Walkative Contributors

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a London-based artist whose large-scale photographic works explore the public spaces of the city. She creates immersive and vertiginous compositions that challenge established urban perceptions and bring to light the overlooked, the dismissed and the unforeseen. Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in many public collections including the Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou. She is a Reader in Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, London.

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’.

Cristina Bogdan is a PhD researcher in Art Theory at the Sorbonne. She has studied Art History, Film and Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the EHESS in Paris, and is currently a lecturer in Art Theory at UCA Farnham and London College of Communication. She is the online editor of Revista Arta in Bucharest. Her work includes writing, blogging and curating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.