Corporeal and aware bodies, therefore less conditioned by standard time/space compression civilization brings forward, walked in silence through urban heat and moisture. They were guided by gestural language and non verbal signs, as to offer the condition for an autonomous and individual participation, cutting through layers and textures the city consists of, while becoming part of a 100-minute experience, a Walk Piece in silence, starting and ending in the art space.
Since 2008, David Bergé has been making Walk Pieces, during which the artist guides participants in silence along a precise trajectory and within a precise timeframe through textures and infrastructures that comprise the city. Walking together resonates with the phenomenological minutiae of street life. Walk Pieces have passed through ancient, modern and contemporary infrastructures: a museum without a floor, in the proximity of containers being offloaded from trucks, through narrow alleys and over large squares, through the bedroom of an art collector, the stage of an opera and an almost finished metro tunnel.
The Bridge, 2018
4 walk pieces by David Bergé
commissioned by curator Domna Gounari
at Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA)
supported by Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA)
acknowledgements: Stavroula Gatsou
related works
ROUTES INTO SILENCE – spatial instructions to contaminate the walking body (text piece), 2018
A Walk in High Resolution (book), 2020
A Walk in High Resolution (exhibition), 2019
Prototype Walk Brussels (walk piece), 2014
Vienna Footnotes (walk piece), 2010