Making the Landscape Sing : walking the map and mapping the walk
With Clare Qualmann, Conor Walker and Blake Morris
WHEN Wednesday January 18th 6-8pm
WHERE :Development and Planning Unit, UCL Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9EZ
In recent years there has been renewed interest in mapping as a practical sensuous activity, engaging not just with what we see, but what we smell, hear , touch and even taste ,as we navigate the world around us . But how to compose these impressions into a story, how to transform the haptic environment into a meaningful site of political and personal engagement, how to make the landscape sing ? In this seminar we have invited three practitioners who are experimenting with new ways of organising cartographic data to present and discuss their recent projects.
Clare Qualmann will discuss her walking projects including the ongoing East End Jam, a participatory walking, foraging, picking and preserving project, Huntly Perambulator (2014) which collaboratively mapped the town of Huntly (Aberdeenshire) with pram users, and walkwalkwalk a six year-long exploration of London’s East End conducted through shared night walks, text works, film, field recordings and mapping.Clare is an artist and lecturer in Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance at the University of East London ; she was a founder member of the Walking Artists Network and from 2012-2015 held AHRC funds to facilitate its development. She continues to lead its online presence and live events, most recently co-curating with Amy Sharrocks WALKING WOMEN a series of events conceived to rebalance the perception of walking art as a male dominated practice.
Conor Walker will be discussing his process of sound mapping, the connections between walking, listening and recording, how archiving sound geographically can inform listening, memory and visualisation and how unifying visual and sonic perceptions of place can construct a framework to work with field recordings artistically.
Conor is a field recordist and artist living in Southeast London, where he runs the Obsolete Future and Abhainn Archive labels. He’s worked in the fields of experimental and independent radio, graphic design, music journalism and pedagogic event organisation. His current work spans audio/visual mapping, GIS for social change, geographic concrete poetry and sound art.
Blake Morris will discuss his use of Memory Palaces, an ancient Greek memory technique, to map hubs of resonance through artistic walking projects. He will address projects in which he he's mapped both personal and collective memories, including Former Fresnans (2013-present), a project that has seen him build a memory palace in Fresno, California with twenty former residents of the city who now live in San Francisco, London and New York City, and Home: A Nomadic Exploration (2013), for which he lived in thirty homes over ninety days in New York City and built a memory palace with each of his hosts.Blake is an artist and postgraduate researcher at the University of East London. He is a founding member of the New York City based Walk Exchange. Examples of his artistic practice can be found at This is not a Slog.
TICKETS £10 AND £5 (CONCESSIONS) .
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