Streetwalker, the passante, and the politics of women walking: picking up the fragments

<p dir="ltr">My Practice as Research Ph.D. comprises three works accompanied by a critical reflection: <i>Echoes from a Berlin Childhood</i> (Sheffield: Gordian Projects, 2016), ‘Articles Lost’ (London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2017), and a set of ten posters titled <i>Voices from the Archive</i> (2018), presented as a broadsheet newspaper. The works explore the politics of women’s bodies in the public space of the street. Lone and collective urban walking is considered as a political act. I present the city as autobiography, exploring this through the figure of the <i>flâneuse </i>in literature and visual art from the nineteenth century to contemporary walking practices, emerging with the <i>passante </i>as the figure whose pace is more in step with mine. </p><p dir="ltr">Each work employs quotation as a method. The book works take extracts from Walter Benjamin’s Berlin essays, placing his writing on the city into new contexts. In <i>Echoes from a Berlin Childhood,</i> Benjamin’s words from <i>Berlin Childhood Around 1900 </i>(1932) are poetically re-composed with photographs made on the streets of his childhood walks, using a 5MP wearable camera with automatic shutter. ‘Articles Lost’ takes extracts from ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ on dreaming and walking in cities, and presents them — and the gaps in Benjamin’s text — as spaces for reinvention. Both works present an alternative mapping of Berlin, a multitude of voices in the writing of the city are heard in my interventions. <i>Voices from the Archive</i> re-composes archival material from the Reclaim the Night movement, encountered during a residency at the Feminist Archive North in 2018. I propose the use of quotation in my practice as an allegorical method, taken from Sigrid Weigel’s <i>Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin</i>. I break the thought-images from their continuum in order to speak the text, retaining its origin through citational method while re-instating the urban woman walker. I situate this practice in the field of conceptual, autobiographical writing by women, alongside practices of iteration that reimagine canonical texts, employing the fragment as method, such as the writing of Lisa Robertson, Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, Anne Boyer, and Moyra Davey. The thesis presents the contextual field of walking practices (and contemporary walking research), considering artist and writer Sharon Kivland’s <i>Freud on Holiday</i> series, and her work on the <i>passante</i>. </p><p dir="ltr">I propose the allegorical method — where visual and textual fragments are composed to create political statements — as confirmation of the value of the quotation/fragment in both academic/art writing and visual art practice.</p>