This Walk is a Pause 

version 1 | 2022

What: Audio Walk

When: When in need for a pause

Where: Wherever your feet take you
Duration: 50 min (or a longer while)

LISTEN HERE (click link)

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The Weather, the Forest, the Sky, the Sky, the Colors of the Day, and the Sky - 2019  © Nienke Scholts 

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I started walking in Scotland, in Japan. Or was it an island closer to home; Terschelling, my dreams? I started walking at the age of 2, in the living room, the backyard. Never liked it as a child, always wanted to be carried. Somewhere along the way I started to enjoy walking. The exact point is a forgotten moment of crucial change. I started walking as part of my artistic practice in the Finnish countryside and pine forests of mid-winter, dark at first glance, so colourful inside. I started walking when I had to stay home. Every morning and afternoon, while the world slowed down. I started walking when I got burned-out, trying to remind my body how to relax, how to be restful: how to pause.
 

This walk is a pause.

This pause is a walk.

 

This Walk is a Pause is a poetic sound piece in which the narrator invites the listener to walk along with her through both actual and mental landscapes -  Finnish pine forests, fields of exhaustion, tingling brain gums, the neighborhood, experiences of disorientation and comforting darkness - eventually arriving in a surrounding where walking offers a form of pausing.

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Exploring walking as a pausing practice, this piece asks which potential space might open if one steps aside from given pathways for a shorter or longer while: If pausing would be what you most need, what would you need it to be?

Credits

This Walk is a Pause, is a work in development, and part of an ongoing research into dramaturgies of work and practices of pausing.

 

Responses to -and experiences of -this audio walk by listeners are gratefully welcomed at: nienkescholts@gmail.com.

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Feel free to share the track with others. Instagram: @nienkescholts - please use #thiswalkisapause.

 

Text and concept of this piece:

Nienke Scholts

Sound design: Femke Dekker

 

With many thanks to Femke for her investment this first fruitful collaboration. Thanks to Marta Keil, Mark van Welzenis, Margo van de Linde, Mariana Fernandez M, Haitian Ma, and Sabine Niederer for thinking along so generously. My peers of research cohort C2 of THIRD / DAS Graduate School, thankyou for the ongoing dialogue and for always holding space. I felt much supported by ARIAS Amsterdam in making this work. Many thanks as well to Saari Residency Finland for granting me a stay in their inspiring landscape. Endlessly grateful for my family, friends, colleagues.. everyone that offered such an incredible amount of understanding for and patience with the transition process that recovery is.

 

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