international walking commissions

I was reading Rebecca Solnit's beautiful chapter on Pilgrimages when I was reminded that "Walking came from Africa, from evolution..." p. 45

My partner is traveling to South Africa in November to collaborate with a friend who has an artist residency there.  Consequently I've become interested in the possibilities of asking them to collaborate with me on a walk in the place it was invented.

This idea got me thinking that some other friends of mine will be taking their band on tour in Argentina and Brazil in November, and perhaps they could walk for me in some way too. 

I'll have to wait for some spectacular accident to occur, linking these international walks with an appropriate concept.

In the spirit of musing, I'd like to share a quote from Solnit's Wanderlust that struck me profoundly.  It portrays pilgrimages so beautifully: 

"These devout and simple people travel sometimes two thousand miles, from China to Mongolia, and cover every inch of the way by measuring their length on the ground...They prostrate themselves on their faces, marking the soil with their fingers a little beyond their heads, arise and bring their toes to the mark they have made and fall again, stretched full length on the ground, their arms extended, muttering an already million-times-repeated prayer."

This bodily relationship with the land, marking the soil with fingers, measuring one's length on the ground; it all somehow reminded me of the various land/body artists (especially in the 1970s) who explored the physical mark-making of the body on the land.

Here are some photographs I took on a solitary walk in Mono Cliffs Park of earthworm trails:

aren't they beautiful?

...like this painting entitled Painting by Philip Guston, 1954, that I saw in New York last February...