I’ve just spent four days at the Supergau festival in Austria; the second edition of a rural arts biennial, that makes a different ‘gau’ (region of the Salzburg district of Austria) its base. The first edition in 2021 was in the Flachgau, this year it was in the Lungau. Along with specially commissioned projects, installations and pop up events, the festival invites a group of ‘freispiel’ (free play) artists to come to Supergau and make spontaneous contributions; workshops, performances and actions, and it is in this role that I took part.
On Monday 29th May I led a walkshop with participants of the ‘Camping Campus‘ a pop up university space for artistic, autonomous and improvised learning. We used The Walkbook; recipes for walking and wellbeing* to make a series of walks around Mauterndorf, a village at the foot of the Grosseck- Speiereck mountain.
Our first recipe was Emily Orley’s ‘Rewrite the Rules’ a walk that invites participants to gather words from signs and other street texts, choosing words that relate to care. This was challenging with a group who were working together in English, but with a wide range of mother-tongues, and in a location in which the majority of street-text was in German (with a spattering of English). We had to work together in gathering and then translating words. We noticed how many of the advertising texts used words of care, as well as the information signs about the UNESCO biosphere reserve that Mauterndorf is part of.
Pulling the whole group together to share our words we came up with the following messages:
The passionate hope of the future is the youth
Saved with transport your ride must go
The past is not for human consumption
Disobey orders close to the church
Our second recipe was ‘Lines and Squiggles’ by Lavinia Brydon, a recipe that asks you to notice, pay attention to, and follow one graphic element: lines. The streets of Mauterndorf (and all across the Lungau) are covered in what looks like scribbles. The road surface cracks in the cold of winter, and is often repaired with a black asphalt sealant, creating a beautiful graphic effect. Our starting point was a series of cracks and splits that had not been repaired; we began by following them in a line as they led us up towards the edge of the village.
We took turns leading, with each person bringing new ideas to what might be a line that we could follow. As we reached the edges of the village the line of the grass along the path, and then the line of a stream leading us away from the road became our routes. Back on the path a sudden absence of lines instigated the use of bodies to cast a shadow for everyone else to walk along.
Our third recipe was Kathryn Welch’s ‘A Walk to Make Others Smile’ that asks participants to leave messages for strangers that will make them smile or bring joy to their day, using materials that are natural and will fade back into their environment. We started this recipe at the foot of the mountain trail, where the path leaves the village and is barred to vehicles, before rising steeply up into the woods and towards the mountain above. We spread out from our base of a water trough, gathering materials from the grassy banks around; pine cones, branches, grass, flowers, rocks. One person used water from the trough to write a (quickly disappearing in the sun) message of encouragement for walkers heading up the path. A smiley face in pine needles appeared on the verge, and several assemblages of found objects were constructed near a bench, and on the edge of the trail.
Returning to the village we discussed the ways that the walking recipes had made us look at the place differently, focusing in on details that might have been overlooked before and changing the way that we interacted with the village.
On Tuesday 30th May, in collaboration with the musician Almut Schlichtling, we created new walk recipes, building on the experiments that we had made using the walk book. We headed for the village of Sankt Michael, following lines and squiggles to the bus stop to start our walking off. On arrival in the village we decided to adapt Lydia Nightingale’s Resilience and Wellbeing recipe from its individual actions (using breathing, counting and affirmations) to a group choreography score. We began with rectangles; pointing and tracing their lines with an outstretched hand, then added in circles; lifting one leg and circling the foot in the air, then came mountains; jump in the air, trees; circle your hands and rotate your hips, street lights; sniff something, cars; touch the ground until we had a constant stream of shared movements flowing. While we moved together through the village Almut played her saxophone, serenading passersby and inviting them to join us, making a musical score to accompany the walk.
Our second experiment created a walk recipe with Almut’s saxophone at it’s heart. Walking along the river path in Sankt Michael we responded to the notes that she played; a bouncing slightly exaggerated step in time with her playing, when she played a multi tonal sound we paused and shook our bodies; high pitched notes made us reach up high; and low notes crouch down to the ground. Families enjoying the afternoon sun in their gardens became our audience as we performed this recipe along the path, using the low notes to ‘hide’ out of sight from their fences and walls, only to pop up again and move as the music changed.
The collaboration with the Camping Campus participants, with Almut, and with other visitors to the Supergau festival (as well as local residents in the Lungau) made these walks super enjoyable and interesting. Each recipe instigated new ways of walking and being in place; shifting our focus from found texts, to the surfaces and textures of the streets, to the ways that we moved, and how we performed for ourselves and others on the walks. The walkbook is available as a free online e-book for all to use at: https://walkcreate.gla.ac.uk/the-walkbook/
*The Walkbook is a publication that was created from a research project ‘Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community during Covid-19’ or Walk Create (for short). I was one of the co-researchers on the project which was led by Dee Heddon, with Maggie O’Neill, Morag Rose and Harry Wilson.