Mutual therapeutic Walking, like Solo slow Aging
Solo Show
04.04–30.04.2024, Arnestedet, Copenhagen

Walking through urban landscapes is the cultural practice of weaving oneself into the tapestry of a city. For the Situationists, the city was therefore not just a physical place, but a psycho-geographic space in which social meanings thicken and layer. When we walk, we cultivate an intimacy with our cities that affirms our place within them. Walking, we draw emotional cartographies of the places through which we pass.

Walking, my gaze goes deeper than the eye approves. The city becomes a picture in front of me, which I look upon as if I were outside of it. You have only ever really been, where you have been on foot, and every walk is a work of art, she whispered.

Bettina Willnauer translates the emotional cartography of walking into the aesthetic and technical language of hand-tufted tapestry. The exhibition thus refers to the visual culture of walking in art and in related fields such as dance, performance, film, photography and literature, which consider walking to be more than just a means of transportation.

Walking as poetic practice and artistic intervention; as witnessing the present and refusing to stand still; as stumbling upon the tracks of one’s own and of others, willingly losing one’s way only to find it yet again.

Text: Katharina Stahlhofen