Walking the world

Corpo, spazio e paesaggio in Richard Long tra pratiche esperienziali e cartografia poetica

Abstract

Not many works are capable of achieving the status of a visual and conceptual benchmark and of altering the course of art history and thought. One such work is Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967). It pioneers a methodology in which the act of passing through is transformed into a sign, a memory and a measure of the territory, establishing a dialogue between individual experience and the geopoetic stratification of the landscape.

This paper aims to analyse Long’s work by interweaving studies on the phenomenology of landscape, with particular attention to the concept of ‘environmental perception’ (Ingold 2000, Wylie 2007), theories of mobility and walking as an aesthetic practice, and affective and political cartographies of space. The analysis is based on a reading of primary sources and a comparison with contemporary artistic practices that critically re-examine the relationships between territory, body and power, in order to situate Long’s work within a genealogy that, starting from walking as an aesthetic act, extends to artistic practices that investigate the dynamics of territorialisation, displacement and transience.