Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Atmosphere and the Art of Walking

I am confronted with the issue of language as the medium in which humans negotiate our relationship with the environment – language as a medium that is liberating and confining at the same time. Turning to the Marginal World, this video titled ‘The Art of Walking’ strikes me particularly for the immediacy of sensory experience evoked in the act of ‘walking’ that seems to be a kind of ‘contact’ with the surrounding without much intervention of language or knowledge.

In this video, I find that walking is presented as a simple act of Suzanne’s movement, looking down to the soil and footpaths, to absorb the surrounding and allow images of elsewhere to easily flow in mind. There is a mediation going on in the mind that could suspend the daily imperial needs of getting particular meanings across through language or signs. To call it an ‘art’ of walking also suggests that walking itself can be an aesthetic experience intensely personal yet rewarding. It is a form of raw and direct contact with the geological and atmospheric surrounding that possibly allows one to feel beyond one’s own interiority and preoccupations.

This video reminds me of the sense of the atmosphere articulated in Walter Benjamin's ‘aura’ as aesthetics. It enriches the notion of it by including an individual subjective experience as part of theme aesthetic theory together with texts or artefacts. This could be an ecological turn in this aesthetic theory, a practice that possibly enables one to perceive certain ecological thoughts such as deep time (the lens of looking at human beings as geological beings) through immediate sensory experiences even before articulation of the concepts in language. I certainly hope to investigate more in this aspect.

- Merah