Seeing whiteness, hearing dead silence, sensing legacies of slave-ownership: an iteration of walking-with.

A walking arts intervention, Sweet Waters, is presented as an emergent iteration of walking-with (Springgay and Truman 2018), revealing and countering white supremacism embodied in the World Heritage City of Bath (UK). A public performative ethical practice addressing contemporary injustices through ‘making the return’ (Ahmed 2010). The work offers a creative response to Ahmed’s view that past injustice remains as present injustice if its origins and legitimacy are not challenged, Sweet Waters involves a somatic approach attending to forced migration and exploitation in the colonial era. Developing a participatory and co-creative iteration of walking arts, Richard White hosted the Sweet Waters cycle of walks in Bath, ‘sensing legacies of slave-ownership’; the project explored the temporal and spatial folds, entanglements and relics of those legacies through a series of walks punctuated by curated interventions and provocations. The presentation reviews these and subsequent public, participatory walks considering the walker experience as captured in notebooks, feedback and the authored creative work subsequently produced. A radical walking arts practice is presented that juxtaposes acts of walking for pleasure with the forced migrations of the slave trade