About

In 2013, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Simon King co-founded The Walkative Project. Through participant and guest-led walks, written and visual documentation, the project explores how walking can trigger processes of thinking, researching, collaborating and making.

We organise walks in which artists, architectural critics, film makers, critical spatial theorists and writers respond to textual, visual and verbal prompts (but also have free reign to respond more personally).

Walkative at the Royal College of Art

Emerging from the project in 2015, The Walkative Society is a Royal College of Art student-led society emphasising walking as a means of discovery and a place for dialogue and exchange. Each year the society is led by two presidents from the student body.

The Walkative Society Presidents

Designers in Residence

Walkative Across RCA

Taking place as part of Across RCA, the Royal College of Art’s annual week long series of cross-disciplinary projects, Walkative’s propositional starting point was that the city / London contains narratives, knowledge and contested materialities best accessed through walking. The projects between 2013 – 2015 brought together a new trans-disciplinary field of artists, writers, musicians, human geographers and philosophers to consider further how, for student practitioners in art and design, the city walk can inform and trigger new processes of making, thinking, researching and communicating.

Contributors

Current

Tom Spooner

Tom Spooner is a London-based illustrator and artist. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2016 and long-time contributor to The  Walkative Project, he is interested in current debates concerning what constitutes psychogeography today and whether the term is misused i.e. is it a politically-charged critical walking practice that was developed as a means to an end (a revolution in the case of the situationists), or is it today a more free-floating form of walking that effectively functions as an end in itself?

Pat Wing Shan Wong

(aka. Flyingpig) is a community artist who was born and raised in Hong Kong, she is currently pursuing a MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art and Co-President of the Walkative Society 2020/21. She published her first illustration book “The Scenery of Old Shops” (2016) and the second book “Once Upon a Time in Tai Kwun” (2018). She has collaborated with various organisations including Tai Kwun, Hong Kong Museum of Art, West Kowloon Cultural District M+, Hong Kong Science Museum etc. Her artworks are collected by Hong Kong Museum of Art. She is also the Varley Award Winner (2020) in RCA.
https://wingshanwong.com/
https://www.instagram.com/collective_forgetting/

Alastair Kwan

is an artist who’s practice broadly investigates issues of identity in postcolonial Britain, positioning this against the Western artistic tradition. He experiments across different media including video, sculpture, painting and drawing. Currently he studies on MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art and is Co-President of the Walkative Society 2020/21. www.alastairkwan.com

Norman Klein

is an urban and cultural historian who is identified very much with Los Angeles. Among his best known work: History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; The Vatican To Vegas: The History of Special Effects; The Imaginary 20th Century; Tales of the Floating Class. He is a professor in the School of Critical Studies, at California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles.

Richard Wentworth

is a chronicler of daily life. Since the 1970s he has played a leading role in British sculpture, isolating both the formal and sculptural qualities of everyday objects. His extensive archive of photographs, Making Do and Getting By(1974 onwards), captures the provisional ways in which people modify the world they inhabit. It suggests an infinite syntax of adjustment, modification and appropriation. The private smile which spectators experience when looking at Wentworth’s work is associated with a deep human capacity to associate the inventive and creative with an internalized highway code for survival.

John Troyer

is an RCUK Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. He is also a member of the Centre for Death and Society. John received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society in May 2006. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Technologies of the Human Corpse was awarded the University of Minnesota’s 2006 Best Dissertation Award in the Arts and Humanities. From 2007-2008 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University teaching the cultural studies of science and technology. Within the field of death studies, John focuses on delineating and defining the concept of the dead human subject. John is in the closing stages of a case study looking at mercury emissions and heat capture technology in UK crematoria.

Peter St John

is a founding partner at Caruso St John Architects. He studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architectural Association, and worked for Richard Rogers, Florian Beigel, Dixon Jones, and Arup Associates prior to establishing the practice with Adam Caruso in 1990. The practice came to public attention with the New Art Gallery Walsall, a commission won in an international competition in 1995. From these origins in the visual arts, the practice has extended its expertise and gained an international reputation for excellence in designing contemporary projects in the public realm. In Autumn 2013 Caruso St John completed the first phase of the masterplan for the restoration, refurbishment and extension of Tate Britain. The project focused on the restoration of galleries in the south quadrant, and on opening up new circulation spaces and public areas around the Rotunda near the Millbank entrance. The project opened to wide acclaim and has been awarded RIBA London and RIBA National Awards as well as the RIBA English Heritage Award for Sustaining the Historic Environment.

Jo Stockham

is an artist working primarily with print and installation. She often deals with the histories of a site, environment and community, using found materials and archive sources. Her current work explores the histories of technology and manufacturing as a subject. She is Professor of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art and current research projects includes an examination of the languages surrounding computing, craft and materiality. She has exhibited widely and undertaken research residencies as Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (1989) The Mead Gallery, University of Warwick (1997), Yaddo, New York 2001 and Wimbledon Centre for Drawing 2007.

Phil Smith

(Crab Man, Mytho) is a performance-maker, writer and ambulatory researcher. He specialises in creating performances related to walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. He writes and performs ‘mis-guided tours’, gently subverting sites of heritage. He is a core member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites, a co-author of the company’s various ‘mis-guides’ including ‘An Exeter Mis-Guide’ and ‘A Mis-Guide To Anywhere’, and is presently working on their next publication: ‘Architect Walkers’. He has recently been performing with Jane Mason in ‘Life Forces’, devising and performing ‘Calton Hill Constellations’ with Siriol Joyner for Artlink Edinburgh and Lothians, and developing a ‘common dance for threatened subjectivities’ with Melanie Kloetzel. Also working as a Site Artist for Tracing the Pathway’s ‘Groundwork’ project in Milton Keynes and is developing a new idea for a festival in the city in 2017.

Phil’s publications include Walking’s New Movement (2015), On Walking, Enchanted Things, and the novel Alice’s Dérives in Devonshire (all 2014), Counter-Tourism: The Handbook and, with Simon Persighetti, A Sardine Street Box of Tricks (both 2012) and Mythogeography (2010), and as a co-writer Ways to Wander (2015) and Walking, Writing and Performance (2009). He is currently writing a book on ‘Zombie Walking’. He is also the company dramaturg and, with Paul Stebbings, co-founder (in 1980) of TNT (Munich), the world’s leading company touring English language theatre to non-anglophone countries. He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at Plymouth University.

Peter Sheppard Skærved

is the only British violinist to have been invited to play on Paganini’s violin il Cannone more than once (five times in particular) and he regularly gives recitals on the prestigious collection of historic instruments at the Library of Congress, Washington. He is also acclaimed for his collaborative work with museums, working regularly with the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum and   worldwide. He plays on a 1698 Stradivari owned by Joseph Joachim from the collections of the Royal Academy of Music, where he is the Fellow of Performance Studies.

Steve Pile

is professor of human geography with the Open University. His main research centres on the relations between places and power. He is author of Real Cities (2005) and The Body and The City (1996), and editor, with Paul Kingsbury, of Psychoanalytic Geographies (2014). He is currently working on early Freudian psychoanalysis and geographies of the body.

Sean Patterson

is an actor and urban walking tour creator and guide.  He has an MA in London Studies from QMUL and is a qualified Clerkenwell and Islington guide as well as a qualified City of London guide.  Sean has a particular interest in Charles Booth’s socio-economic mapping of London in the late nineteenth century and a series of walks look at specific districts.  His walks follow Booth’s actual route and Sean reads from Booth’s aide memoire notes compiled at the time so that walkers can compare actual sites over a period of more than a hundred years. Walkers are also invited to read extracts from a variety of historic and present sources that attempt to excavate London’s past, present and future.

Laura Oldfield Ford

is a London-based artist and writer concerned with issues surrounding contemporary political protest, urbanism, architecture and memory. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007 she has become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. She is the author of Savage Messiah.

Douglas Murphy

is an architect and writer living in London. In 2012 his book The Architecture of Failure was published by Zero Books. He explores the strategies through which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. He is currently finishing his new book Last Futures, a study of technology and nature in post-war architectural avant-gardes, to be published by Verso later this year.

Nayan Kulkarni

is an internationally recognised practicing visual artist with over twenty years of experience of developing and delivering innovative site, context and place specific artworks in architecture, transport infrastructure, public realm and landscape. Nayan is currently collaborating with URS on the public realm strategy for the city of Kinston Upon Hull and developing a new large scale light artwork for a major exhibition is Seoul, South Korea. Currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, Kulkarni’s practice has resulted in some of the most ambitious light works in the UK. He has a reputation for delivering place specific artworks that transform the familiar often creating moving experiences of light and place. The perceptual, intellectual, ethical and technological dimensions of light as medium and idea are fundamental elements in his work.

Sharon Kivland

is an artist and writer working in London and France. She is a keen reader, considering what is put at stake at the intersection of art, psychoanalysis, and politics. For some years she has been following Sigmund Freud on holiday. She is Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Adam Kaasa

is an interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the politics of the city, foregrounding the role of architecture and design. He completed his PhD as a SSHRC Scholar at the London School of Economics and is currently a Research Fellow in Architecture at the Royal College of Art. His research and teaching interests include critical and urban theory to consider public space, the postcolonial and negotiations of capital in late modernity, as they touch ground in the practices of architecture. He is a founding member of Theatrum Mundi and the When We Build Again collective.

Duncan Jeffs

is a London-based artist currently studying sculpture at the RCA. Often collaborative, his practice uses images, noise, video, found materials and appropriated media content to weave together an ongoing montage; layering fact and fiction into objects and temporary installations that mutate as they are assembled in various sites.

Past

Ania Mininkova

works in film and uses her voice toengage with language’s sound and rhythm as sculptural elements. Herwork explores contemporary mythologies, and she’s been walking SanFrancisco to engage with its mythos of the Wild West of ideas. Sheis currently pursuing her MFA in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin. www.aniamininkova.com

Dolly Kershaw

is an artist based in London. She holds a MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art.

Tere Chad

Chilean artist (b.1990) and creative inventor based in London. Focused in general on sustainability and promoting Latin American art & culture abroad. She is co-founder of the ‘Latinos Creative Society’ at the University of the Arts London and founder of ‘Alter Us’, an emergent multidisciplinary collective that attempts to find solutions to face the challenges of the Anthropocene. She holds a MA Art and Science from Central Saint Martins and a MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London.

Agata Madejska

is an artist based in London. She holds a Diploma in Photography from the University of Essen, Folkwang School, Germany and a MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art London. www.madejska.eu

Viviana Uriona

b. 1973 in Pergamino (Province of Buenos Aires). She graduated in political science, studying at University of Cologne and at the Free University of Berlin. She holds a PhD about social movements and community radios in Latin America from the University in Potsdam.

Mark Uriona

b. 1975 in Mozambique, raised in GDR. learnt to photograph in the USA. He studied law and worked as a research consultant for a member of the German federal parliament. 2011 he founded the “Kameradists”, a cooperation of independent Moviemakers. Uriona was a member of the editorial staff of the “Prague Spring”, worked for “Geo Season”, the project “Bosnian voices” and the Helmholtz Association.In 2020 Viviana and Mark Uriona release „One Word“, a participatory documentary that was developed and filmed with the inclusion of Marshallese people through film workshops that have run over a period of nine months in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. https://one-word-the-movie.com/. In 2015, they both released a full feature documentary “No Rest. No Haste. „– a movie about the battle over the land between the indigenous population of Argentina and the transnational agribusinesses.https://www.kameradisten.org/en/ohne-rast-ohne-eile/ In 2012, they released the full feature documentary “Sachamanta” – which deals with community radio stations in northern Argentina and their role in defending the land of the indigenous communities against land grabbing.https://www.kameradisten.org/en/sachamanta-3/ . All of these movies were produced within a participatory approach.

Méitaka Kendall-Lekka

b.1983 in Majuro Marshall Islands, belongs to the Rimwejoor, clan “Jowi”. She is a professor and chairperson since 2014 Business Studies Department at the College of Marshall Island, Majuro. She holds an MBA from Chaminade University of Honolulu, and is a PhD candidate in Creative Leadership for Innovation and Change at the University of U.S. Virgin Islands, St.Thomas US Virgin Islands. Ms. Kendall-Lekka is an active member of several NGOs, such as Jo-Jikum, who is very active in climate protection. In 2019 she received the “Young Pacific Leaders” – Award for your political / cultural engagement. In February 2019 she represented the President of the Marshall Islands, Hilde Heine, with the mock session of the YPL climate change program at the Pacific Island Forum in Suva, Fiji.

Hannes Brunner

b. 1956 Switzerland, lives in Zurich/CH and Berlin. His art installations favor the thought of modelling with ephemeral materials (http://www.hannesbrunner.com/fallture-failure-on-truth-2/), and his contextual art projects combine different medias including social process from digital communication into real physical spaces and vice versa.
He is currently a Professor of the sculpture department at Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin. He has a degree in Architecture from ETH Zürich and an MFA in Photography from the Art Academy in Kassel, Germany. www.hannesbrunner.com

José García Oliva

Venezuelan–Spanish artist based in London whose practice navigates the collision of both identity and places. This interrelationship is explored through the lens of migration in its socio-economic and political context; the ashes of post-colonialism — especially from South America — and its echo in Europe. His practice is research-led and situated, taking the form of participatory performance, installation and drawing.

Antonia Low

is an artist based in Berlin. She has studied Fine Arts at Kunstakademie Münster and at Goldsmiths College, London. She is professor at State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. Her work has been presented in numerous international group shows and biennials. She has had solo exhibitions at Goethe Institut Hong Kong (2018), Gingko Space, Beijing (2017); Deutsches Haus at NYU, New York (2017); Palazzo Altemps, National Museum of Rome (2016); K21 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2015); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2014) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2014). Three monographs on her work have been published: Der verlorene Raum/Pax und Concordia wartend (Kettler Verlag, 2014); Inventar (The Greenbox Verlag, 2012); and Low Deluxe (Argobooks, 2009). www.antonialow.com

Daniel Carnevale

1993* in Toronto. He received a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, Canada in 2017 and holds a MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. His practice spans the use of photography, painting, video, and installation.

Fredie Chan Ho Lun

is an award-winning independent filmmaker based in Hong Kong, his films concern about grassroots communities and social activism. He traveled to New York to explored community-based filmmaking in early 2020 and recently making a new video for the Walkative project.

Robin Kirsten

is PhD Candidate, Royal College of Art, London
www.robinkirsten.work

Anna Ådahl

is a visual artist and researcher working in various mediums such as film, installations, performance and new technologies. She uses the tools of assemblage and montage where found footage meets newly produced images and where ready-mades are used as props in spatial narratives. Over the past decade the notion and politics of crowds has been central in her artistic practice. Within her current practice based research her focus has turned towards the aesthetics and the politics of contemporary crowds, operating in a new computational realm. Her Fine Art practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art in London adresses the aesthetics and politics of today’s digitised and simulated crowd. She was  a member of the editorial team of OEI magazine between 2012-2018.

John Wild

holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, exploring Psychogeography in the Digital City. His practice investigates the spatial aesthetics that new circuits of digitality are bringing forth. John has participated in numerous exhibitions, festivals and events and his work has been performed at Transmediale (Berlin), iMAL (Brussels), Late at the Tate (Tate Britain), the Barbican (London), the Sonic Arts Expo, Catalyst Arts (Belfast) and the Royal College of Art.

Adalberto Lonardi

is an interdisciplinary designer developing creative strategies to empower the community. He holds an MA in Interior Architecture from the Royal College of Art and was Co-President of the Walkative Society in 2019/20. www.adalbertolonardi.com

Katharina Siegel

is an artist based in London and Berlin, who holds a Diploma in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) and a Master’s in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art London. Her multidisciplinary art practice is often research-based and explores concepts of experience, space, temporality and process. She was Co-President of the Walkative Society in 2019/20. www.katharinasiegel.de

Max Kohler

(b. 1996) is a writer, programmer, and designer based in London. Recent essays include Zoom Zoom Zoom, and Cloud Visions (forthcoming). He holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art. He was the Walkative Society’s Designer in Residence 2019/20. maxkoehler.com

Aethan Wills

was born in Japan, but has spent most of his life in London. He studied Fine Art BA (Hons) at the Byam Shaw School of Art and is now completing his MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He often travels to Japan to conduct reach towards his practice and has widely exhibited in galleries both nationally and internationally.

Gabor Gyory

, born 1983, is an artist, curator and writer and co-director of London gallery Twelve Around One. Recent exhibitions include Salient, The Dye House, Peckham, which included Juliette Bonneviot, Samuel Fouracre, Christian Hidaka, Sara Ludy, Thomas Lock, Ben Sansbury & Daniel Swan; and Phosphene, The China Shop, Oxford, which included Majed Aslam, Joel Beach, Jack Brindley, Markus Karstiess and Adam Thompson.

Steven Eastwood

is a filmmaker whose work spans fiction, documentary and artists’ moving image. His films have been screened and exhibited internationally to acclaim. He has published numerous articles and chapters on cinema and regularly curates screenings. In 1997 he formed the production company Paradogs Films. Paradogs’ second documentary, Those Who Are Jesus (2001), was nominated for best documentary newcomer in the prestigious Grierson Award at BAFTA. Eastwood gained a theory-practice PhD through UCL, The Slade in 2007. His work currently deals with the ‘event’ of filmmaking as a site for performing difference. His films veer between genres, embrace difficulty and lack of conclusion and freely-play between fact and fabulation.

Alexander Duncan

, born 1985, is an artist living in London. He moved here from Swansea in 2011 and is currently studying for an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Alex works primarily with sculpture, photography, sought objects, video and drawing. Recent shows include Raised Beach, MOSTYN, Midden, Vulpes Vulpes and Cabin Fervour, a residency in collaboration with Live Art/National Theatre of Wales. Alex will be showing work at Leicester Festival 2014 in November.

Amy Blier-Carruthers

is a Lecturer in Postgraduate Studies at the Royal Academy of Music. Her PhD (King’s College London) compares live performance and studio recording, using both analytical and ethnographic methods (currently being prepared for publication). Her research and teaching interests are often interdisciplinary, and revolve around subjects involving performance style, recording practices, ethnographic approaches to classical music-making, innovative performer-led concert practices, the history of performance on recordings and the aesthetic and cultural contexts of these. She has recently presented at conferences in Singapore, Quebec, Vienna, Tel Aviv, London, and Cambridge, and is a core member of the AHRC Research Network ‘Performance in the Studio’.