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Arts & Communication A montage of small movements

Alert to markers of unfolding potential, he looked for Kindness
signs of undercurrents while steering the steamboat A witnessing of human contacts that release unwanted
along the river 2 tensions

Part 1: Turbulences A momentary suspension of planned time
Feet shod and feet bare: how do they experience the A still life popping up out of the ordinary
ground?
A collision of lives
What would worlds perceived through feet look like?
A being ‘in’ something with another
How do walking bodies “grasp” the turbulence they set
in motion? A being pulled into a place you did not intend to go
Part of a chain of action that is always reaction
How do the webs of significance woven by sedentary
perception differ from those woven by the embodied A sharing of vulnerability
experience of pedestrian movement? A sense of being connected
It all begins with a walk, two people unbeknownst to A moment of vitality
each other plunge into the current of everyday life walking
side by side. An unexpected encounter
Walking along in a city leaves no visible trace. It is as if Four months later, no trace is left of our presence. Streets,
we just skim a surface prepared for us. such as traditional maps, exist independently of being
looked at.
What happens when a body brushes against air?
At the turn of the new lunar solar year the city takes a
What kind of turbulence do we set in motion? pause: the streets are empty stages.
What new terrain opens up? On reentering them echoes of conversations that had
The paths trodden as we ponder these questions wound their way down the spiraling passage of my inner
radiate out from a core, the place where the dance is ear comingle with my now embodied imagination.
3
and a warp of threads. Held only by gravity, the warp A meshwork made up of memorized impacts ripples,
responds to the body’s every move and reveals fugitive while nudging toward new vistas.
presences … profound and absolutely ordinary …
slashing the surface The scent of a tree that met us as we turned a corner,

Part 2: Ripples An old rusty bicycle, its saddle protected with a plastic
bag,
Traversing a 20-min radius from the core, we, a stranger A house, a villa with a sign saying, it is a kindergarten,
and I, walk along the streets repeatedly throughout
October 2016. The edge of a pavement sloping down to street level.
We set out to make a map, a map made of random acts While waiting at a traffic light, peripheral vision
of kindness, acts we are about to witness. beckoned to the left where an elderly couple walked hand
We explore the notion of kindness as a technology as in hand………………“that’s cute not kindness.”
well as an emotion. Walking ahead of us, a man supported a woman
We gather material to map spaces in new sensory struggling to keep upright while pushing her wheelchair…
registers like a geography of kindness. We wonder if …“that’s not kindness, it’s social obligation.”
such “geographies” were to spread like ripples beyond A rental bike.
their source, “might they leak out into the wider world?”… The spot in the middle of the road where the traffic
(Thrift, 2007). policeman patiently explained to a woman we know not
2. This observation is taken from a lecture ‘Extrastatecraft Part what, but it took a long time and without his guidance the
1’ by Keller Easterlink, given at the AA on November 1 , 2013 traffic was building up, and he just carried on attending to
st
3. The reference, The place where the dance is, is a nod to an the need of the woman, quietly, calmly.
extract from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Burnt Norton’ in Four Quartets: A conversation,
‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.
Neither from nor towards. At the still point, there the dance is’. A shared walk,

Volume 1 Issue 1 (2023) 2 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.399