(Or)Landscape(s)

Time Travelling in Bloomsbury

Thumbnail image for (Or)Landscape(s)

A select and hardy group of wind-whipped Walkativists defied the exceptionally cold weather on Sunday 18th March to gather with walking arts collaborators Noble & King under an oak tree in a Bloomsbury graveyard.

This solitary and paradoxically ancient young English Oak in St George’s Gardens served as both a literal and metaphoric starting point for a wild goose chase around the landscape of Bloomsbury. The walk – (Or)landscape(s) – an allusion to Bloomsberian Virginia Woolf’s time travelling and gender switching protagonist in the novel Orlando, but also loosely inspired by the episodic mise-en-scène in Sally Potter screen version – was structured around a performative and dialogic narrative that drew upon literary, historical and psychogeographic quotation as well as palimpsestic and serendipitous fragments encountered by the walkers along the route.