Walk and Talk (Bucharest Biennal 4)

WALK TALK feat Florent Meng
Bucharest Biennale, invted by Felix Vogel and Katharina Hohmann.
24-29 may 2010_Bucharest

Walk/Talk Projet“A comparison with the speech act will allow us to go further" and not limit ourselves to the critique of graphic representations alone, looking from the shores of legibility toward an inaccessible beyond. The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple "enunciative" function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts con-tracts between interlocutors into action).14 It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.”
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

Walk/Talk (2010). According to Michel de Certeau the act of walking is connected to the urban system in terms of enunciation: „The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.“Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng decide to stride along the city of Bucharest during 5 days inviting every day a new person to join them in a walk/talk. This walks, that all last for 6 hours and cover about 20 kilometers, are documented in various ways. The walk/talk project aims at producing new forms when the conventional tools turn out to be inadequate to capture everydayness.
After our last walk, a scripted performance/lecture took place at the Biennial’s Pavilion. A fragmented text was read while 60 photographs pinned on the wall behind us were slowly taken down.The nature of these pictures is very diverse: a mix of photographs taken during our walks and of diverse documents referring to elementsin our lecture.
The images taken down while the lecture was hold were then dropped on the ground and left there at the end of the performance for the visitors of the biennial, thus creating a subjective and labyrinthic documentation.
Introduction at the lecture-performance May, 29th, 2010 :
«The talk/performance that will follow is in no way a work of art. The actual work has been of course the walks and talks themselves, a form we thought to be the most relevant concerning our situation: how to make an art work within seven days, respecting the framework of the Biennale, the city and the people who leave within? This lecture is in no way a conclusion. Flaubert said that stupidity consists in the will of wanting to conclude. We believe that it’d be stupid to conclude. These walks and talks continue outside, steady, and probably unconcerned with this lecture... and that’s our best reward.»