Elly Yazdanpanah
Walking A/r/tography
In this visual journal, I decided to be involved in the process of walking without any preconceived notion to analyze the potential of this experience to create the new possibilities of understanding. In this process, I attempted to recognize the importance of bodily experience not only as an abstract empirical representation but also grounded in nature of experimentation itself (Irwin, 2013). Regarding the importance of the experiment, I intended to relate my personal experience of being in Montreal as an international student into my walking project and visual journal. I was also interested to recognize how different factors such as orientations, culture, context, being and not being in a place might affected on my perception of walking (Ahmed, 2010, Cannatella, 2007), For this reason, I chose to do this project collaboratively with another author in Tehran, Iran to examine the differences and similarities in the process of my walking in both embodied and disembodied existence, inside and outside Iran, individually and collaboratively.
I intended to explore some questions concerning how I would react to the action of walking and what are the differences between walking in Iran and Montreal? What are the similarities? As a female how is the quality of my walking different? What is my virtual experience of walking outside Iran? How does the co-author inside Iran perceive this experience as an outsider? And what is his experience of walking in Tehran?
We recorded all phases of our practice with its challenges, concerns, efficacies, and affects from the beginning. In this process we attempt to be faithful and obedient to the multiplicities of directions and let ourselves be led by the process of learning rather than having an exact map from the earliest stage until the latest. However, this does not mean we did not design our steps. Each step is designed according to what happened in the previous step, very similar to what we read in Irwin article and the rhizome theory of Deleuze and Guattari: “an assemblage of objects, ideas, and structures that move in dynamic motion performing waves of intensities that create new understandings (2013, p. 199).”
Digital self-representation is a very common method in the digital culture in contemporary life, and as Harris mentioned “Video method help artists and researcher to make sense of their lives by making a record of our ordinary attention to things.” (2015, p. 155) As virtual experience was a predominant component of our project, all data is documented in digital formats (video and pictures) and presented in an online format (online exhibition). In all phases we went back and forth between different stages and linked some of our previous personal experiences and readings to the concept of this project. The author and co-author shift between being an outsider and insider in different situations such as location, place, culture, and A/r/tography itself.
to know more about this visual journal: https://walkingsproject.wixsite.com/onlinexhibition
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). Orientation matters. In Coole, D. H., & Frost, S. (Eds.), New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics, (pp. 234-257). Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Cannatella, H. (2007). Place and Being. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(6), 622-632. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007. 00319.x
Harris, A. (2015). Ethnocinema and Video-as-Resistance. In Hickey-Moody, A. & Page, T. (Eds.), Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance, (pp. 55-168). London: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd
Irwin, R. (2013). Becoming A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 54(3), 198-215. doi: 10.1080/00393541.2013.11518894
