chip walks
In 2007 the collective walkwalkwalk created a new artwork based around chips and inspired by a chip fork, a found object from an East London walk. Using the fork as a way to explore a new area of London - the postcode district of E8, they set a rule to start from a chip shop, buy a bag of chips and walk with them until they found another shop (repeat until exhausted/sated). Using this method over a number of weeks they mapped every chip shop in the district.
walkwalkwalk photo:
What quickly becomes apparent is that chips are a lens through which to explore a place - a lens that brings into focus food cultures, changing demographics, regeneration, and the interconnecting threads that spread out from those factors.
walkwalkwalk photo:
In 2015 walkwalkwalk offered the chip walk as a walking score for the book ‘Ways to Wander’. It instigated a revisiting of the project through multiple locations, using the bag of chips as a tool to explore the places that walkers were in.
In January 2018 when Blake Morris asked for people to accompany him during his year of working and walking through the artworks in the book I naturally chose the Chip Walk; he happened to be walking it on my birthday, in August, and I would be on the Greek island of Lesvos - what better way to celebrate than to go from taverna to taverna eating chips.
During that spring and summer on Lesvos, questions to do with resilience and sustainability also started to emerge as I worked with Cookie Arnone, an artist-activist who was coordinating different kinds of projects, from building a womens’ centre to organising paper and paint for arts workshops at One Happy Family (OHF), a resource day centre for refugees in Mytilini (capital of Lesvos). OHF is a long but walkable distance from Moria Camp and is organised largely by refugees themselves with support from European NGOs.
When we discussed resilience we were thinking of it in a sense of creating the “capacity to retain a degree of integrity, self organization and self awareness by engaging a process of finding value in the constant flux of everyday life.” (Douglas, Fremantle, Delday: 2004). Situations where people can regain or find this resilience become crucial in these life and death circumstances as experienced in Moria camp and creating and participating in artworks offer such opportunities. Felski suggests we might begin to do this by “addressing the practical and experiential logic of everyday modes of orientation rather than seeking to transform or transcend them” (2002: p. 617). Thus a familiar walk with additional elements took root as an idea.
Because what then, was my birthday Chip Walk with Blake? It felt frivolous and strangely irresponsible: I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that I would be walking small distances between eating places in the village where I lived, Skala Eresos, getting food easily, celebrating with friends whilst others not that far away in Mytilini would be walking eight kilometres from the Moria refugee camp to the not-for-profit taverna, Home for All for a free evening meal. It might be the only meal of the day for them in a camp filled to more to four times its capacity and where a two-hour wait for sub-standard and sometimes inedible food was the norm. Moreover, it is still the norm that many people all over the world walk miles to get food and water each day.
To highlight this fact and to continue to raise awareness of the desperate situation for refugees in Moria camp I decided I had to walk a different kind of Chip Walk. I collaborated with Cookie to organise a Lesvos Chip Walk to start at Moria camp and end with a free meal at Home for All.
There was a chip van just outside the gates at Moria camp where I could buy us chips at the start of the walk then there would be food at the end of the eight kilometres at Home for All. We advertised the walk and asked people to join us; it would be hot and dry, but we received enthusiastic responses and started out with 62 walkers, refugees, asylum seekers and NGO workers and volunteers from all over the world: from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Tibet, Greece, UK, France, The Republic of Congo, the Netherlands, Germany, many of whom had crossed the sea in tiny plastic rafts to Lesvos from Turkey.
People were so enthusiastic to start the walk that they left before the chips were cooked. Three of us waited to get four large portions of chips, more as a token to symbolise the essence of the walk than anything else, because even when we caught up with everyone people did not attack the chips with the gusto that I have come to expect from UK chip eaters. By contrast, the chip brooches I had made from cutting up yellow car sponges were much more enthusiastically received and worn.
These were my attempt to document and add a further aesthetic aspect to the walk, where “Metaphor can shine light on particular aspects of an issue, make unexpected depth visible, or bring into focus what is yet unclear or previously unexplored”(2003:7). For it was important to me that the walk was still an artwork as well as an activist intervention and making sponge chips was just as an important part of the process as buying the hot chips from the van outside the camp gates.
Stopping for chips from Moria camp on the way to Home for All
My walking and theatrical practice of clowning both involve interruptions - of assumptions and expectations, of logic and habit, of seriousness and play and of everyday movement and all these elements are linked. For me the Chip Walk became an additional interruption in an intentional everyday kind of walk and one that brings together people around a common purpose, buying and eating food, and noticing and perhaps discussing in some depth the surrounding environment might happen almost as an aside, in a deceptively easy and simple way. In this way the chips might be considered almost a playful misdirection, in magician's terms, where other issues emerge almost by chance, through incidental conversations, imaginings, local knowledge, the re-surfacing of memories and the periodic attention to surroundings as the Chip Walk moves on.
The walk gave each of us a chance to walk and talk with different people, at different paces and at different levels of engagement. Some people were already friends, some worked together, had become friends in the camp or had crossed the sea together. All wanted to engage in conversations and discussions - many about family, about their situation in the camp, about their desires and dreams for the future - where they wanted to be and what they wanted to be doing: not living in the camp and not being sent back to where they had fled from. We were creating what Grant Kester (2004: 3) calls dialogic art where we take “the traditional art materials of marble, canvas or pigment” and replace them with “socio-political relationships.”
Along the way we talked, introducing ourselves to each other, hopefully creating what Kester (2004: 6) suggests is “an open space where individuals can break free from pre-existing roles and obligations, reacting and interacting in new and unforeseeable ways.”
The Chip Walk enables us to interrogate the commonalities of circumstances (people gathering together for simple, everyday activities of walking, eating and talking) and of disparities that exist in these worlds apart - between incomes, accessibility to work and housing, in addition to issues of gentrification, sustainable building and urban planning. The two main contexts that we have practised this work in: Lesvos and Hackney, are worlds apart yet the action of walking and eating and talking, following a score for an artwork, creates in each location a temporary community with ‘rich opportunities to engage people in the examination of issues of societal concern.’ (Romney, 2005, p3).
food at Home for All
We continue to conduct further iterations of this convivial and participatory artwork: In July 2019 there was a simultaneous Chip Walk in East London and in Prespes, Greece as part of the Walking Encounters/Walking Bodies/Walking Practices conference. For Walking's New Movement conference in Plymouth 2019 we conducted a shorter chip walk sampling chips around the Barbican area of the city, having discussions with chip shop workers and taking note of the regeneration of buildings and structures that has resulted in a particular mix of architectural transformations of the area. The chip walks forefront food as a lens through which to connect walking, urban regeneration, conviviality, migration and research methodologies for social change.
These subsequent Chip Walks and the recounting of the Lesvos Chip Walk have enabled me to raise money (by selling sponge chips for 1 euro each) which I have been able to give to Home for All, contributing to the purchase of a pizza oven which now provides more free dinners for more refugees (still no chips!).
