Visual images can give rise to the poetics of reality. It is arguably this poetic capacity that gives many of them their reason to exist. 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 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 poetics of walking cannot be revealed in objectified images. Images can function only as post-its of embodied experience. The initial recording is no more than an initial sensory stimulus (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory) and functions as a scrappy trace of an experience.

The artistic practice to be applied to the visual remnants of some of the walking processes of Visual March to Prespes is a return to a state of understanding. A photo is not a photo, that is, not a fixed image of a reality. It is an opening into the vagueness of memory. The walking artist is not the creator of an objectified image (such as a painting, sculpture, video, or performance) derived from an impression recorded during their walks. The walking artist 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.

______

The Oryza cylinder

In 2012 we hiked up Varnous Mountain, Oryza. Getting up to the 2,334-metre peak was an exhausting climb. The view, however, offered a broad vista of the Pelagonia plain, the surrounding mountains, and the Prespa basin.

During our descent to 2,000 metres, we encountered two highway-culvert tubes. I paid no attention to them at the time, and when I later looked through the photos from that day, I did not remember having seen them. One of our colleagues, Eleni Niska, had photographed the cylinders, one of them with graffiti on it. For her, it was an important encounter.

On the crest of Oryza peak, what can graffiti reading “Up to a little further down” mean?
To whom is “Μέχρι λίγο πιο κάτω” addressed?
And where is the “up to a little further down” from 2,000 metres? Is it at 1,900? At 1,800? At 1,700, or at 1,600?
Who is the author of that exhortation?

A few years later I went back to the same place to see the pipes for myself. There was nothing there. The landscape had absorbed the object, and my memory with it.

______

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 I took 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. But on Thursday, June 27th, 2007, I discovered the significance of recording, the importance of grasping the moment.

In one of the photos I captured two observers. On the left is Anastasia Notta, an art student from our nomadic body; on the right, a border patrol officer. We found the officer there, as if he were waiting for us. He was not part of our group. He stayed with us for a few hours and then left. Nothing connected them: their clothing, their posture, their gender, their instrument of observation (one holds a camera, the other binoculars) were all different. One carries a gun, the other 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?

______

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 marks the western border of Thessaloniki. It is not a long river, no more than 10 kilometres, but it runs through the most degraded part of the city.

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

Who is crossing? What is crossing?
Is the nomadic body a river flowing under a bridge?
Or is it the bridging of the two shores, two realities that the nomadic body is trying to escape?
And the water? Where is the water?

______

Napalm

In 1949, during the final 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 incinerated in the horrific flames of that weapon, dropped onto the slopes and peaks of Western Macedonia from Curtiss SB2C-5 Helldivers, the main type of aircraft used by the Greek Army, under the supervision of American military advisers.

Seventy-five years later, on Saturday, March 2nd, 2024, a group of graduate students from the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Western Macedonia came across the casing 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, had encountered the ultimate relic of horror.

What should we do with that relic? Leave it where it is, or take it to a “protected” space? And what if smugglers of contemporary archaeology were to remove it and sell it to a collection in Athens? We decided to remove it ourselves, and in a walking procession we carried it down to a place where we will look after it.

What are these young people carrying?
What are these scraps of metal they hold in the misty air?
What is their value?
How much are these scraps worth in the marketplace of ideas?

______

Ταμπουρατζής

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

His grave is on Lesits, a 2,124-metre peak of Mount Verno, where the last major battle of the Greek Civil War took place. Usually, those who fell on the battlefield were carried to one of the neighbouring towns and buried in the military cemeteries. As far as I know, Tabouratzis is the only one who was buried on the spot where he fell, in a grave made there. Some years later the body was exhumed, but the remnants 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?

______

Gazing

One more Friedrichean back?
Or not?

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