Kinga Araya’s Ten Steps: walking in circles
.
(copies of Kinga Araya’s film ‘Ten Steps’ are available on dvd - £10 for individuals, £100 for institutional use, free for interested galleries or curators – for further information please contact The CrabMan. )
Walking back and forwards across a field of long grass, Richard Long marked a straight ‘path’. He recorded the effects of this act, publishing a single photograph of the field with its trampled line. In attempting to address problems of sculptural representation, Long dislodged the physical act of making from the studio- or gallery-bound object. By using an existing, “natural” material (the field) rather than an extracted, quarried clay or stone, he had opened up a discourse of immediacy, the walker sculpting their mark directly, unmediated, into the surface of the natural world.
And yet its representation is enigmatic. The path, photographed, suggests its own unending. There is a romantic invitation to continue the walk, virtually. There is also a dread absence: the walker has gone. The document encourages a contemplation of a changed space; admiration for the simplicity of the act’s conceptualising and for the concentrated precision of its conduct. The sculptural and sited qualities appear uncontroversial: Long has done as he intended. But Long troubles the qualities of the document by claiming that the art is the walk itself: “walking as art”.
There are, of course, banal and sophisticated contradictions here: the field is not “natural”, but a bounded space of agricultural industry, Long displays and sells (at prices that suggest an auratic value) the documentation of his ‘making sculpture by walking’, and rather than inviting his ‘audience’ to the site of his direct, immediate sculpting even to witness (let alone, participate in) the act itself, Long disappears, assuming the figure of what is lost in his work. The walk (and therefore the art) is uncapturable, mysterious, modest, etherealised by the artist’s absence and “Nature” is mediated by absence. A space is opened up between Long’s walking and the documenting of his walks, a space into which his ‘audience’ can enact virtually a strange version of History, of an ‘almost-mystical’ relation to a very particular siting (imagined and found) of Nature, away from the built environment; ancient and deserted. Long’s efforts to reach these places and to make the interventions he documents there are considerable, but as Waldemar Januszczak has remarked: “the immense effort involved — the private performance — is never allowed to leave a drop of sweat on the resulting artwork”.
Everyone who walks after Long has to deal with this absence; with the theatrical potency of his disappearance, the magical ease of his labour and its limitless promise of efficacy and authenticity, and with the clean, bright ‘discovery’ in documentation of a ‘Nature’ that will not abide the very intervention that has revealed it. Abjuring the means of their own makings, the act of art and its now magical material are no longer accessible to each other in the same temporality – a mark in the grass assumes ineffable qualities: uniqueness, originary potency and closure in non-time – it is forever there and unrecoverable. No wonder then that “Long hates being called a romantic. Or, worse, a mystic.” No wonder that the ‘Line Left By Walking’ photograph is so uncanny; the line has not been “left by” at all! Rather it a flickering freeze-frame, a repeated moment of hung time that turns ‘place’ into the haunt of problems for the ambulant eye.
‘Ten Steps’ engages the viewer in a walk that they were not involved in: the simple thing that has evaded so many. Avoiding minimalist tendencies and abstracted mappings, ‘Ten Steps’, despite its managed, damaged heroic, retains the informality of everyday walking and its encounters. It sustains thematic and narrative development and shape. It is both exceptional and ordinary. It absorbs the accidental, but without the over-accumulation that can drain all sense of incident from an account. It moves step by step, through levels of philosophical sophistication, but rather than rising to disappear in a vista, it seems to move inwards layer by layer, reminiscent of the sixteenth century Scala Naturale of Giovanni Camillo Maffei, described by Tim Ingold as: “concentric circles which… may be envisaged to form a giant stairway, the ascent of which affords, step by step, a comprehensive knowledge of the universe… perceived from within”. Araya’s ‘Ten Steps’ intently peels back the banalities; neither exceeding nor surrendering to them.
The backstory of ‘Ten Steps’ is heroic and transgressive. The walk it represents is a ten day circumambulation in 2008 of the 160 kilometre-long site of the former Berlin Wall, timed to memorialise the twenty years since Kinga Araya walked out, abruptly, on a Polish tour party in Florence and defected to the West. There is something ‘stranded’ about her act – her personal flight so close to the collapse of the Wall – her agency exposed by the sudden withering of Fukuyama’s phantasmic ‘History’; its timing will not allow it to rest easily into the hard binaries of the Cold War.
The difficulties, liminalities and negotiations of Araya’s escape, arrivals and movings-on are neither under- nor over-sold, there is no attempt to universalise her experience, nor to deny its times of suffering, disorientation and rejection: “falling down and getting up because of my political, linguistic and cultural unfitness within Italian and Canadian laws concerning immigration and citizenship”. But by remaining resolutely under-dramatised it enables a quilted, quotidian utopia, constructed from the transformed ordinary on the border of a historical dystopia: “a symbolical dwelling in between places, cultures and languages”.
Despite the pilgrimage-like structure of the walk, Araya does not attempt to follow ‘religiously’ the route of the Wall, but often follows the leisure tracks that hug, efface and interweave with it. When one of the numerous walkers who come to join her enthusiastically rallies the party to trace the Wall’s actual route through tangles of low branches, from concrete stump to faded insignia, the effect is no more nor less authentic: for Araya’s walk contains both romantic quest and schematic exercise, refusing to collapse into formal athletics or heroic miserablism.
As if it recognises the uneasy, acidic effects of History on heroism, early on the camera moves queasily over the abandoned form of a sanctuary, a hostel in Rome that afforded Araya some shelter. The building is stubbornly incommunicative, its ruin undramatic and asublime. There is nothing natural or accidental about this ‘field’. It is simply uncared for, a material container of exchange value in abeyance. A place of waiting between transits, stalled before its own transition. The camera’s nervy resistance to any latent neo-romanticism in the ruins is, at first, unsettling. Where is the thrill? Where is the plane of entry? But there is a depth of field here; for it is in the restless fluidity of the camera that the space is peeled back; not for the viewer to consume. Its abjection is too specialised in value to be chewed over. It must simply wait and wait: an everyday- or anti-sublime. In Long’s 1967 photograph the path disappears, carrying viewers’ fantasies with it, but here there is a uselessness that refuses to disappear, overstaying its welcome, swinging about the viewer, woozily; establishing the cantankerous, needy, difficult, unsettled symbolic terrain of Araya’s ten day walk.
‘Ten Steps’ is not a riposte to anything. It is the work of someone sensitised to the possibilities of ‘walking as art’. Kinga Araya’s doctoral thesis ‘Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper’ contains a review of ‘walking as art’ that, along with those of Francesco Careri and Roberta Mock, restores breadth to a description that some (Solnit and Coverley, for example) have tethered too tightly to the literary. ‘Ten Steps’ does not attempt to supersede the ‘tradition’, but rather it carries it forward, as one of the productive ‘burdens’ of the circumambulation.
Araya knows how to use ‘burdens’ and understands their affordant qualities. In her early works she creates objects that impinge on free ambulation. For Peripatetic (1998) she wears large bowl-like iron hemispheres on her feet, and in Grounded (III) (1999) she adds a prosthetic leg, walking (with three legs) and talking (in five languages), describing her experience of exile while re-mapping five diverse Toronto boroughs. The ‘burdens’ she creates and carries are means to discovery and excessive-engagement. Similarly, the ‘problem’ of language is for her the opportunity for translation: a ‘crossing-between’ that transforms as well as traverses.
The quotidian act of walking is always fore-fronted in ‘Ten Steps’. Feet fall on a succession of unexceptional surfaces. The texture of the terrain is ersatz and slippery of identity. But there is nothing quotidian about the sum of Araya’s pedestrianism. She describes the momentum of her walking and talking (the two seem inseparable in her work) as “an impossible desire to create an empowered and authentic ‘self’ that would displace the prosthetic origins of our culturally and politically conditioned identities’.” She has no illusions about this desire and deploys its impracticality to make translations of her reality. In ‘Ten Steps’ she is all the time negotiating the place of this ‘self’. While at certain times she seems the self-evident centre, accompanied for most of her walk by a video camera operator and the object of newspaper photographers’ and journalists’ attentions, at other times she is apparently shaken to the very edge of her event; the walking group is commandeered by enthusiasts for the Wall’s story, for an architecture of ruin, or for walking and wayfinding itself. At times the walk is displaced, spiralling away from Araya, by the simultaneous, but distant walking of other artists, and revoiced by computerised audio artworks and translations.
As well as the ten days of walking, the ‘Ten Steps’ are also ten poems, written by Araya in her early days of exile. In the structure of the walk, their ascetic simplicity translates into a hint of a sharper formality, an excessive Dante-esque circling of Hell, proceeding step by step and layer by layer. While she avoids theatrical gestures, the ten steps are not equal segmentations, but the whole structure is inclined. Each day is a kind of advance; introducing new levels, a reversing of archaeology: heaping ideas, adding remnants, laying new stories. The city and its ghost-wall are not discovered readymade by the walkers; they are produced before the camera, formulated and chewed upon. The space is made through the forefronting of the act of walking itself, through the contrasting qualities (and collective ‘form’) of each day’s ambulatory partnerships and groups, through the languages and translations, through discussions of border and the slithering of those discussions across self and nation, escape, home and other.
But there is more to this film than a dominant form (no matter how porous). There is also a pointillism of sharp moments and snap images: trespass, a piece of the Wall bought by Theo to trail plants in his garden, kitsch stalls, mannequins dressed as border guards, a man of reminiscences who can produce an album of photographs, camels(!), lakeside neo-classical pillars, echoing sheep, currywurst, preserved stretches of death zone, The Gleaners, Kant, “geschichte”, the trade in spies, burying identity papers. We catch very little of the direct vocality of the encounters. They are transformed into reported speech; a formalism that deters nostalgia and encourages critical consideration. And one that allows us to site our reception where we can be most affected by its becoming simultaneously dramatic and philosophical.
But that is too cold a reward. For there is an anti-sublime to come. Alone in the woods. The constituent parts of this sequence are disparate, assembled by the momentum of the walk and jumbled into place by Araya’s cursory attention to maps. Araya has received an audio from one of the artists engaging with her walk at a distance. The artist is Susan from New York. (These artists, and indeed all the participants are referred to by their first names only, although some viewers will recognise familiar names, faces and art practices from the world of ‘walking as art’.) Susan has translated a story by Robert Walser into English. Araya listens on headphones as she takes a ‘short cut’ through a forest. She becomes lost. She is alone. There is no video camera operator now. The camera is no longer the documenter, but Kinga Araya’s subjective point of view. She uses the viewfinder to negotiate the forest, speeding up as her anxiety accelerates her deeper into where she does not want to go. A New York voice speaks the translation: a story of a child with no family, who runs off to the end of the world, noticing nothing of the landscape or the people disappearing around her, imagining her destination as a high wall, an abyss, a green meadow, a lake, a polka-dot cloth, a thick white paste, pure air, a sea of bliss, a brownish path and then as nothing at all or, rather, nothing the child can quite identify.
Now, lost, engrossed in the tale, the rain falls heavily and, after numerous detours, Araya finds shelter from the storm in the Heinrich Heine Klinik.
And then returns home, resting, readying herself for the next day’s segment.
The walk ends on ‘Kinga’s Day’, July 24th. On this final day disorientation has set in, a long, unnecessary detour prolongs the walk, bodies are heavy with significance. Just 300 metres from closing the circle, Jürgen, an enthusiast from Day 2 appears to guide them to the completion, one more loop inside the loop. Copies of Araya’s identity documents, buried ten days before, are exhumed; this childhood game has resulted in little more than a slight decomposition, just as the walk itself has been gently de-composed, distracted and detoured in order to get at the layers of its subject. Jürgen drives Araya to her home.
The trembling circle that ends ‘Ten Steps’ is a layer like those of Scala Naturale and a seismic record of quotidian footfall. Where the photograph of Richard Long’s ‘A Line Drawn By Walking’ documents the disappearance of its ordinary material into mystery, the connectivity of Araya’s imperfect gesture, in attempting and failing to match the brutal ideal of containment, allows the past and history back in by walking “counter-clockwise to recall, recite and recycle what seems to be lost forever” (that “what” being the Wall) and articulates in its unevenness what the “step” of a new flâneur might look like. Without surrendering either to banality or magic, Araya ‘contains’ them both in her trembling trajectory, opening up the borders of exceptional walking to the significance of its stumbling translation into the everyday. ‘Ten Days’ deserves to be recognised as equivalent in significance to Richard Long’s seminal work of 1967. For, like Long’s, it is a work of ambulatory re-starting, of beginning the work of translating what has been silenced for too long into what can now be chosen: to be an exile within sociability; to re-make the phantasmic, ambulant and nomadic flâneur – walking between constructions, collecting the neglected – as a concrete figure, not only in raked and sandy border zones, but possible in an everyday “trans”.
The Crab Man (July 2010)
(copies of Kinga Araya’s film ‘Ten Steps’ are available on dvd - £10 for individuals, £100 for institutional use, free for interested galleries or curators – for further information please contact The CrabMan. )
The Line
‘Walking as art’ - self-consciously aesthetic and interventional walking, part of a knowing production and performing into being of places – has increased rapidly since the late 1960s, accelerating in the last decade. But over that time the problems of representing that walking have not diminished:What remains of the inhabited and embodied act of walking in its representations?For many artist-walkers, critics and art historians, Richard Long’s ‘A Line Made By Walking’ (1967) has been an originary work of ‘walking as art’; a re-starting for disrupted walking after Dadaist deambulations went nowhere and Surrealism’s aimless rural wanderings were witheringly détourned for the purposes of psychogeographical data-gathering by the International Lettristes in the late 1950s.
What points of identification or empathy are possible?
Where is the walker?
What agency remains in representation?
Is anything mapped?
Is any ‘where’ placed or re-made in the representation of its production?
Where is the producing of place displaced to?
Walking back and forwards across a field of long grass, Richard Long marked a straight ‘path’. He recorded the effects of this act, publishing a single photograph of the field with its trampled line. In attempting to address problems of sculptural representation, Long dislodged the physical act of making from the studio- or gallery-bound object. By using an existing, “natural” material (the field) rather than an extracted, quarried clay or stone, he had opened up a discourse of immediacy, the walker sculpting their mark directly, unmediated, into the surface of the natural world.
And yet its representation is enigmatic. The path, photographed, suggests its own unending. There is a romantic invitation to continue the walk, virtually. There is also a dread absence: the walker has gone. The document encourages a contemplation of a changed space; admiration for the simplicity of the act’s conceptualising and for the concentrated precision of its conduct. The sculptural and sited qualities appear uncontroversial: Long has done as he intended. But Long troubles the qualities of the document by claiming that the art is the walk itself: “walking as art”.
There are, of course, banal and sophisticated contradictions here: the field is not “natural”, but a bounded space of agricultural industry, Long displays and sells (at prices that suggest an auratic value) the documentation of his ‘making sculpture by walking’, and rather than inviting his ‘audience’ to the site of his direct, immediate sculpting even to witness (let alone, participate in) the act itself, Long disappears, assuming the figure of what is lost in his work. The walk (and therefore the art) is uncapturable, mysterious, modest, etherealised by the artist’s absence and “Nature” is mediated by absence. A space is opened up between Long’s walking and the documenting of his walks, a space into which his ‘audience’ can enact virtually a strange version of History, of an ‘almost-mystical’ relation to a very particular siting (imagined and found) of Nature, away from the built environment; ancient and deserted. Long’s efforts to reach these places and to make the interventions he documents there are considerable, but as Waldemar Januszczak has remarked: “the immense effort involved — the private performance — is never allowed to leave a drop of sweat on the resulting artwork”.
Everyone who walks after Long has to deal with this absence; with the theatrical potency of his disappearance, the magical ease of his labour and its limitless promise of efficacy and authenticity, and with the clean, bright ‘discovery’ in documentation of a ‘Nature’ that will not abide the very intervention that has revealed it. Abjuring the means of their own makings, the act of art and its now magical material are no longer accessible to each other in the same temporality – a mark in the grass assumes ineffable qualities: uniqueness, originary potency and closure in non-time – it is forever there and unrecoverable. No wonder then that “Long hates being called a romantic. Or, worse, a mystic.” No wonder that the ‘Line Left By Walking’ photograph is so uncanny; the line has not been “left by” at all! Rather it a flickering freeze-frame, a repeated moment of hung time that turns ‘place’ into the haunt of problems for the ambulant eye.
A Wall Trod By Walking
One of the extraordinary qualities of Kinga Araya’s hour-long film ‘Ten Steps’ is that it has begun to answer the questions that Long has left hanging, hauntingly, since 1967. Where others have responded with their own half-mysticisms – anglo-psychogeographers channelling Arthur Machen, autobiographers drawing their identities in a sometimes brutal mix of tarmac and celluloid, formalists unfixing themselves in algorithms, neo-romantic textualists using walking to pace up their heightened thought and prose (each of these making further work on Long’s problem-setting possible) – Araya has corralled multiple tactics of engagement with space, overlapping various styles of address, evoked a sociality of the road and given attention to aura-stripped visuality and obstructive things. She makes her work within a circle not a line. Her quest does not leave and arrive, but leaves and returns. She slips a loop around her subject. ‘Ten Steps’ engages the viewer in a walk that they were not involved in: the simple thing that has evaded so many. Avoiding minimalist tendencies and abstracted mappings, ‘Ten Steps’, despite its managed, damaged heroic, retains the informality of everyday walking and its encounters. It sustains thematic and narrative development and shape. It is both exceptional and ordinary. It absorbs the accidental, but without the over-accumulation that can drain all sense of incident from an account. It moves step by step, through levels of philosophical sophistication, but rather than rising to disappear in a vista, it seems to move inwards layer by layer, reminiscent of the sixteenth century Scala Naturale of Giovanni Camillo Maffei, described by Tim Ingold as: “concentric circles which… may be envisaged to form a giant stairway, the ascent of which affords, step by step, a comprehensive knowledge of the universe… perceived from within”. Araya’s ‘Ten Steps’ intently peels back the banalities; neither exceeding nor surrendering to them.
The backstory of ‘Ten Steps’ is heroic and transgressive. The walk it represents is a ten day circumambulation in 2008 of the 160 kilometre-long site of the former Berlin Wall, timed to memorialise the twenty years since Kinga Araya walked out, abruptly, on a Polish tour party in Florence and defected to the West. There is something ‘stranded’ about her act – her personal flight so close to the collapse of the Wall – her agency exposed by the sudden withering of Fukuyama’s phantasmic ‘History’; its timing will not allow it to rest easily into the hard binaries of the Cold War.
Despite the pilgrimage-like structure of the walk, Araya does not attempt to follow ‘religiously’ the route of the Wall, but often follows the leisure tracks that hug, efface and interweave with it. When one of the numerous walkers who come to join her enthusiastically rallies the party to trace the Wall’s actual route through tangles of low branches, from concrete stump to faded insignia, the effect is no more nor less authentic: for Araya’s walk contains both romantic quest and schematic exercise, refusing to collapse into formal athletics or heroic miserablism.
Objects and Abstracts
At a crucial moment in the film, Araya and one of her co-walkers enter a watchtower and the camera lovingly lingers over curiosities: banal objects of East European manufacture, collectors’ items, a system in ruins and available for re-assemblage. Araya comments that the ambiguities of East/West are not present here, that they are re-presented in the watchtower museum as a simple binary. There is no room for subtlety, and we begin to see ‘the Wall’, through one of its few remaining material points, as a very particular kind of absence. And Araya’s quest as impossible, not hopeless.
‘Ten Steps’ is not a riposte to anything. It is the work of someone sensitised to the possibilities of ‘walking as art’. Kinga Araya’s doctoral thesis ‘Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper’ contains a review of ‘walking as art’ that, along with those of Francesco Careri and Roberta Mock, restores breadth to a description that some (Solnit and Coverley, for example) have tethered too tightly to the literary. ‘Ten Steps’ does not attempt to supersede the ‘tradition’, but rather it carries it forward, as one of the productive ‘burdens’ of the circumambulation.
Poetic Feet: Units of Meter
As well as the ten days of walking, the ‘Ten Steps’ are also ten poems, written by Araya in her early days of exile. In the structure of the walk, their ascetic simplicity translates into a hint of a sharper formality, an excessive Dante-esque circling of Hell, proceeding step by step and layer by layer. While she avoids theatrical gestures, the ten steps are not equal segmentations, but the whole structure is inclined. Each day is a kind of advance; introducing new levels, a reversing of archaeology: heaping ideas, adding remnants, laying new stories. The city and its ghost-wall are not discovered readymade by the walkers; they are produced before the camera, formulated and chewed upon. The space is made through the forefronting of the act of walking itself, through the contrasting qualities (and collective ‘form’) of each day’s ambulatory partnerships and groups, through the languages and translations, through discussions of border and the slithering of those discussions across self and nation, escape, home and other.
But there is more to this film than a dominant form (no matter how porous). There is also a pointillism of sharp moments and snap images: trespass, a piece of the Wall bought by Theo to trail plants in his garden, kitsch stalls, mannequins dressed as border guards, a man of reminiscences who can produce an album of photographs, camels(!), lakeside neo-classical pillars, echoing sheep, currywurst, preserved stretches of death zone, The Gleaners, Kant, “geschichte”, the trade in spies, burying identity papers. We catch very little of the direct vocality of the encounters. They are transformed into reported speech; a formalism that deters nostalgia and encourages critical consideration. And one that allows us to site our reception where we can be most affected by its becoming simultaneously dramatic and philosophical.
Dialogue
At this point we might feel that we have found the film, for ‘Ten Steps’ is here comparable, across genres, with the cinematic dialogue of ideas – ‘My Dinner With Andre’ or ‘The Last Mitterand’. Its exchange of ideas - on exile, on desire, on the pleasures and uses of walking, on ‘wander’ and ‘marschieren’, on walking’s own border of left hand and right hand, on utterance and identity - becomes increasingly thrilling. Not because anything is formulated more presciently, vividly or concisely than it has been elsewhere, but because we see the coherence of certain ideas about identity, liminality, nomadism and the terrain of “trans” (in gender, memory, geography and language) emerging from chaos and happenstance, at the mercy of the wind and rain and despite the eccentricities and inconsistencies of the articulators. What comes through particularly strongly is an idea of default-exile, as both a refusal to accept (like Dante) the banal adaptation to enforcement of normalisation, but also a choosing to adopt the destabilisation and “trans” possibilities of exile within homeland (new or old), home and body. A knowing through self-disorientation. The modesty of Araya’s poetic form pays a handsome return here. But that is too cold a reward. For there is an anti-sublime to come. Alone in the woods. The constituent parts of this sequence are disparate, assembled by the momentum of the walk and jumbled into place by Araya’s cursory attention to maps. Araya has received an audio from one of the artists engaging with her walk at a distance. The artist is Susan from New York. (These artists, and indeed all the participants are referred to by their first names only, although some viewers will recognise familiar names, faces and art practices from the world of ‘walking as art’.) Susan has translated a story by Robert Walser into English. Araya listens on headphones as she takes a ‘short cut’ through a forest. She becomes lost. She is alone. There is no video camera operator now. The camera is no longer the documenter, but Kinga Araya’s subjective point of view. She uses the viewfinder to negotiate the forest, speeding up as her anxiety accelerates her deeper into where she does not want to go. A New York voice speaks the translation: a story of a child with no family, who runs off to the end of the world, noticing nothing of the landscape or the people disappearing around her, imagining her destination as a high wall, an abyss, a green meadow, a lake, a polka-dot cloth, a thick white paste, pure air, a sea of bliss, a brownish path and then as nothing at all or, rather, nothing the child can quite identify.
Now, lost, engrossed in the tale, the rain falls heavily and, after numerous detours, Araya finds shelter from the storm in the Heinrich Heine Klinik.
And then returns home, resting, readying herself for the next day’s segment.
Compartments
The compartmentalisation of the walk is crucial to its relation to everyday life. Araya’s pilgrimage is an interrupted one. The symbolism is put away in the evening and reassembled the next morning. There is something like work as well as art. Araya always treads a split path. She does not process the liminalities of the borderland for their abject thrills alone. Many of her route decisions take her through uncanny non-places, along dull uniformal paths. Often, when the camera lifts from the walking feet, there is little in the way of landmarks or extra information. The footpaths are doubly banal: both abject and (at least on Araya’s journey) unused. This double-inauthenticity will not allow the quietism implicit in the default representation of non-place (“dreadful place, beautiful image”). Instead these achingly ignored places infuriate: obscene anti-memorials (where concrete constructions and death zones have been replaced by symbolic cobbles or low, functional fences) for the millions dead in globally dispersed contests of this border, exterminations and repressions to preserve this point of apparent difference. Its sudden, almost frictionless crumbling is what is frozen here, a political faultline become a cyclepath. The walk ends on ‘Kinga’s Day’, July 24th. On this final day disorientation has set in, a long, unnecessary detour prolongs the walk, bodies are heavy with significance. Just 300 metres from closing the circle, Jürgen, an enthusiast from Day 2 appears to guide them to the completion, one more loop inside the loop. Copies of Araya’s identity documents, buried ten days before, are exhumed; this childhood game has resulted in little more than a slight decomposition, just as the walk itself has been gently de-composed, distracted and detoured in order to get at the layers of its subject. Jürgen drives Araya to her home.
At The Last
Exhausted and blistered from her ten days and 160 kilometres of walking, Araya subjects herself to a final task. Kaspar, one of her virtually accompanying artists, has suggested that for one hour she draw a circle without removing her pencil from the paper. This is a conceptual encore, an exorcism and a palimpsest. She ‘writes over’ the Wall, moving beyond the uniqueness of her experience: “An hour seems like eternity”. The circle is drawn in a tremulous hand, a ripple running around a border, a particle passing through an accelerator. 
The Crab Man (July 2010)