I walk by topo-graphing. Places have their narratives. Narratives of routes. Stories of itineraries. These stories are known to those who walk them often. They may be personal narratives or ones learned from those who came before. Often, while walking, we read the traces of earlier walkers, passersby, and other creatures that have passed through.
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“Let me begin by explaining what is not a landscape,” Ingold writes. “It is not ‘land,’” he emphasizes. “It is not ‘nature’ and it is not ‘space. I walk around, topographing trying to discover what the world means to the people who live in it.
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I walk step by step. Making a path on paper. Stone by stone. Outline to
outline. I watch the step. If I’m not careful, I’ll stumble. Now and then I
stop to look around. The trees, the trunks, the sky. I walk over the pine
needles, past the wildflowers between the networks of tree roots and the edges
of rocks. Water flows have formed passages between the roots and the rocks, or
perhaps, conversely, the roots have formed between the passages of passing
water and our footsteps.
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“As we walk upon this earth, our hearts […] We rejoice in the progress of our body across the uneven surface of the earth“, writes Dimitris Pikionis in his text sentimental topography.
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I meet the earth’s surface in the bark of a trunk. A bark is full of layers
of older barks. I travel across its surface – a surface of surfaces. A relief
mosaic of inhomogeneous elements. A peeling bark. Changing skin. Growing. The
outer layers are more exposed, cracked, and drier, ready to peel off. The
crust’s surface, with its islands of peeling, resembles the scales of a strange
skin, an armor for harsh conditions.
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I look at the abstract canvases of the trunks, the islands of peelings, the
notches of detachments, the “stairs” and micro-grades of the bark’s
eczema. Ι move across the surface of this “skin”. Then I look at my
skin. I move on to its epidermis, the outer layer of my body. I move between
the stretch marks formed by the folds of skin and the grooves formed by veins
and nerves, between the pores and valleys formed by the finger’s contour lines,
sometimes dehydrated, sometimes oily.
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I’m walking. I move with my eyes on the surfaces. The peeling posters on the city streets amidst graffiti, next to the chalky surfaces of the chalky sidewalks. Fragmentary writings and readings emerge from the city´s palimpsest, revealing successive historical layers. I walk and observe. Over time, I have stopped seeing the clumsiness of the streets and sidewalks. Instead, I see figures, amazing collages, and abstract “canvas”.
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I look at the sidewalks. Many times, the more a sidewalk is broken and
“patched,” the better it is. I make up stories out of Jacob’s street
ballets. Except that I don’t look at the dancers; I read their footsteps in the
topographies of the city: the chewed bubble gum on the floor; the cigarette
trampled maybe by the nerves of lost love, or of workplace resentment, or just
for the taste of tobacco; bag ties of a lifestyle that the wind blew in; the
moving truck that cracked the sidewalk slab; or the parking lot that probably
ripped the sidewalk gutter off. Patches on the streets and sidewalks from
leaks, repairs, reconstructions, patches from stories of workers, urban
installations, telecommunications, protests, and tourists, signs from a
gentrified neighborhood, and makeshift shelters of paper boxes in the
galleries.
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I walk following the cues from GPS map recording on the screen sentimental
coordinates of an algorithmic topography. I alter the route. In reaction, I
change direction. We used to move without instructions, following the steps and
signs of our memory. I try to be here, on the spot, but I often find myself out
of place, often out of time. Atypical times, ectopic places, places that are
non-places. I search. I walk. I lean on your shoulder. Is your shoulder my
place? And no one knows while we all understand, why I weep as we return to my
grandmother’s field.
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Text and images were published in magazine “Yusra”, volume 17, May 2023.
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Bibliography
Jacobs, Jane. The death and life of great American cities. Vintage, 2016.
Pikionis, D., 1989. A sentimental Topography. Architectural Assoc.
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