The KABK Design Lectorate has considered some of the many facets of walking as a research method in art and design. Through interviews, education, publishing, exhibitions and events, we have addressed the relationship amongst walking and other tools and tactics such as writing, mapping, image-making, archiving, sensing, speculating, listening and place-making, and amongst walking and themes such as rhythm, public space, climate crisis, the Anthropocene and slowness.

In June 2021, we explored walking as a research method and darkness, as an (im)material condition and symbolic space of unknowability and enchantment, as well as insecurity and exclusion. To help us, we invited artist and researcher Nikos Doulos to co-curate and moderate this online event. Using his own practice of night walking as a point of departure, Doulos introduced a panel of speakers who shared their perspectives on the relational and multisensory capacities of walking with, and in, darkness, and how wandering (nocturnal and otherwise) might help us connect to other bodies and non-human entities. The panel included author Nick Dunn, performance artist Susanna Hast and artist, diarist and researcher Benny Nemer.

Among other topics, speakers discussed walking as a method and an artistic practice interlaced with modes of autoethnographic research and storytelling, as well as how new combinations of walking and darkness might prompt other possibilities of socialisation and other processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Edited transcript

Alice Twemlow: Welcome, everybody. Lovely to see you all. This event is part of a larger project at the KABK Design Lectorate that explores the capacities of walking as a research method in art and design practices. The more we learn about walking, the more fascinating it is. I'm going to pass things over to a colleague to introduce tonight's speaker.

Martha Jager: Thank you, Alice. Tonight we have Nikos Doulos, a visual artist, curator and educator. His interest lies in ambulatory practices framed around notions of embodiment, memory and storytelling. In his work, he creates temporal malleable interventions/situations as participatory infrastructures for shared knowledge. He is a co-director at Expodiumin Utrecht (NL) and the initiator of NIGHTWALKERS—a participatory nocturnal walking project investigating the contemporary identity of the urban walker. He received an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute A.K.A DAI and currently tutors along with the rest of the Expodium members at the Spatial Practice objective of the HKU MA programme Fine Art (HKU Mafa) in Utrecht.

Nikos Doulos: Thank you so much. I'm happy to see so many people joining. I really want to express my immense gratitude to Alice and Martha for the invitation to co-author this evening.

We're bringing in three additional voices this evening. Here with me is Nick Dunn, executive director of Imagination, the design and architecture research lab at Lancaster University where is also a professor of urban design. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Social Futures, examining the insights that the arts, humanities and social sciences can bring to the ways we think, envision and analyse the futures of people, places and planet. Nick is also the founding director of the Dark Design Lab that explores the impacts of nocturnal activities on humans and non-humans. He is an official advocate of the International Dark-Sky Association, working across academia and multiple design professions to promote positive engagements with darkness and increase public understanding of key issues. He is a keen nightwalker, author of Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City (Zero, 2016) and co-editor of Rethinking Darkness: Cultures, Histories, Practices (Routledge, 2020).

Susanna Hast comes to us from Helsinki. She is a songwriter, performance artist, writer and researcher into a pedagogy of movement. She has a doctoral degree in social sciences and works in the multidisciplinary field of artistic research, where she is invested in topics such as social emotions, militaries and militarism, sound, trauma, voice, war experience and vulnerability. She is a visiting fellow at The Center for Educational Research and Academic Development in the Arts (CERADA), Uniarts Helsinki, in a project called ‘Subtle Corporealities: Propositions of Resistance for Creative Practitioners’.

Finally, Ben Number is a member of the KABK family. He’s a Montreal-born artist, diarist and researcher. His practice mediates emotional encounters with musical, botanical, art historical, and queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Tiroler Kunstpavillon (Innsbruck), Dazibao Centre de Photographies Actuelles (Montreal), and the Staatsbibliothek (Stuttgart). His sound and video work is part of the permanent collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), The Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw), Thielska Galleriet (Stockholm), and The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). Nemer completed a practice-led PhD at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, where he was part of Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, a three-year research project led by art historians, cultural anthropologists, and artists in Germany, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. His doctoral research critically examined the museum audio guide as a media form, turning to queer theory and contemporary museum mediation practice to expand and critically reimagine its potential. Nemer is an Associate Researcher at a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels and a researcher in residence at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. He is a core tutor for the Master of Artistic Research programme at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague, Netherlands.

As I said, the invitation to co-curate this event came from Alice and Martha's understanding of a project called NIGHTWALKERS. NIGHTWALKERS is an ongoing trajectory, beginning in 2011, constituted of evening strolls and examining all prospects of nocturnal perambulations. It looks at societal perspectives, ecological perspectives and pedagogical perspectives in terms of how we learn while we encounter the city. It also includes all means of embedding ourselves within the landscape and allowing the landscape to also enter ourselves.

NIGHTWALKERS exists predominantly as an extension of Expodium. We want to look at the city in broad terms, through the lens of hands-on practice, and to address what we think are significant. I have compiled a small slide with photographs of places that night walks have taken place.

We have been taking night walks and leading workshops in a range of urban areas, including South Korea, Belgrade, Italy and Finland. We have been thinking of multiple ways to understand night walking as a very serious playground.

We have been experimenting with ways of engaging with other entities in walking, whether scripting walks or making them completely impromptu. This is one of the walks that we did, where we invited people to listen to a soundscape and walk with the map that was provided for them. In this case, someone climbed up a bridge. This was illegal but rather metaphorical when the picture came out.

This is a night-walking session that I led in Athens in 2017. It was a way for me to reconnect with the city; I am from Athens and lived there during my most formative years. I used the night to walk to reconnect with several people that were important to me in my upbringing.

We perceive walking as a tool for research and aesthetic practice. That might deviate a bit from the Lectorate's project of walking as a method, but it allows for the opportunity to negotiate how we interact with each other, who leads the walk, how the walks get interrupted and so forth. We're keen to sustaining that openness.

Every distinct body carries a certain narrative. I truly believe that there's a way for everyone to be able to narrate their life through a succession of walks.

While walking on this presentation, I came across Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo (Vintage, 2017) by Lauren Elkin. This book addresses the idea of the flâeur through a feminist perspective based on literature. It also depicts wanderings in Paris. She described a moment in which she's been walking on the cobblestones of Paris and thinking of who has walked the path before and what's hidden underneath those cobblestones.

There is something in Elkins narration that speaks to those modes of attending to the streets that encompass a relationship to thought evoked by simply recognising that we literally and metaphorically walk in the footsteps of others. It also reinforces my belief that we never walk alone, in the sense that we are carriers of gifts and burdens, privileges and restrictions, enticements and misfortunes passed on by others who have saved the world before us and continue to do so for us. Much like Elkin's encounter, I wish to acknowledge open walking and night walking as a vocation and an evocative act of rendering oneself and of things lost and found in a world described through an infinite reconciliation with what is registered, seen and unseen, familiar and unfamiliar—a dual act of haunting and being haunted.

I'm interested in this idea of walking with ghosts and understanding ourselves. In the recent book of Matthew Beaumont, The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (Verso Books, 2020), there is a specific mention that I find quite interesting when it comes to modes of haunting. He writes, ‘In a double sense, we need to haunt the streets of the city in order to preserve and protect and reinvent them. In order to make them accountable to those who inhabit them rather than those who seek to monetize them, we need both to frequent them as familiar places and, like spectres, to disturb them and make them seem unfamiliar.’ For me, night has been profoundly accommodating to this mode of haunting the streets and being haunted.

I want to answer the most common questions we get when we invite people to walk with us. They ask, why at night? I have been fortunate to meet Nick Dunn and read his book Dark Matters. There's a quote on page one of his book, which gives an intriguing answer to this question.

However, the atmosphere of cities can change distinctly at night. For in the nocturnal hours, identities become slippery, motives less easily defined, and architecture itself may appear far less assured of its role. Structures, rules and regulations that engender ‘tactile sterility’ (Sennett, 1994) in the urban realm quickly break down at night. The processes of change that occur when walking in the city and urban hinterlands at night may be understood as ‘inscriptive practice’ enriched with the potentialities that Bergson (1913) describes. Freed from the spaces of everyday life, the vectors of night-time walking enable us to reconnect with the city and give things our undivided attention, which affords the ‘divining’ (De Boeck, 2015) of a different experience of place, providing a welcome respite from the ongoing erosion and subdivision of our time and sense of belonging in the world. I will therefore attempt to elucidate on the on-going entanglement that occurs at the boundaries of body and urban landscape; day and night; space and materiality.

It is possible to understand an encounter as relational rather than absolute. It is through that kind of thinking that we defend the understanding of being in the night as a relational encounter. It's in darkness as a relational condition—as a relation to our bodies, to other bodies, to human and non-human entities and, of course, the architecture that surrounds us. It's been through that introduction that influenced me in thinking about darkness in general, darkness as a space for performance and darkness space also of meaningful encounters.

In Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 (Verso, 2014), he writes that we live in fraud and brightness; we live in a false perception of light, which serves capital. Somehow 24/7 illumination functions as a disadvantage. He was speaking about this idea of the dark promise.

How can we think of darkness as a space that enables other forms of socialisation? How do we deal with a moment in time in which darkness is a promise of freedom? And, if it is a promise of freedom, what kind of philosophy can erupt?

This reference helped me to understand darkness as a different social space, which Andre Lepecki also speaks about. Darkness is a condition that holds you in and swallow you. I have been interested in walking as a way to descend into night. In Greek mythology, there is this world called Kathavalsis, which means descending to the underworld. It is a world linked to the myth of Audicious going to the underworld to get his loved one back.

I'm going to close a bit with a scene from a movie from Jean Coquteau in 1950 and a specific part that depicts the decent into the underworld. He’s getting the help of a person from the other world called Herkubees and descends into the zone, where people are not really aware that they are dead. They are going just roaming around. It’s a place made of memories. I wrote a small text in relation to that, which I’ll read as a way to close.

This place, made of man's memories and habits, stands as a metaphorical Topos. The nocturnal wanderer see illumination through the gestures of departing and arriving. The zone is not a mere trope for the underworld. It is an elusive analogy to the world we currently occupy.

Recently I have been thinking about the notion of cruising, the notion of gay cruising and spaces within the urban realm that constitute the zones for cruising to take place. We have been talking with Alice and Martha about a possible first approach to this could take place in our sessions today. Benny Nemer continues this idea. He’s gifting us with a sonic work that he has devised. It's a sound work that invites people to walk in cruising places and understand their relationship with parks and trees.

Benny will give a short introduction before starting the sonic work. I encourage you to stay with us for about twenty minutes while the sonic piece takes place. We’ll return afterwards and hearing from Nick.

Benny Nemer: Last night, I went for a walk to Montmartre just before midnight. I've recently moved into the adjacent quarter, and I am still trying to trace the boundary between my new neighbourhood and the historical charm and tourist charmlessness of Montmartre. The curfew has just been lifted in Paris, so evening walks no longer feel elicit, which I suppose is a good thing. I shift between a desire for freedom of movement and a desire for opportunities for subversion. The evening air was mild. It had rained earlier, so everything felt fresh and sensual.

I didn't bring my phone, so I had to find my way by instinct, by remembering and by surrendering to the possibility of getting lost, to not knowing where I was going. I am often lost.

In the morning I saw Nikos' Instagram post about the dark wandering event. The post said, “Benny Namer invites us to embark on a remote sonic walk by situating our relation to non-human entities and by querying our wanderings on foot through the history of cruising.” Except that you didn't write querying, you wrote 'querring'.

I immediately understood that this was not a misspelling. There is no such thing as a misspelling of the word queer, as Annamarie Jagose asserts. Queer's power is its definitional indeterminacy. I suppose queer resists a conclusive rendering into orthography. Your querying seems to be a proposal of the use of a word that I have not yet encountered. It uses the word queer with the verb query to make a mistake, a verb form of the word error. It is also used to describe certain practices of walking away from the path.

Seeing this word for the first time, it occurs to me that bodies that enter the effective and gestural modes of cruising are bodies that queer, bodies that are and, therefore, bodies that were. I hear an echo of the word Q-U-A-R-E, which I have encountered in Afro-Futurist contexts. Thinking back to last night's walk, trying to trace the boundary, getting lost, I realised my evening stroll was acquiring. In fact, as I think of the ways my body has moved through the world throughout my life, it seems to me that cruising is my primary movement style, a navigational mode that defines the contours of my life, full of mistakes, wrong turns of queering, querying my way through life, through joys and my sorrows, through my love stories and sex, dates and heartbreaks.

Thank you for illuminating this new word for me. Thank you for tracing it for me in the shadows. I welcome queering into my vocabulary. Yours, Benny.

This is a guided encounter with a tree, so it is best you listen in the company of trees, ideally surrounded by trees, a wood, an orchard, a forest glade, a thicket, a copse, a grove, a jungle. If you're lucky, if you are not among trees and you cannot wait, if you need it now, then you will have to enter the garden of your memories and conjure trees in your mind. Birch and Elm, Willow and Cassia, you know. Still, you are encouraged to make your way to a wooded area, a botanical garden, or even a tree-lined avenue. Better yet, a city park for the trees whose praises we wish to sing grow in the parks of this city and the cities of the world: the trees of Hamstead Heath, the trees of Calton, Hill of the Mag and born of Wayne Cole, North Carpark and the Board Evanson. The trees that populate these places where men congregate to have sex.

You are going to be led through the trees to find your lover. If you are going to find what you are looking for, you are going to have to be patient. You are going to have to wait. Find a spot among the trees, a spot with trees in view. Find a position and wait. Wait for the next cue.

Gay men, homosexual men, trans fags—call us what you want. Our desires, our need for contact have brought us to these places, regardless of what terms the era dictates word English words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations, and you can be sure that the trees don't care about these impermanent words and names. They have been out and about on people's lips, in the houses, in the streets, in the fields for so many centuries. There is talk, however, among Botanic, linguists, and arboreal ethnomusicologists, that the trees have always been partial to the term faggot.

There are many theories, but no definitive conclusions as to why this word has come to refer to a feminine or gay man. Faggot from the ancient Greek Palicos for bundle, which, by the time it arrived in Latin as Fagus, meant kindling, then morphed into the Italian faggot to the old French ago, and into Middle English as faggot, where its meaning as kindling remained unchanged. A bundle of sticks and few. Meanwhile, it made its way into German, Slavic and Scandinavian languages as fake, meaning torch.

Behold the trees from all directions of your body without moving your eyes or head. Behold the trees above. Behold those around there is behind.

It is at this mediaeval moment when the word faggot was coalescing into its Middle English form. The burning of witches and heretics was widespread healers, midwives widows who owned desirable property. Our ancestors, our spiritual sisters, were burned at the stake in some tellings of this history. The sodomites of the mediaeval age, our ancestors, our spiritual brothers, were oiled and set alight as kindling for the fires that consumed the condemned women. Bundles of faggots flaming, bundles of tree branches. You see, we faggots or trees.

You come around to the trees, never to, without touching them. Imagine the texture of their bark, based on past encounters with trees. Circle the trees whose bark elicits the most exciting memory of touch.

We might look to trees as ancestors as faculty relations to see the relationship between our bodies and the bodies of trees, our limbs and their branches, our skin and their bars are upright postures or groupings and individualities. It is here in verdant cruising parks, marginal zones sheltered from the public's gaze. In a poetry of privacy, the boundary between our bodies and the bodies of trees is so favourably blurred.

Change the direction of the path of your movement in a way that makes no sense to anyone, not even you.

Follow our directions, but do not follow them with precision. When cruising, precision is only achieved by following desire and the cues your body and sexual appetite give you certainly not by obeying rules or instructions. Cruising is, by its very definition, a collection of transgressions and broken social and spatial rules. disobey subvert pervert what we tell you to do. If you choose to stray from this guide, try to feel the sensation these deviations elicit these oblique moves may produce queer effects. This, too, is a way to cruise.

Keep track of a tree that appeals to you. Lose track of it. Do you remember when trees were the only refuge for our desires? Trees have provided an architecture for gay sex since time immemorial beyond the reach of memory or a record. They have cast shadows, created walls and shelters, formed chambers among their labyrinth-theme branches for lovers to climb, to conceal, to reveal long before geo positioning software, before dating sites and personal ads, before gay bars and saunas and dark rooms, before truck stops, basement parties, and public toilets, before penal colonies and prisons, before bedrooms, before beds.

Before all of that, there were trees we may not remember, but the trees do. And they tell each other about the vast scope of erotic activity they have witnessed and sheltered and participated in over the years. They have seen it all. And so the lover you are in search of today is not another human but a tree. A tree far more sexually experienced than you could ever be.

Without changing your position, take a moment to look around at everything that is in view. Consider what is not in the video, what is beyond the boundaries, the vision.

Something is wrong with the way humans have rewritten the growth patterns of trees to depict heterosexual reproductive pathways, which has nothing to do with the true lines trees follow. Anyone who has really looked at a tree knows that they do not clear their branches into the infinitely repeating couples of so-called family trees. Two is not part of the trees numerological essence. Trees split and trifurcate their branches, wonder, deviate and fan out. They track up and down, backwards and sideways, spiralling, splintering, inging and zigzagging in polymorphously perverse weaves the fractal pattern of true human relationships. Queer families of sevens and fives of eights and elevens. Trees are facts.

Is the tree ash or fur, top or bottom? It's hard to read their signs. We've lost our skills at interpreting their languages.

Not all of us. Indeed, there are surely those who still speak with trees. Perhaps you are one of these people.

What is the form of desire? Can the immaterial speak? How might one trace the tens of hundreds of thousands of sexual relations one has in a lifetime? What patterns are woven from all the sexual energy that passes from the bodies of our ancestors into our present-day sexualities? If the history of cruising sex had a voice if our arboreal love could sing, how would it sound?

The bassoon is a fag, too. Its body is made up of hollow, interconnected wooden tubes, a bundle of sticks which gives it its name. Fagotto in Italian, faggot in German and the larger, deeper voiced double bassoon, the irresistibly named Contra Fagotto, the counter faggot, whose branching body curves and coils like a sailor in a Jean Cocteau drawing, showing off his biceps. The bassoon is one of us, an evolutionary link between human fags and arboreal fags. , yes, the bassoon will accompany your movements. It will encourage you as you cruise among the trees and soften the pressure of the open sky above to awaken the memory of other cruisings, yours and the cruising of your ancestors, as human breath blows through hollow wooden branches.

Slow down each time you pass a tree to check it out, make contact, but keep moving.

Hey, lover. Somewhere in this park, a tree is waiting for you. Approach the tree, but not along a straight line. Take an oblique path. You must find a queer way. Your arboreal lover might not be facing you. The tree might be behind you. You might find the trees sideways. Get up close or as far from the tree as feels right. But don't be fooled. Trees are not immobile. They moved with the breeze growing at their own speed, unperceived by us, but moving nonetheless. The tree is adjusting its own position in relation to yours and to its other lovers and companions. as you cruise, you enter a duet with the tree, a trio, and also a vastly different temporal mode. Look past the tree that appeals to you. Pass it, but turn back to glance at it, to show the tree you’re curious.

Now that you have found your arboreal lover, how do you approach it? How do you establish consent for the sexual contact you seek? It might seem absurd to ask a tree for permission to touch it. We were made to touch trees, to live among them in profound connected relationship. But given how deeply an unnatural separation between us and trees has been cleaved in this chapter of The Anthropocene, given the entitlement with which humans touch, grasp, claim, and use whatever we want. Given how the language between us is broken, perhaps a gesture of respect, a gesture of repair.

A request for consent might be in order. Perhaps there is something we might learn from asking for it. A tree’s consent does not assume our touch is welcome. We could try it and see what happens when we asked the tree. May I? How might we do this? In what language? One thing is certain: it begins by slowing down. It is inconceivable to synchronise our human tempo to the tempo of trees. But surely the slower you move, the closer you will get to equal exchange, you do it will, however, always be contrapuntal.

You will always be moving at different speeds on different timelines. Slow down. Now, find a way with words and with breath, a gesture with carefully directed energy with the transmission of a thought. Find a way to ask. Then wait. Wait for as long as it takes.

End of sonic work

Nikos Doulos: Nick will introduce someone who'll bring in his thoughts on urban spaces and encountering multiple species.

Nick Dunn: Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you this evening. Thank you to Alice, Martha and Nikos for the invitation to contribute to this event.

We dream in darkness. What of the nocturnal city and its capacity for the imagination? How can dark help us rethink the future city? Light has become synonymous with progress. It is philosophically bound to ideas of wisdom, goodness and coherence. Yet, light and dark had deployed across urban landscapes in different ways, including the social control and, of course, symbolic of power.

Many of us return home in the evenings, start preparing meals and engaging with other forms of labour and care. We often draw away from the daytime, its routines and its rhythms. We are less attuned to the environment outside, its flora and fauna, now limited simply to what we can see through the portals of our homes. But, outside, the natural world does not stop. We may close ourselves off from the environment beyond, but it remains around, underneath and away from our homes. Of course, nature also lives on its surfaces, in the cracks, out of view, or only indetectable by human eyes—a multi scalar phenomena from the microscopic to global networks of migration.

In this talk, I'm going to share an account of my recent work focused on seeking a better understanding of landscapes. In doing so, I aim to present a preview of the city at night as a future landscape that is in the process of becoming cities themselves to dynamic entities of material and immaterial flows, processes and systems.

Manchester, where I live, is a city of disappearances in terms of its nightscapes and nocturnal ambiences. The view shown here no longer exists. This is because since early 2014, Manchester announced its intention to replace 56,000 gas lamps with LEDs. It’s important to understand that this loss of accessing darkness is an absolute. It's not gone forever. It's temporary. But this plan for complete illumination is itself an illusion, since lighting technology is built over and responds to a longer history of partial infrastructure and contextual characteristics.

I've been doing three things with walking as a method for seven years. I've been documenting how these places have been changing across the city and the wider borough. I've been doing that to capture some of the different ambiences of darknesses, because darkness is situated, it's plural and its diverse. This has led to hundreds of hours of night walking through these places and the production of an archive of photographs, maps, auto-ethnographic notes. It’s also hard to know what's lost if you've never experienced it.

Since 2016, I’ve also used walking as a method to lead groups on night walks around the Greater Manchester City region to share with them the different nocturnal ambiences. As groups, we've done drawings, written short text, moved our bodies and collected arrangements to explore our entanglements with darkness.

Thirdly, I've been learning how other people make sense and use the nocturnal city during the pandemic, whether that's through labour respite or other activities.

I took this image during the second national lockdown in the UK. It shows a security guard that was one of only five people I encountered during six hours in the city centre that night. The others were a street cleaner and three young women returning home from doing health work. But all this work so far has been anthropocentric, and it's not engaged with the non-humans who might contribute to the composition of the identity of urban places after dark. I felt I needed to address that.

I've been trying to think about design as a less human-centred thing and, something, a more-than-human thing. New agendas that promote health and wellbeing in cities, especially during the pandemic, always come with visions of clean, green urban environments. I'm interested in the invisibility of urban nature at night. In this new work, I'm exploring the entanglements between humans and non-humans, bodies, landscape, place and time to consider how we might evolve approaches for the design of the future city.

With this in mind, I shall now introduce a major site for my multispecies encounters, which is close to the city centre of Manchester. It's the Irk Valley, which is a large green corridor comprising of 600 hectares. During the last two centuries, the Irk Valley has witnessed huge transformations, many due to the rapid industrialisation of Manchester. It’s one of those sites that’s about to be subject to a major regeneration project.

In the 1700s, this area was wild and neglected until a local man named Robert Tinker decided to clear and convert the landscape into a type of pleasure gardens. The pleasure gardens were originally named Elysian Gardens, then Vox All Gardens, and it was renowned as a place for people to enjoy during day and night. 3000 coloured lights adorned the gardens so that people were able to experience an intelligent, rural and delightful night, according to the advertsements.

Eventually, the site became surrounded and then engulfed by industrialisation. Engles wrote about the base of this site, and he described it Hell on Earth. The valley quickly changed in character from a place welcoming people to one that was highly polluted and inhospitable, and it keeps some of those features. Now the ground still contains chemicals and heavy metals, and the landscape presents a series of green spaces full of hazards, twists and turns that can make it feel isolated despite sitting one quarter of a kilometre away from the city centre.

It's here that I conducted a series of eight night walks between the 3 February and 31 March 2021. This cumulative experience has helped me comprehend some of the nuances of this section of the Irk Valley. The following description provides a shortened account of my night walk taken on 25 March. I started at 07:30 p.m., which is about an hour after sunset, and it lasted about three hours.

The isolation one feels in these places, especially during lockdown, is particularly pronounced, even though there is not a curfew under way. Activity after dark is evident near to homes and streets rather than large sites of urban nature. The collective amnesia that has largely rendered parts of the Irk Valley to become almost invisible is palpable, unloved and unremarkable. To the casual eye, it is the preserve of occasional joggers. Workers in industrial units struggle on their way home, and bored children and teenagers play out of the parental gaze.

Their mix of urban and otherworldliness make them the perfect places for night walking. For creativity and imagination appear to be in a state of becoming rather than finished sights of manicured nature. They are foreign, and it is this quality that also makes them ideal for spaces in which we can think about the future. Of course, such a perspective is human orientated, but there are already various species crawling, scurrying, swimming and flying within and through the Irk Valley for them having already found an ecological niche in which they can survive, if not thrive. The notion of change is potentially perilous and may not be advantageous to their ability to survive.

The significant amount of detritus has a twofold impact. Firstly, it discourages human activity by limiting access to sites or making them hazardous. Secondly, it provides additional places of refuge for other species. In this way, these artificial buffer zones, these eco tones offer a useful, if rather unaesthetic feature of these places. Heading along Anzac Street,silhouetted against the brick wall which suddenly ends at a bridge over the River Irk towards the unknown lands of Saint Catherine's. Here above the river, there are common Pipistrel bats swooping in their flourishes against the navy sky. Down by the water side, a rat makes its unhurried way along a series of displaced bricks.

It dissolves into the shadowy fingers of overhanging flora. As the river bends out of view, a small flutter of moths busy themselves, rendered by a street lamp, slowly flowing the long Collyhurst Road. The land rises quickly on either side. The city beyond disappears at Foxall Street. Back down near the river, a new perimeter fence attempts to block access to the other end of St caprins.

My feet are drawn down by the slope of Smedley Road household and trade. Rod and feet scratch their way amongst cardboard before a passing car throws the whole scene ablaze in its headlights and leaves silence in its wake. The splash and gurgle of water echoes from underneath the nearby bridge. Trees, bushes and grasses conspire together, ensuring that progress through and around them is slow and careful. A slight buzz briefly orbits around me, followed by the sensation of tiny insects about my face. But my action is off kilter in this place. All focus is put into staying still, the better to detect the more than human utterances of the night.

When we think about the future of cities, it is hard to ignore the visions produced for urban places that communicate clean, green, daily environments. However, I contend that night walking is where we can find fertile opportunity for imagining how places might change and for whom. If days are the rehearsal, night is the performance. The nocturnal city awaits our wonder and our wonder. It is the temporary city where identity can be reinvented, and this includes the identity of places. For at night, amidst the urban shadow lands, the ghosts of the past leek out of the city's cracks and pause while the future appears in fleeting glimpses.

To experience the city at night is to be immersed in a landscape of greater. As light pollution now presents a global challenge, recognising the diversity of interplay between light and dark is critical in moving towards a goal where its impacts on human and non-human bodies can be tackled in a local and situated way through creativity, commitment and action. Now, more than ever, we all need to engage with the dark city dreaming and the multi-species future city.

Thank you.

Nikos: Thank you, Nick, for this spirited presentation. Susanna, I'm going to give the floor to you.

Susanna Hast: Thank you, and thank you to the organisers. I'm so excited to be here.

On September 8, 2018, the weather is warm, but the sky is cloudy. I watch intently how students of the 105th Cadet Course of the Finnish Defense University march as one body, 163 pairs of feet stomping in sync. The rhythm is loud and captivating.

The sound changes when the surface changes from sand to gravel, yet the rhythm persists. I am touched by the rhythm as it runs through my body. Rhythms are pleasing in themselves. But when military bodies move in rhythm, more is moving than just them. This time, marching is the visual theatre, thick with meaning.

I want to tell you about a trespassing experience. Although I was invited and welcomed by very polite hosts, I was doing research with Finnish Cadets. I was studying how body technique relates to a sense of community. I hadn't planned to follow a walking methodology. I was simply presented with an opportunity to take part on a 30-kilometre walk with the cadets. On the first day of their studies, we marched through the city with a stopover at a military cemetery where the cadets went through some rituals, proceeding all the way to the military base of Santahamina, a beautiful seaside location where bird song and gunshots coexist.

I walk with a small group. Our journey begins at noon. The arrival is around 01:00 a.m. The starting point for me is that I feel so out of place in a military space. I’m a shy, introvert civilian failing. I don't know where to place my body, where to situate myself in the formation, where to hide, how to approach anyone, how to begin a conversation in an institution made of secrecy, commands and hierarchy. I find my place at the back, and I am told that one by one a cadet will join me and we walk side by side.

Things get much easier for me when I'm told where to be. This is how things get done here. I began interviewing while walking. Walking makes talking easy. It makes time pass. Later, I would realise how different that is compared to the room in which I sat face to face with an immobile cadet. But the fluency of speech was not the only gift of walking.

Share the satisfaction and the agony of walking with cadets, and my position shifts closer to the inside, daytime, trembling at the back of the group. I am so attuned that I passed through the gates of the military base in my civilian clothes without the guards noticing that I am not part of this group. But there is another kind of protection that night offers. Enveloped by partial visibility, I can reorient—so Saddamet says of queer orientating. The question of orientation is not only about how we find our way but how we come to feel at home.

I am an orienteering body simply because I am gendered as a woman. As I will later testify, I didn't come home as a woman emerging differentiated from military masculinity. But, the march queered our bodies, and mine in particular.

I shouldn't have been lost since I was taken care of. They wouldn't leave me behind. They resisted the time difference between those who walk at the front and those who need to keep up. They won't take that risk in the military, the slowest sets the pace.

I want to bring your attention to mobility in darkness as a reparative experience. On that day, 8 September 2018, the sun set at 8:18 p.m. Twilight, which is the period of time from sunset to the moment the centre of the sun is six degrees below the horizon, lasted for 45 minutes.

This means that about 10:30 p.m., when I go looking for a place to urinate in a small forest area, it’s already dark. It's not nighttime when there's no indirect sunlight. I can still see where I'm going without artificial light, but it's too dark for me to wander too far. There is enough light that I see how cadets keep arriving at the control point on a steady stream, and I have no other choice but to lower my pants here, even if they see me.

It's really a potential time. Not yet night, not yet too dark, but also dark enough for hiding and dark enough for something to emerge.

I'm under no threat. There's nothing familiar to rely on for once in public space. I don't have to be careful and cautious. I don't feel protected yet. I feel safe. My body has a new presence.

I arrive. I find a home in my body, exiting a body of shame and guilt, exiting a body that is all body and nothing but body, and arriving in a body that is free for a moment in the dark. This transmutation takes place when walking with soldiers on an ambivalent ground of all the places in the world, the militarised territory dislocates me. And in the end, I don't want to leave and arrive at someplace else. I want to stay here.

Thank you.

AT: It's wonderful. Thank you.

Nikos: Thank you so much, Susanna. Really effective. As you said, you are in a place where you feel protected but not safe. These contradictions are somehow embodied through your experience. I feel that this is a condition that could not have arrive without that massive process of walking as an exhausting process.

AT: Thank you for all those amazing presentations. I'm still reeling from this. I want to get straight into the safety topic, which I've been thinking about all evening from various angles, starting with the notion of the playground. It’s a privilege to be able to get lost and explore while feeling protected but not safe.

I'm interested to talk pragmatically about urban space. How can this kind of research and artistic practise perhaps help more and different types of bodies to feel protected and even safe while walking at night?

Nick: We have to basically reverse pretty much all the progress, certainly from a Western perspective, since Enlightenment. And if we do that, it's fine. The problem with light, particularly post Enlightenment, is it takes on a moralising tone. Light has become shorthand for safety and security, and that's problematic.

The problem with light, particularly post Enlightenment, is it takes on a moralising tone. Light has become shorthand for safety and security, and that's problematic.

There was the tragedy a few months ago. Sarah NAME was killed at night. The UK government’s kneejerk reaction was to put up new lights everywhere. But let's be very clear about this. I want a world in which everybody can be out and be safe at whatever time they choose. Adding more LED lights doesn't make up for systematic and cultural failures that allowed this to happen. I've done collective night walks with people in various cities, policy makers, people with mobility issues who maybe move around differently, different communities, people of vulnerability and with different backgrounds to see how they experienced the night. I’m a white, middle-aged male, and I can’t know how other types of bodies experience the city at night. I think we need a richer description of what these places do and offer various types of people. I think that's getting lost. We need to think about how to design with darkness for everyone, rather than always trying to banish it.

We need to think about how to design with darkness for everyone, rather than always trying to banish it.

AT: That last point is important.

Marnia Mendez: I take a lot of walks from 6:00 p.m. to 06:00 a.m. It is very frightening, to be honest. I'm trying to reconcile the facts that I care for myself when I walk and that it can feel dangerous. I usually walk without a purpose, and I don't really know where I'm going. But while I do this, I get cat called and people try to get me to go home with them, which is really terrifying. So, I walk around with a weapon just to be safe, even though I know that it’s a relatively safe area.

SH: I don’t think that protection solves the issue of how we can be in the dark and benefit from the dark. So, I'm left with the idea of the concept of safety as an experience that happens in my body or that comes from me.

I think that protection, safety, security, militarism, and violence form quite an entanglement. Within what Nick said about light as an institutional and political, security becomes problematic. And the question of protection from a feminist perspective is also problematic, because it means there is an agent who has the power to protect, and then there are those who need to be protected. The military is not a safe space. This raises questions about where does safety comes from. In my experience, it came from the walking and the befriending, as well as an unconsciously reliance on the dark and the Finnish forest to protect me.

This question of what can emerge in the dark that cannot emerge in daylight is so interesting, especially in relation to Nick’s problematizing of light and lightness.

AT: Is the notion of the collective enabling? I noticed quite a few of you talking about collective walks. How does that counter this image of the loan walker? How important is it to do a collective walk?

MM: I think the sensorial implications of collective walks are so different from walking on your own. There is a fundamental difference between the level of feeling safe that completely changes the sensorial implications.

Susann: I find collective walking is a powerful tool. It's a pedagogic tool, and it's a tool that the military uses the famous drill, which is based on the idea of or the practice of sinking. It's an opportunity and it's a danger when you have a crowd that is being manipulated into action. The collective sense of sense of collective body has this potential of destruction and beauty. Rythmically, what happens when you move in unison with a group? The environment changes, especially if there's audience to witness you. It's powerful, it's emotional and I think it's something to investigate if anyone's interested.

Nick: I think that the idea of conformity is interesting. I've done two main types of collective night walking. Some have been members of the public who came out to a public festival. Others I’ve designed from the outset to think about urban policy topics. How do we design this city? How do we sit with policymakers, built-environment professionals, people that use the spaces, and with the members of the public? It’s about recognizing you aren’t the expert and there’s no right way to do it.

I think a lot of the literature about night walking is written by white, privileged male people, and quite a lot of them based in London in the UK. That means they come from a very particular view of doing it.

But when you go out and do a collective night walk, people relax into it fairly quickly and it forms a certain type of entropy. I think that being part of a collective body brings safety, so they don't feel like something bad is going to happen.

AT: I think it's probably a great moment to wrap up, although I know we could keep going all night.

MJ: Thank you all for accepting our invitations and walking with us. It was fantastic.

ND: Thanks to everyone who joined us this evening, and thanks to Benny, Suzanna, Alice and Martha. Hopefully, we see each other in the streets, literally. Let’s wander off. Thank you again, everyone.