Workshops
Johanna Steindorf: Views from Somewhere: The Audio Walk as Artistic Practice and Method Oct. 1st, 2019 14:30-16:00
In the audio walk as artistic format, a narrative is created for a specific location within a city. These
narratives are often linked to the site, its history and/or its inhabitants. Equipped with a portable and
headphones, the individual participant can explore these site-specific stories by foot.
As an artist, I also propose using the audio walk as an artistic method, inverting its original logic by
evoking personal narratives in the participants. By combining specific audio with a location,
individuals explore their own thoughts, memories and emotions that surface while walking through
the place. I have used this method in the past to work with women who had recently migrated to
Cologne. Together with the women, I investigated how our personal experiences and memories of
other places influence the perception of a city that is new and unknown to us.
The workshop is based on my 6 years of research on audio, gender and migration within the Ph.D.
program at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. In the workshop, I will present both approaches and
propose experiments in order to investigate how our individual view on a location is always
embodied, gendered, situated and can benefit from others’ views: “(…)the joining of partial views
and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of an ongoing
finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions-of views from somewhere.”1
1 {Donna Haraway 1988 #498D: 590}