Walking in Ethnocidal Places

This advanced art studio course will introduce students to contemporary walking-based artworks and cultural traditions that intervene, archive, and organize within conditions of enclosure, expropriation, or genocide.

Rooted in the instructor’s dissertation thesis, this seminar will begin by conveying his research in Jewish theological, historical, aesthetic, and political contexts of walking as both mundane and esoteric human tendency; as solitary and collective; as holy and profane; as escapist and participatory. Students will learn additional tactics and approaches from historic movements like the anti-capitalist derive (drift) developed by African and European artists of the Lettrist International (1952-57) in Paris and the Kurdish exodus from Mariwan (1979) in opposition to the Islamic Revolution in Iran; as well as from contemporary artworks including Emily Jacir’s Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work) (2003); Regina José Galindo’s Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces) (2003); Joanna Rajkowska’s Basia (2009); Hiwa K’s Pre-Image: Blind as the Mother Tongue (2017); and JeeYeun Lee’s Whose Lakefront? (2021).

Core parts of the seminar will be experiential, participatory, and process-oriented; on the one hand taking students to places of political-historical intensity in Whatcom County to experiment with collective creation of place-responsive walking pieces, and on the other hand facilitate a recurrent thread of exercises, conversations, and critiques throughout our 11 weeks for students to develop their own walks, enacted between seminars, that derive from their situations, solidarities, and genealogies.

At base, we will return and return, in both practice and history, to the ways in which walking might participate in and manifest counter-situations of traumatic time, where violated communities of the living, dead, and nonhuman continue to demand and enact repair.