WALK, series of monthly urban art walks commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD, London, 2024, photo by BUILDHOLLYWOOD
"WALKING IS SO SIMPLE YET SO DEEPLY COMPLEX": IN CONVERSATION WITH ALISA OLEVA
Walking is one of the most elemental things we do—so ordinary, so entangled with daily life, that we rarely pause to notice its intricacy, let alone its power as a creative, political, or relational act.
For walking artist Alisa Oleva, walking is not just a way to move through space, but a way of being in it. It is a practice of listening, sensing, marking the world with quiet traces—on the city, on others, on herself. Her work echoes anthropologist Tim Ingold’s idea of wayfaring: moving not with detachment, but with presence; not as a traveller following a map, but as a body unfolding a path through lived experience. Walking becomes a line drawn in time—part choreography, part cartography—shaped by footsteps, attention, and the textures of the everyday.
In this conversation, we follow these lines, walking with Alisa through cities and thresholds, through silence and noise, through memories and structures. We speak of drifting alone and gathering in temporary communities, of stripping things bare, of returning. At its heart, this is an invitation: to walk differently. Not to arrive, but to notice. To understand space not as something we move through, but something we co-create with each step.
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