Home Walk

Home walk – As even Gretel told Hansel: ‘We will find the way…’ an audio recording of a walk on paper as a performative experiment performed by Mariken Overdijk with some passers-by in the Amstelpark on 29 November 2020.

To the left of the Glazen Huis, you can hear a sound fragment that took place at the exact same location. It is the snippet of an unnoticed mimography, elicited from some passers-by in the park, whom Overdijk invited to take a walk on paper outside at a table with two chairs. During this encounter, she shared a personal fragment about the route of her feet in her own house here in the city. She also read a letter inviting the passer-by to take her back to that same morning in their house, the moment when their feet leave the bed and start their daily walk. Up to the front door.

Overdijk seduces these guests into giving her a glimpse of a seemingly unspectacular ritual of the human body that gets up every day, time after time, to participate in the daily routine. In the sound fragment, fragments of this daily ritual shared by the passer-by are made audible. Like an invisible mimography of what goes on behind the facades of the city. During the conversation, the descriptions of this route are followed as closely as possible with a pencil on paper and made visible by walking along in this way. Here you can also see one of the letters that Overdijk subsequently wrote to this co-occupant, with the blueprint of the house walk she drew, transformed into a score on paper.

The separate sound fragments can be heard at the place where they were drawn as a testimony.

This event took place as part of the exhibition Mind Your Step (2020) on walking as environmental research, organized by Zone2Source.