I walk. Walking didn't occur to me as something in need of definition or legitimation. I took it for granted. After moving to the USA, people started asking me why I walk, where I walk. I was confronted with the impossibility of walking and with the growing urge to find possibilities to walk here. This is a different culture. I became strangely aware of my being foreign, observing from a distance, from my culture. I glided into an anthropologist's position. I understood that both the practice and the imaginary of walking needed theoretical construction. Walking is a social practice, imaginaries and representations of walking are social constructs, the environment in which we move is a social construct, built of layers and layers of history, geography, architecture, religion… How, where and if we move becomes a point of political struggle, a question of autonomy, spatial, physical, spiritual, economic, social autonomy in the guise of mobility.
I now study walking as a scholar. And I walk, as a woman, as an artist. I direct and create audio-walks using walking as documentary research method and as form of display - inviting people to go on those walks, listen, sense, discover. I teach documentary methods in geography and urban studies. I mix disciplines in the hope of creating or enabling a deeper understanding of what we are doing and why. And I walk.
I have a BA in social science (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland) and an MA in theatre directing (Universität der Künste Berlin, formerly known as HdK), I am currently studying walking for my Ph.D.
