Walking with Artists creating new Encounters

The last few months have been very eventful as I developed a couple of walks through Thread and Word

One of these was ‘Sumak Kawsay’, a walk for Terminalia which unexpectedly resulted in a small book of verses to put in your pocket and take for a walk, This limited edition print, with verses written by those who participated on the walk was put together in collaboration with Well Projects in Margate.
You can check the booklet out and also links to the walk here: Sumak Kawsay

I also started to plan a walk ‘Listen to the River ‘ , Are you Listening? last November. Through various twists and turns, including a failed funding application ,this walk has evolved to Are you Listening? and will be recorded as a soundscape by the artist Lucy Claire.

Our focus on Listening has opened this walk to the possibility of bringing a sound to the walk which will then be overlayed on the recorded soundscape by Lucy.

Collaborating on this walk has been quite a journey and I am very appreciative of the people who have been involved in putting it together. There were times I thought it wouldn’t happen and now here we are a couple of weeks away and I am so thrilled and excited to be able to walk Are you Listening? with twelve participating walkers, some who are artists and some who are great collaborators and friends.

for more about Are you Listening?

https://elspethpenfold.blogspot.com/2019/05/listening-sketchbook-drawing-walk.html

Please get in touch if you’d like to join us. You can sign up on eventbrite and will then receive details of how to contribute to the soundscape if you wish to

The walk which is part of The Chelsea Fringe on May 26th has been supported by The Pump House Gallery in Battersea, The Work and Play Scrapstore South London and Creative Enable at Wandsworth Council.

A Walk for Terminalia with Thread and Word – Some context for our walk .

This walk takes place February 23rd in Seasalter, on the Kent Coast.
Terminalia Festival of Psychogeography

you can check the festival out and find us under events.

As I prepare for this walk with Thread and Word there are some connections that I have made over the last week that have contributed to my thinking about this walk that I thought would be worth sharing. I mostly carry these ideas around in my head and have found that writing these ideas down does clarify my thinking as I try to explain them. Although I have to admit some ideas are a leap of faith and associated with feelings you carry in your heart as you will no doubt gather if you read this.

The first has been connecting my thoughts about the solar panels proposed for the landscape in Seasalter with the Inca deity’ s Inti, the God of the Sun, and Mama Pacha, Mother Earth .

This photo was taken in Reculver today, and it made me think.

I was born in Bolivia and grew up in Lima, Peru. At school we learnt about the Incas probably in the same way as children in England learn about the Romans. So I tend to draw on this bank of knowledge using the mythic method, a method identified by TS Eliot and James Joyce, which draws on myth from the past as a way to help us connect with the present.

A few days ago I walked in Seasalter and thought about how important it is to feel this connection with the earth and the sun. In Peru there are no figures for Mother Earth (Mama Pacha), aside for those made to sell to tourists, as Andean people believe she can be felt in every place, at every moment and in every living being. Where do the thousands of solar panels proposed for the site we will be walking in Seasalter fit in to this scenario, I wonder?

Andean people still believe strongly in the importance of living in harmony with nature and not taking too much from Pachamama. How will Mother Earth change if the rays of the sun are diverted from the land and harnessed as energy ? I am not against a greener energy but as I walked I wondered how much energy do we really need? Should we reflect on our role as consumers ? Where are the boundaries to our consumption?

There are ten of us walking to celebrate Terminus, the Roman God of boundaries.

‘ Terminus was one of the really old Roman -gods – he didn’t have a statue, he was a stone marker ” (see Terminalia website)

We will be reading poetry, listening to music and meditatively knotting ropes. I have made the ropes for this walk by hand in my studio.

This practice also derives from my knowledge of the Incas and the records that they kept through a system of knotted ropes called Quipus. To this day the village members, who are trained in their roles as Quipucamayocs in villages in the Andes, are able to read the knotted ropes that our text based society is unable to translate. Although there are theories and explanations offered by researchers and anthropologists there is still a mystery in the artefacts which I makes me think that we can’t predict or explain everything. Some things come from your inner feeling and relationships with the earth.

We will reflect on our thoughts at the end of the walk when we attach our knotted ropes to our Vara ( Pole) . Below is the Vara I have made for this walk with a strap that I have woven on an inkle loom . The weave is symbolic of the land we will be walking around and I will explain this on the walk.

A Vara for Terminalia

This Vara (Pole) will then join the collection of 12 Varas in my studio.

I have been leading walks and assembling these Varas since 2015. Each Vara holds the ropes knotted as a record of a particular walk which I have led supported by friends, academics and artists.

I would like to thank all those who are joining me on this walk and giving their support in making the Vara contributing to an exchange of ideas, meditative knotting and poetry writing in the pub at the end. This is the first time we will take the Vara on the walk with us and then put the ropes on to the Vara together as a group. I usually take the ropes back to my studio and then assemble it there on my own. I think it will add to the ritual of the walk and am looking forward to seeing how this develops.

I am hoping that our poetry writing will be taking a leaf out of ecopoetics as described by the founder of the ecopoetics journal Dr Jonathan Skinner (Warwick University).

Ecopoetics Journal

Jonathan will be joining us on this walk. We will be locating our poem in and through the ‘site’ rather than kinds of ‘writing’:

“Taking writing out of the classroom, the bookstore and the library even out of the book itself shifting the focus from themes and styles to an institutional critique of green discourse itself and to an array of practices converging on the oikos, the planet earth that is the only home our species currently knows”(1).

I’m looking forward to seeing what we come up with.

Looking forward to celebrating Terminalia with you all on Saturday!

By way of an explanation, we will be celebrating Terminalia with Thread and Word in Seasalter through a walk with poetry readings ( you are welcome to bring a contribution) and the meditative knotting of ropes. I will supply the ropes.

Our intention is to explore the liminal space that surrounds us .In Seasalter.there is a proposal to cover the area we will be walking with 1.000’s of solar panels as tall as double decker buses .

The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold – any point or place of entering or beginning. A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing.

It is suggested that we should get there as often as we can and stay there as long as we can ….

Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.

The act of walking and knotting ropes will allow us to think about where we are now and how our world might be transformed .

We will document this experience on a Vara ( see photo below of nine Varas from previous walks wit Thread and Word )

The weave for our Terminalia Vara is in the photos alongside. We will be attaching our ropes to the Vara at the end of the walk ( in the pub ?) .

Looking forward to walking and sharing this ex[erience with some of you on February 23rd.

For more about this event you can check out my previous blog posting!

for tickets:Terminalia tickets

Here a cement block which will be part of our walk in Seasalter celebrating the Roman God of Boundaries Terminus.

Terminalia was an ancient Roman festival in honour of the god Terminus, who presided over boundaries. His statue was merely a stone or post stuck in the ground.

This walk is organised with the intention of gathering people together at a designated site, with the purpose of considering difficult choices and where we draw the line. We will walk and ponder through poetry readings and a meditative knotting of threads.

For information about this walk:

Terminalia Festival

You are invited to walk with us through Thread and Word while we ponder on difficult decisions . None of this is easy!

Here is the site for our walk, but it might look more like the image below:

The walk is free but numbers will be limited. Please email me : [email protected] if you would like to join us.

For more about Thread and Word please visit the facebook page:Thread and Word