Arba Bekteshi is a walking artist and urban anthropologist. She works on projects falling between the artistic and anthropologic spectra, - focusing on mediations of changing urban landscapes, negotiations of public and private spaces, citizen agency, as well as understandings of immanence in documentary film. Bekteshi uses psychogeography, cartographic mapping and multimodal and sensory ethnography to think with the various components of the city. Her walking art and individual and group psychogeographical walks are performative enactments of spatio-temporal narratives only as far as them being co-creative becomings. In the same co-creative milieu, the schizocartographies she draws reveal invisible histories as she acts in dialogue with vernacular ecologies. Engaging with spatial justice issues, means she operates with practices of radical care in a thick present that embraces multi-species, multiracial, multi-kinded life.
Proposed Work
You can find my public log for the BKN Residency here.
Walking with the Verticality of Björkö
To walk with the verticality of Björkö, Väddö is not to reproduce its verticality and preoccupy oneself with the movement of the body, but to investigate and attune to embodied knowledge(s) that stem from the land moving constantly, slowly almost imperceptibly. At the same time, to walk with the verticality of its rising bedrock is not to ignore the changes brought forth by climate change as if the place could escape the rest of the world, but to attune to the present moment and pay attention to ask what does this emergence want.
Thus, the question of how one is to walk with the verticality of Björkö, Väddö can be reframed as to what are the environmental affordances does the verticality of the island. At a temporal threshold, at the margins of a sinking world, mapping the verticality of Väddö is to trace another cartography of the Anthropocene.
