LUCA VARGIU, Università di Cagliari

Walking has been dealt with from various points of view and by various disciplines and practices, including aesthetics. Its aesthetic relevance will be investigated by outlining a sort of road map, so far, a long way away from being exhaustive. In its current state, it includes four approaches: John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s “odology”, Kurt Lewin’s “hodological space”, later reconsidered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt’s “strollology”, and Francesco Careri’s “walkscapes”. However distinct and somewhat divergent they may be, these four approaches all focus their attention to the relationship between body and space, considering walking as a fundamental moment of the sensitive experience of space – an aesthetic experience, insofar it is related with the senses and the feelings (sentiments). The same focus is also found in the artistic practice of the so-called “walking artists”, such as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Michael Höpfner, which, for this reason, can be fruitfully put in comparison with the aforementioned approaches.

Discutant / Lucia Quaquarelli, Université Paris Nanterre

Picture: Hamish Fulton, Seven paces, detail. Skulpturenufer Remagen, 2009 (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0).