Dirty Walks

Abstract

A playful and speculative drafting of a reflection on a walking as a practice by two practitioners who work with walking as a part of a trans disciplinary set of tactics and methods.  Myer Taub is a theatre maker engaged in questions of digital theatre making, ecological research and performance outside the theatre, such as an ongoing treasure hunt series, that metaphorphoses according to site and situation, as does all of Taub's performance, staged in local bars to parking lots to the woolworths grocery store. Bettina Malcomess is a writer and an artist whose work looks for new archival vocabularies to rethink the densities of historical material, carrying out a series of gestures in their films and sound works that attempt to embody counterpoint voices. For both artists, the multiplicity of their practice methodologies is an attempt to respond to a present marked by urgent ecological and political questions, a time of crisis. During the Covid 19 pandemic, the artists began to take a series of intentional walks along Johannesburg's urban / natural edges, a continuation of walks Malcomess undertook in the co-authored book Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (2013) and Taub's everyday practice of walking as a choice and as an excercise in embodied motion through the city. These walks led to an understanding of the city through it's hidden waterways and green belts, hidden within what Malcomess calls the city's 'uitvalgrond' (surplus ground). To encounter this hidden city meant getting dirty, and so the walks coalesced into the curated walking project, Dirty Walks. These curated walks involved setting up a client who expressed a wish to Malcomess, who curated the walks from a studio in Grant Avenue, Norwood, essentially a suburban high street. Taub would then meet the client, with Malcomess playing fixer or broker for the 'price' of the walk. This model of exchange, desire, dirt was complemented by an archiving of the walk in a drawer in the studio. Thus the project presented here is the repository of the dirty walks, including various walks done over the years between the artists and between the artists and their clients. The repository is organised as a series of images as evidence, a series of links to cogent research and most importantly a conversation between Taub and Malcomess that was staged for a video piece inside a theatre. The sound of this conversation is presented here without the mis-en-scene of the stage, where documentation of a dirty walk was projected while the authors continually repositioned themselved and changed seats, and lighting. The original video is available as a vimeo link held on the Dirty Walks Dischord Server, where evidence of former and new walks continues to multiply. This multiple staging of liveness and the digital on several platforms is an intentional mirroring of the multiplicty of pathways necessary for a walking methodology. The invitation to the reader to move between this site and the Dirty Walks dischord server reflects the complexity of an attempt to walk a city in crisis into being, an ecology of ruptures and fragmentation of  the enmeshment of the natural borders and the human-made world, of failing infrastructure as metaphor and fact. This multi-scalar and multi-modal journal entry attempts to embody this fragmentation and invite thinking within the movement and crisis.