Laura Fisher’sGoing Out/Going In is an audio performance for one person at a time, designed to be listened to on headphones during a walk through an urban environment. Using gentle instructions, spoken by Fisher, and a reflective soundtrack the piece encourages its listeners to tune in to their body and its movements, observe and feel their built surroundings and drift through their locale being led by their own curiosity. The piece premiered online on 24th February 2021as part of Out of Place Festival–an online programme of art events organised by Paisley Arts Centre, Future Paisley and Renfrewshire Leisure. I listened nearly a month later, on 18th March 2021. Perhaps my little stretch of local urban environment is not so urban, really. I live in Broughty Ferry, a historic fishing village on the Firth of Tay, just along the coast from Dundee. While listening to the piece, I walked from my house, down to the seafront, along the beach esplanade and into the town centre.
Most of my ‘solo’ walks recently have not been so solo. I walked pushing my baby son Ezra in his buggy, while he slept. My walk is multi-purpose: I’m going out for a walk, to get some fresh air, participate in an artwork, have some space away from screens; I am also taking Ezra out for his nap. During Going Out/Going In Fisher asks me to focus on the movements of my body, to notice my breathing, to pay attention to the built environment. The piece encouraged a kind of heightened sensual experience of space. The thing I love about this kind of work is that it frames our surroundings as the sites of many chance performances: the perfectly choreographed movement of a flock of birds across the sky; the way the wind is channelled through the architecture becomes a kind of performer for our senses; the town acts as a backdrop to our own intimate thoughts, feelings and narratives.
The piece also allows for a space to slow down and reflect. This is a welcome invitation in a period when screen-based fatigue and the hidden efforts required to communicate across space and time feels very present. Not only does the piece encourage me to reflect on my own embodied experience of these spaces and environments, and how they affect my body, but it also prompts me to think about how I am able to move through space with ease as a white able-bodied man. The tricky navigation of a particularly narrow pavement with Ezra’s buggy coincided with a moment where Fisher asks…“which cultures have informed the way you move through space … who taught you to move safely through a town or city?… how do you experience moving through an urban landscape? Do you travel with ease? Does a set of stairs with no handrail present a barrier to you? Can you travel down an unlit street at night? Is the ground beneath you well-maintained or littered with slabs and potholes?”
Who is allowed to walk? how? and where? are the kinds of questions I have been thinking about a lot as part of the walking Publics/Walking Artsresearch project led by Dee Heddon collaboration with Maggie O’Neill, Morag Rose and Clare Qualmann. Fisher’s work allowed me to reflect on these questions through my own embodied experience of the local environment. And sadly these questions took on an extra resonance given that I was listening in the week after the discovery of Sarah Everard’s remains following her abduction during her walk home from a friend’s house in South London. The work gently and poetically, but not without a kid of affective force, invited me to tune into my environment in a different way, to notice it differently, to be aware of the barriers to walking that some people face, the way that urban landscapes are designed to structure our movements, the privilege attached to the ways that I move through space. It asked me to be more attuned to the ways structural inequalities are written into the landscape. Interestingly Fisher has created an accompanying work Going In/Going Out, another audio work designed to be experienced indoors that invites the listener to tune into their body and gently explore movement in their own home or residence. While not explicitly stated in the work, the piece offers an experience for those who, for whatever reason, cannot go for a walk. It brings the outside in through field recordings of the outside environment. More information about both works and links to the online audio pieces can be found at Laura Fisher’s website: https://www.laurafisherperformance.com/going-out-going-in