The long story …
Routes and P(l)aces England is a section of a long journey still being written.
The spark started in 1997 when I found myself ‘somewhere in a field in Hampshire’ on an all-night romp with strangers. I met a person in a central London hostel when we both saw the other was reading the Popul Vuh. We got to chatting and he invited me to a rave he was heading to, and off I went. The morning after, on the way back to London, while I looked out the window at things my California eyes could only see as very, very old, we chatted about long-distance hiking. I saw hedgerows and churches and thatched and stone cottages. Narrow country lanes and signs to towns and villages I had read about in my art history and religion courses. I thought, ‘why don’t I do a tour walking between these places instead of taking a bus or train’.
I applied this desire to incorporate walking methodologies in cultural studies later that year while researching romanesque chapels in France for my undergraduate course. I followed a coastal path between these sites in Brittany – where locals dubbed me a pilgrim and treated me as such. I was frequently offered drinks or meals by local clergy and their parishioners. I was always given a bit of grass to set my tent up on or offered a couch somewhere, which felt odd given that I was an American Jewish woman who crafted an interdisciplinary major related to art, anthropology, and religion at a very progressive liberal arts college in New England. I identified as a student and not a pilgrim.
For the next two decades there would be trips with similar designs around tourism on foot in Italy, France, Scotland, California, New England, Israel and Spain – adverse to following set national paths but designed around themes nonetheless (disused paths and roads, public art, abandoned villages, old growth forests, etc).
Fast forward two decades – I am in Poland developing a project linking the participatory arts projects I’d been involved in and my Jewish ancestry – prior WW2, my maternal family traces its routes in the Eastern Carpathians – towns that are, in 2022, in Ukraine and Romania.
There was a side project in Poland I was working on, specifically in the Beskids and Biesczady, the Carpathian ridge running along borders with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine, I was linking Jewish heritage (non-)sites along or near national hiking trails. I was recording these walks in photos, videos, and audio files, occasionally pontificating on what it meant to walk this way. I planned on talking to a golem made from mud collected near death camps. A pilgrimage of sorts that exposed the conversations we have in our head when confronted when genocide, recreation, socialization, and natural beauty all sat on top of each other.
SIDE NOTE: When I first arrived ‘in the east’, my spare time was spent mostly visiting Jewish sites or on hikes in Beskid Sadecki (had a friend from NYC living on the Czech side of that range). I noticed heritage and recreational tourism overlapped seamlessly. In the mountains, the location where one national-ethnic culture ended and the other began (Czech, Polish, Slovak, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, etc) was impossible to distinguish with my American eyes. The pace of walking amplifies this liminal space belonging, death, and sublime scenery alongside lively mountain huts and friendly Folx, from all over the world … but mostly from the region. I recognized the low-stakes environment walking offers to explore the paradoxes and tensions that often surface when a difficult past occupies public space.
Encouraged by my supervision team at the time, I shifted my focus from participatory art/cultures and Jewish subjects to focus on walking and Jewish heritage in Poland.
However, due to several factors, including the political climate at the time in Poland, I left before the project was completed. It felt like running off, leaving food on the dinner table like many other Jews running in the wake of fascism. This departure also made me aware of a sensitivity I’d developed to the less palatable (the patriarchial) bits of Talmudic Judaism and the Catholic Church.
I went to the UK, joined a PhD program at the University of Roehampton, was shuffled around departments, eventually dropped into the School of Arts (which is currently being dismantled) and was guided into designing a similar but more overtly arts-related project. This was all during COVID lockdowns, leaving me to feel strongly that England should be my focus just to reduce potential complications involving international travel. Now, it was a matter of designing something that drew on similar interests in walking and heritage tourism that engages with issues of belonging in and with the landscape.
There is no shortage of artistic walking cultures in the UK – from the artist Richard Long to the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was easy to identify walking as a national pastime in England. However, focusing on figures such as Wordsworth and the perceived cultures around countryside or long-distance walking drew attention to a similar concern I had in Poland: the dominance of masculine, colonial and heterocentric standpoints in walking discourse, perspective and creative outputs. This is what sent the project in the direction of women folx …
Procedurally similar and topically different, the Polish and English projects are earnest attempts to engage with places and people through pedestrian mobilities.
Focusing on FLINTA folx in England is a countermap to the Poland countermap. The project invokes similar methodologies to address some of the traces, paradoxes, and tensions raised when FLINTA folx walk in the countryside. The rest has yet to be written …
