THE TIME WALK
Performative walk
16th of July, 2021
Part of the project WALKING LANDSCAPES
On Friday the 16th of July I departed from my grandparent’s old house in Laven and went for a 12-hour long walk with my granddad’s quote-book and my camera. Every hour I read a quote from the book and with that in mind made an interaction with the landscape to create a photographic image. I could be followed live every hour on ‘Walking Landscapes’ Facebook page.
WALKING LANDSCAPES is an artistic walking project by METROPOLIS - Art and Performance in Public Space. Over the course of 140 days, 140 artists undertook 140 twelve-hour walks through vastly different landscapes across the 12 participating municipalities.
All of the artists have a special connection to and knowledge of the landscapes they walk through. With this knowledge in their backpacks, they take us to hidden and forgotten places on a journey into the nature, myths, atmospheres, phenomena, and secrets of the landscapes.
They explore these places through their individual artistic disciplines — performance, visual art, dance, storytelling, architecture, film, music, etc. — using the surroundings both as setting and substance for the artistic actions they create along the way: stories, performances, installations, conversations, paintings, compositions…
All of the artists have a special connection to and knowledge of the landscapes they walk through. With this knowledge in their backpacks, they take us to hidden and forgotten places on a journey into the nature, myths, atmospheres, phenomena, and secrets of the landscapes.
They explore these places through their individual artistic disciplines — performance, visual art, dance, storytelling, architecture, film, music, etc. — using the surroundings both as setting and substance for the artistic actions they create along the way: stories, performances, installations, conversations, paintings, compositions…
My granddad was one of my favourite people and one of the most intelligent human beings I have known. He never had a formal education and through his life, he worked as a milk man, a pig farmer and a sweeping man. When I knew him, he was retired and often sat in his chair reading Kierkegaard, Platon or other philosophical writers. He collected quotes and shortly before he died, he returned to me a notebook I had made for him, with all the quotes he had collected on small scraps of paper over the years. Besides reading my granddad went for a daily walk around the small town where he and my grandmother lived, and he reckoned, like the philosophers, he was reading, that walking was good for both body and mind.
About the walk
by art historian Iben From
Art Centre Silkeborg Bad
(in Danish)
Extract from text about all the Silkeborg walks: Walking Landscapes Silkeborg
The Landscape as a Key to Identity and History
Visual artist Lotte Christensen conveyed the landscape of the area west of the railway town of Laven. She highlighted its defining characteristics through carefully composed visual perspectives, which also opened up for excursions into cultural and art history, as well as presentations of earlier philosophers’ reflections on nature. In this way, she drew attention to the existential and cultural-historical dimensions embedded in the landscape—particularly in how humans have understood and continue to understand landscape and nature.
She also pointed to her own artistic work as a constructed representation, and to an art-historical dimension by using a clearly repetitive photographic process to demonstrate how depicting a landscape is always a deliberate arrangement. At the same time, she wove an element of her own family history into the work, further emphasizing that nature endures beyond all else, while the individual human being—or any given era—is merely passing.
