Walking Between Art and Aesthetics

Walking has been dealt with from various points of view and by various disciplines and practices, including art and aesthetics. In order to encompass such phenomenon in an adequate way, an ad hoc terminology has been often coined. Among the terms that have been appositely created, at least four are worth mentioning: “odology” (John Brinckerhoff Jackson), “hodological space” (Kurt Lewin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Otto Friedrich Bollnow), “strollology” (Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt), “walkscapes” (Francesco Careri). However distinct and somehow divergent they can be, the four approaches labeled with such four terms all focus their attention to the relationship between body and space, considering moving as a fundamental moment of the bodily experience of space. For this reason, they can be fruitfully put in relation with the artistic practice of the so-called “walking artists”, such as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Michael Höpfner. For on the part of the theoreticians as well as on the part of the artists, it is possible to maintain that walking “triggers thought about new forms of individual freedom, but also about the possible re-establishment of lost relationships between subject and surroundings, between places, time periods and cultures” (H. Eipeldauer on Höpfner).