Abstract/Summary

Walking Narratives and Affective Mapping is an art project which explores the city of Nicosia as a fluid space that engenders individual narrative connections. These emerge through lived experiences and are then developed into narrativised artefacts through a process of engagement, dialogue and collaboration between invited contributors and the artist. The artist creates a situation whereby to invite someone to lead him on a walk anywhere in Nicosia that holds some personal resonance for them stimulates the relational potential between the contributor and the artist. In the process of walking-in-two, retracing a particular route in somebody else’s footsteps, walking beside them and with them, talking and listening, the artist’s body is capacitated; it has been relationally attuned to its environment through someone else’s perceptual experience. Working from a perspective that attributes archival intelligence to the body and material and cognitive qualities to affect, the artist responds to each walking journey using a methodology that comprises of situatedness and embodiment, as well asrelational, dialogic and collaborative practice to explore the city as a site where new narratives are crafted that redefine the language typically used to describe Nicosia. These narrative assemblages open up novel configurations that allow us to step away from readily available ways of thinking and writing the city, and together form radical archival propositions based on living experiences that contradict the vocabulary of unitary ideologies of territory. The city is rediscovered through the logic of kinesis and kinaesthesia, where walking opens the potential to ways of perceiving the self’s presence within its own territoriality asit extends into city spaces to form a type of an affective map of Nicosia.