‘Walk with me, talk with me': the art of conversive wayfinding

This peer-reviewed article analyses modes of conversational engagement in different examples of contemporary walk works (Graeme Miller’s Linked; Platform’s And While London Burns; and Tim Brennan’s Luddite Manoeuvre) and defines the particular approach to guided walks enacted through them as ‘conversive wayfinding’. It considers strategies of companioniability employed to make sense of complex socio-political geographies. In the context of this special issue exploring walking as ethnographic and arts practice, the research contributes to the understanding of the significance of these forms of performance as spatial practices that conduct percipients’ attention to landscapes through mediated/live aural performance; perceptual and dialogic strategies of interacting and knowing place through shared viewpoints, earpoints, conversational conviviality and critical witnessing; the use of different paces, paths and places of narrative; and performance as a way of knowing. Mike Pearson cites my notions of ‘conversive wayfinding’ and ‘percipient’ advanced and clarified within this article and drawn from my doctoral research as a contribution to understanding modes of ‘performative occupancy’ and roles of audience in site-specific performance (Pearson 2010). The article follows on from my contribution as an invited respondent to the ROAM Walking Arts Festival and presenter at Walking Arts Seminar at Loughborough, University in 2008. Various versions were presented at: Sites of Performance: Mapping/Performance/History, University of Nottingham, 2009; Living Landscapes, Aberystwyth University, 2009; Anticipatory Histories of Landscape and Wildlife, University of Exeter, 2010. The consideration of participatory and convivial modes of engagement and methods of shared knowledge production in walking performance pursued in this research continues with my ongoing project the Walking Library, co-created with Deirdre Heddon (University of Glasgow) and with emerging outputs including a library carried in rucksacks 334km across Belgium and exhibited along with reading and writing workshops as part of a commission from the peripatetic arts festival Sideways 2012 (http://www.tragewegen.be/nl/myers-heddon-gb-en)