In the summer of 2024 I led an exploratory walking workshop alongside friend and artist Ke Zhang at EASA (European Architecture Students Assembly), a community I’ve been involved on and off since 2017. It’s a two week programme of workshops, talks and events where architecture students come together from across Europe. This edition was held in Benidorm, Spain.
Something that keeps drawing me back to this event is that it concerns ‘architecture’ in its broadest sense, welcoming workshops from the built to the theoretical. Our workshop was the latter, being focused on the process of walking and being in the city rather than end product.
Each year the assembly is based on a particular theme, ‘Shānzhài’ being this year’s. A Chinese word with implications of ‘fake’, it set us the task of copying a workshop from years gone by. We chose 2022’s workshop ‘Do people like your feet?’ as a reference point to guide our theory and actions to walk as an experimental and artistic practice.
What this meant on the ground was facilitating a series of ways in which we may interact with the environment. Ranging from the playful to the absurd, we introduced participants to different exercises which encouraged getting lost and reading the city in alternative ways. Sources that inspired this included psychogeographic manifestos from the 1950s through to contemporary art practice with a concern for place.
Here’s a sonic extract from one of our exercises:
While we didn’t demand any kind of phsyical output, the particpants opted to collate a series of visual fragments from the two weeks in the form of a zine. I enjoy how this offers a memory of our time spent in Benidorm, an emotional map of the city.
Thank you to all of our participants alongside EASA Spain for putting together this ambitious event.