Visual images can give rise to the poetics of reality. It is arguably this poetic capacity that grants many of them their existence. Numerous approaches across the visual arts pursue exactly this. In this sense, within the realm of images, art history itself can be seen as a mega-concept, an endless succession of visual poetic texts.

Spanning a 20-year process since 2007, Visual March to Prespes too unfolds as a series of poetic images, here emerging through walking practices. Over the years, it has encountered people and entities, shaping a nomadic walking body that keeps expanding. Already in our very first marches (2007 to 2010), photographers captured the continuous transformation of terrain, uncovering the concept of shifting landscapes.

The Land Art Encounters from New Mexico, the following decade, connected us with the rough landscapes of migration along the Mexico–United States border. The Balkan artists and theoreticians who joined in 2016 then revealed the complexities of the Balkan heartland — and, in turn, so did the international community of Interartive magazine, the WAC Encounters, the WALC partners and nodes, and all the creative people and collectives we encountered along the way. They all have contributed to the way Visual March to Prespes perceives realities. We are grateful to all those walking comrades.

This text is as much a reflection on how walking and visual perception intertwine as it is a tribute to them. For years, we walked with them, whether mentally or physically, crossing landscapes in places like Grammos, Arizona, the Pyrenees, Lahore, Dendropotamos, Brooklyn, Sarajevo, Lebanon, and so many lands across the world. In all these travels, the sensorial landscape is transformed into an immersive succession of embodied experiences.

What we found is that, in walking art practices, the image is never stable, it is an expanding crack in time and place. Walking images are not objectified moments that can be exhibited in museums, gallery spaces, or movie theatres. Even the most advanced technologies cannot solidify their actualities. They are memories slipping in time, vanishing into the infinite — spaces, thoughts, ideas. The poetics of walking images are not there to be experienced directly cannot be experienced as such; they exist in the bodies of those who have momentarily grasped them, and in the minds of those who are listening to the narration of the walking experiences or the fragmented recordings, whether optical or audio.

The walking poetics cannot be revealed in objectified images. Images can function only as the post-its of the embodied experiences. The initial recording is no more than an initial sensorial stimulus (visual, audio, tactile, olfactory, gustatory) and functions as a scrappy trace of an experience.

The artistic practice that will be implemented in the visual remnants of some of the walking processes of Visual March to Prespes is that of a return to a state of understanding. A photo is not a photo, e.g. a fixed image of a reality. It is an opening in the vagueness of memory. The walking artist is not a creator of an objectified image (such as painting, sculpture, video, performance) that derived from a recorded impression during his walks. He is an interpreter of the fragmented traces of memory.

From the infinite number of pictures that have formed the Invisible Library of Experiences of Visual March to Prespes, I have selected six photographs, each paired with a reflective tale in response. Here they are: images that cannot but keep re-adjusting, glimpses of landscapes in continuous making.

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The Oryza cylinder

We walked in 2012 toward the peak of Varnous Mountain, Oryza. It was an exhausting process, up to the peak’s 2334 metres. The view offered a broad vista of the plain of Pelagonia, the surrounding mountains, and the Prespes mountain basin.

During our descent to 2000 metres, we encountered two highway-culvert tubes. I did not pay any attention to them; I didn’t remember having seen them. Years later, going through the photos taken that day, I saw that one of our colleagues, Eleni Niska, had taken a photo of the cylinders, one of them with graffiti on it. For her it was an important encounter.

In the crest of the mountain Oryza, what can graffiti reading “Until a little further down” mean?

To whom is “Μέχρι λίγο πιο κάτω” addressed? And what is the “little further down” of the 2000 meters? The 1900 meters? The 1800 meters? The 1700 meters? The 1600 meters?

Who is the author of that urge?

A few years later I returned to see the cylinders again. Nothing was there; the landscape had absorbed the object and my memory.

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Observatory

I took the photo on the afternoon of Thursday, June 27th, 2007. It was my first ascent in the mountains of Florina, and I still recall the excitement of that day. It was not just any day: it was the First Day of my new life. The First Day of Visual March to Prespa.

The photos that were taken then were the outcome of that euphoria: everything around me was new. The mountains, the senses, the people, the animals, the discussions. I am not a photographer, not even an amateur one. Thursday, June 27th, 2007, was when I discovered the significance of recording, the importance of understanding the moment.

In one of the photos, I depicted two observers. On the left, there is Anastasia Notta, an art student from our nomadic body; on the right, a border patrol officer. We found the patrol officer there, as if he was waiting for us; he was not part of our nomadic body. He stayed with us for some hours and then he left. Nothing was connecting them: the clothing, the posture, the sex, the tool of observation (one is holding a camera, the other binoculars) — they are all different. The one is carrying a gun, the second nothing but herself.

Years later, the persistence of their observation became the focus of my reflection.

Watching whom? Watching what? What is this unexpected pair trying to find, or uncover?

From what enemy are this woman and the police officer trying to protect themselves? What are they trying to prevent?

Or is it not that?

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Impossible Bridges

After years of walking in the mountains, 2014 was the first of my walkshops to take place in a city. We walked along and inside Dendropotamos, a river that defines the western border of Thessaloniki. It is not a long river, no more than 10 kilometers. It crosses the most degraded part of the city.

People had to improvise, building bridges to connect the two shores. The area, forgotten for years by any central authority, was thus shaped by the need of the people to survive. These passages (more than ten) are not the product of central planning or the knowledge of an engineer; the bridges are made from whatever was available, out of the sheer need to cross.

Who is crossing? What? Is the nomadic body a river flowing under a bridge?

Or is the bridging of two shores of the realities that the nomadic body tries to escape from?

And the water? Where is the water?

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Napalm

In 1949, during the last year of the Greek Civil War, a new weapon was tested for the first time: napalm bombs. Hundreds of soldiers of the Democratic Army were evaporated in the horrible flames of that weapon, thrown onto the slopes and peaks of Western Macedonia from the Curtiss SB2C-5 Helldiver, the main type of aircraft used by the Greek Army, under the guidance of American military counselors.

On Saturday, March 2nd, 2024, seventy-five years later, a group of graduate students from the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Western Macedonia encountered the shell of a civil war napalm bomb in the abandoned camp of Hagia Varvara. A nomadic body of young artists, most of them born half a century after the end of the Civil War, encounter the ultimate relic of horror.

What shall we do with that relic? Shall we leave it there in its place, or shall we take it to a “protected” space? And what if smugglers of contemporary archaeology were to remove it, to sell it into some collection in Athens? We decided to remove it, and with a walking procession we took it down to a place where we will take care of it.

What are these young people carrying?

What are the scraps of metal that they hold in this misty atmosphere?

What is their value?

How expensive are these scraps in the markets of ideas?

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Ταμπουρατζής

The name of the soldier is Χρήστος Ταμπουρατζής (Christos Tabouratzis). Χρήστος was killed on August 12th, 1949, the last day of the war. He was 22 years old. Nothing is known about him. Basically, he is an anonymous person with a name.

The grave is in Lesits, a 2,124-metre peak of Mount Verno, where the last major battle of the Greek Civil War took place. Usually, the bodies of those who fell on the battlefield were carried to one of the neighboring cities and buried in the military cemeteries. Tabouratzis is the only one, from what I know, who was buried on the spot where he fell, and a grave was made. Some years later, the body was exhumed, but the fragments of the grave are still there.

The people who are passing by are leaving coins in the censer of his grave, along with their cigarette butts. Euros, Greek drachmas, Albanian leks, and even some coins from an Arab country can be seen there.

Why was he buried in Lesits? Why is the grave empty now?

And the body? Where is the body?

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Gazing

One more Friedrichean back?
Or not?

Vrisi Nitsa: the wheat field and the withered tree.
Or not?