One lilac evening in New York, Jack Kerouac walked and dreamt of all that was beyond a ‘white man’. In Paris, Georges Perec roamed and exhausted a place by recording what happened when nothing happened. Stanley Brouwn’s participatory mapper, Iain Sinclaire’s path orbiter, Peter Smithson’s wall gazer, Vito Acconci’s cinematic stalker – these uncommon walkers and walks have for centuries offered surprising, subversive and resonating analysis of urban lives. To ‘walk’ – to think a walk, to represent and to remember a walk, to talk about and to detail a walk – is to produce not only knowledge of the city, but also the making of the city. These wanderers, perambulaters, plodders and trespassers have seen the eternal in the transitory and the prophecy in the infraordinary through the act of walking, unleashing the city as its most uncanny and liberating. From the physiognomy of moving bodies to the technology of navigation, psychogeography to nomadic identity, journey diaries to hand-held cameras, the city of Budapest will be explored and quarried through the medium of moving feet.

In its second year, AAVS Budapest extends the previous exploration of the uncommon walk through the interventive ‘Walker’ to possibilities of an urban ‘walking’ set that strategically records, extrapolates and modifies our everyday spaces and our understanding of them. While the ‘Walker’ may be considered as an extended and augmented version of a pedestrian, the ‘walking set’ is a cross between a moving person, i.e. from the incidentally captured passerby to the intentional worker/performer, and a moving fragment of the city, i.e. as part of cycles of physical transformations of our urban environment. Architectural elements such as a doorway or a facade can ‘walk’ and be reappropriated, materials can move and be reused, even particular views and scenes in the city as constructs can also be transported, duplicated, edited and merged. The walking set is an evidence of material and immaterial transaction, as well as a new provocateur, within the city.

AAVS Budapest collaborates closely with prominent art and architectural institutions (FUGA, and KÉK) and creative international practices (IVANKA Concrete and HELLO WOOD) based in Budapest, as well as brings together an array of individuals as guest lecturers and workshop tutors who have developed a body of work relating to the theme of walking. Specialised workshops, guided experiments and project tutorials will be interspersed with evening public lectures and roundtable discussions. The output of AAVS Budapest’s ten-day activity, which will consist of a mixture of drawings, texts, sounds, images, films, collages, maps, catalogues, models and projections, will be exhibited in public as part of the renowned Budapest Design Week.