jemima Yong, Zack McGuinness, Pietro Molinaris, Neve Harrington, Hamish MacPherson, Elida Silvey, Tara Fatehi, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Jeffrey Choy, Adam Moore, Lam Jane, Hannah Kemp-Welch