INTRODUCTION TO WAP AND ABOUT THE EXPOSITION

The WAP25 program organizer asked each participant to contribute by leading a walk in response to the annual theme while maintaining both individal and collective efforts. WAP is designed to open up new thinnking for the individial artists and to initiate collaborate endivors. The time spent together lingers beyond and for this a select number of artists are invited to continue to work on the thematics in a coalition -  WAPC.

 

Within the overarching theme Walking as Passion  -  Embodied Thinking, WAP25 explored Magic Walking and Sister Forest. These explorations took shape through imaginary walks, walking safaris, bunker walks, årsgång, and a range of individual walking-based initiatives.


WAPC - Walking As Practice Coalition, consisting of former WAP program artists and walkingaspractice.org were went public in 2025.

 

International Prespa Walking Arts Encounters 2025 (WAC25).

WAP25 June edition became entangled with WalkingTogether.eu, which in autumn 2025 selected WAP as part of its node system. A representative of WALC, Andrew Stuck, joined WAP25, with the intention of developing programming at Björkö and Prespa simultaneously, focusing on audio- and sound-based walks. The WAP25 program dates were selected to coincide with an international walking arts conference, held from June 30 to July 6, 2025, in Prespa: Walking Home / Walking in Transition.

 


The first segment of this exposition left to right holds walks initiated by me during the June edition of WAP25.

The second half walks conducted on other sites than Björkö but is intervowen with the thematics, as experienced life is not linear. The lower first segment holds a curatorial text.


The text image in the upper left corner takes you back to the WAP25 indexpage from where other artists expositions can be reached.

Since 2002, a reverential, congregational mode of thinking has underpinned my work, developed in tandem with site-specific collaborative practices and installations addressing communities and specific social issues. This trajectory culminated profoundly on August 28, 2025, when I conducted my mother’s funeral as a performance ritual. This pivotal experience clarified the depth and direction of my practice. In that moment, the strands of my work cohered: performance ritual as a site of transformation and transcendence, and practice itself as a sacred continuum.


I understand performance rituals as iterative, situated acts—each one a proposition for how we might relate differently: to one another, to memory, to place, and to time. The processes embedded in my artworks continuously readdress ethics as relational and foundational, engaging discourses of subjectivity, responsibility, difference, alterity, finitude, and togetherness.


Works produced prior to 2020 can also be situated within this discourse. They drew from everyday life, memory, and Lefebvrian readings of space, imbuing environments with meaning through lenses of social justice and collective experience. Since then, my practice has shifted toward an even more integrative mode of becoming and co-becoming, merging curatorial work with site-sensitive installation, video, and embodied research. This includes drawing on ancestral knowledge, intergenerational memory, and the ways communities relate to their natural and cultural environments as modes of knowledge production.


I approach performance as a ritualized act of presence—an invocation of shared memory, resistance, and in-betweenness. What I seek is not spectacle, but attunement: a space where the symbolic becomes sensory and the archival begins to breathe. Working across moving image, sound, photography, and site-sensitive installation, I construct temporal environments in which the personal and the political are not oppositional, but parallel currents—continually shaping and reshaping one another.


Ritual, for me, is not static repetition but an embodied methodology: enacted, responsive, and held in common. These rituals unfold through fragile gestures and durational engagements, inviting co-presence, listening, and slowness. My work inhabits thresholds—between public and private, official narratives and lived testimony, center and margin. Within these in-between spaces, concepts such as weak resistance, counter-publics, and co-becoming are explored not as abstractions, but as lived and collective processes.


The body—my own and those of others—moves through landscapes and histories, often through walking-based projects that dissolve distinctions between artist and participant. These are not performances for an audience, but calls to engagement. Participation may occur through presence or at a distance, yet always within a shared ritual field. I conceive of performance as a form of social ritual, where witnessing becomes both ethical and participatory

RE-THINKING PRACTICE 

 

Anna Viola Hallberg's work - as an artist explores the relationships between embodiment/experience and audiovisuality, spatiality and time, through discursive and immersive video-based installations. She works with subordinate thematics from a documentary point of departure focusing on experiences and emotions. At times connecting the material with archival discoveries. 

ANNA VIOLA HALLBERG

Notations from April to December, 2025

CURATORIAL REFLECTION

 

WAP25 – Walking as Passion: Embodied Thinking

WAP25 marks the third year of the Walking As Practice (WAP) residency program at BKN, located in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. This year’s theme, Walking as Passion – Embodied Thinking, foregrounds the interplay of body, mind, and landscape as a mode of artistic inquiry, exploring walking as both practice and ritual. The program brought together artists, students, and educators to reflect on proximity, presence, and the transformative capacities of walking in relation to life, nature, and collective experience. Each participant contributed through walks that reflected the program’s theme. These ranged from imaginary walks, walking safaris, bunker walks, and årsgång to individual explorations. Walking was reframed as an embodied, attentative practice, where body, mind, and environment merged. Guided by sound, distance, texture, and scent, walking became a form of inquiry, memory, and self-expression—a practice of embodied thinking.

 

In WAP25, presence was enacted through embodied action—a relational engagement with landscape, spirit, and fellow participants. Passion served as a conduit for forces larger than ourselves, animating the walk and imbuing each step with intention, memory, and emotion. Embodied thinking enabled participants to bypass conventional intellectual structures, accessing visceral, intuitive modes of knowing. Walking in WAP25 was simultaneously process-based and ritualized, highlighting ethical, poetic, and communal dimensions of art-making. Individual and collective bodies moved across landscapes and histories, dissolving distinctions between artist and participant. Ritualized engagements—through sound walks, bunker explorations, or attentative pilgrimages—created shared fields of co-presence where concepts such as weak resistance, counter-publics, and co-becoming were not merely theoretical but lived experiences.

 

Rebecca Solnit observes that “the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.” In WAP25, this idea resonated deeply: walking became a way to traverse both external landscapes and the landscapes of the mind.

This notion aligns with Victor Turner’s concept of the liminal—a “betwixt and between” space where conventional structures dissolve, and alternative modes of being emerge. Rather than producing conventional narratives or performances, participants moved through the site as if it were sacred, allowing slow, intuitive gestures to invoke the latent energies, histories, and ecological tensions of the land. Similarly, Anna Tsing’s arts of noticing encourages attention to what persists under erasure, while Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of orientation highlights how our bodies carry remembered histories and spatial inscriptions. In WAP25, movement was not about dramatization or resolution; it was about presence, care, and attention. The practice resisted extractive temporalities and spectacle, becoming a ritualized offering—an act of witnessing and inhabiting vanishing landscapes, asking participants to feel loss rather than merely recognize it.

 

The walks were shaped by care, environmental grief and personal loss, offering moments for reflection on the unbroken horizon where external landscapes intersect with inner experience. Participants engaged in acts of pilgrimage, attentative dwelling, and contemplation of life, death, and interconnection. For the curator, this included processing personal loss alongside practices such as Shinrin-yoku, the Japanese art of immersive sensory engagement with nature, and collective explorations like Sister Forest, developed with artist Lisa Gordillo and students from Michigan Tech what if we see the forest as an ancestor or relative how is the essence of care altered from the one where we see the forest as part of the capitalist machinery.

 

Activities unfolded across Björkö , emphasizing sound and audio-based walks, collaborative fieldwork, and attentative engagement with the surrounding environment. The theme of Passion is adapted from the theme of Supermarket independent Art Fair 2025 where WAPC - the coalition of walking artists who all been to WAP made the first public walks in Stockholm. WAP25 exists in April edition and June edition. Coinciding with the International Prespa Walking Arts Encounters 2025 (WAC25) and the broader WalkingTogether.eu framework, WAP was selected an official node within an emerging network of walking-based art practices. 

 

WAP25 represents a broader inquiry into ritual, memory, and relational ethics. Drawing on decades of experience in site-specific, socially engaged, and performative practices, the residency emphasized attunement, slowness, and listening, demonstrating walking as both an ethical practice and an artistic methodology—a way of inhabiting the world with care, attention, and intentionality.


WAP25 positions walking not as metaphor but as a methodological, curatorial, and artistic tool, uniting mind, body, and environment in a single lived experience. Through embodied thinking, ritualized practice, and collective engagement, walking becomes a space for reflection, ethical inquiry, and imaginative exploration. The unbroken horizon—both literal and symbolic—serves as a site of transformation, where the personal, social, and ecological intersect.

Walking with a purpose is not the same thing as walking consciously. 

SHIRIN-YOKU  WALKS 

WALK: Pilgrimage to the Unbroken Horizon
Date: June 16th
Participating: 25 artists/students/teacher and one dog


 

This walk was, in many ways, derived from Magic, tracing back to the period when artists Lisa and Hugo Gordillo were working at BKN. Lisa and I coined the concept Sister Forest, originally intended to unfold in 2024. However, life took a different trajectory, and the return of Lisa—together with her colleagues and students from Michigan Tech—came to fruition in June 2025.

 

What emerged was not the Sister Forest exhibition project as first envisioned, but rather a shared transgression of the forest. Each WAP25 artist was paired with four to five students or teachers, offering an introduction to their own practices, expanding on walking as an art form, and sharing perspectives on Björkö. At certain points, we engaged in attentive dwellings within the forest—moving toward pilgrimage and contemplating the potential meaning of the unbroken horizon.

 

Walking consciously is not the same as walking with a purpose. This walk was embedded in consciousness: an attentive walk in which body and space become one, guided by sound, distance, nuance, smell, and texture. The scenario unfolded within a dual context of environmental grief and personal loss.

 

For me, the Unbroken Horizon is where everything coheres; the path leading toward it becomes a trail of Shinrin-yoku.

 

The summer of 2025 held two profound losses, alongside a sense of a world order falling apart. The text Once Whispered, the Loss of Two was initiated during the walk Pilgrimage to the Unbroken Horizon, and was released on December 17 (see separate post).



 

PREAMBLE

WAP25 marks, for me personally, the conclusion of my fifth year as part of a curatorial fellowship at BKN, where I have also been a co-founder. For WAP25, I took on the same mission that artists coming to BKN undertake: to re-think one’s own practice.

Being embedded in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden, I have worked through methodologies such as Thinking Together, Learning Together. This means being a body among other bodies in a remote location. I asked myself what I could learn from this stay—what it means to learn from being with more than 200 artists and with nature. In this context, I was able to seek out what is essential to my own practice: embracing embodied thinking.

The theme for WAP25—Walking as Passion: Embodied Thinking - became deeply entangled with my life in ways I could never have anticipated. During this period, I experienced repeated interruptions as I travelled to the hospital while a close person in my life reached the end of their life, passing into the territory of the ancestors on July 30. The theme unfolded not only as a curatorial framework, but as a lived and transformative experience.

This year also marked the end of a personal and professional relationship with a former co-curator and instigator of WAP. Despite this, I am deeply grateful to now have a language for what sustained me during this time: Shinrin-yoku—the Japanese practice of sensory immersion as a way of connecting with nature. Japanese thinking and ancestry practices are deeply intertwined, 

characterized by a syncretic blend of Shinto (indigenous animism) and Buddhist traditions that emphasize harmony, transience, and familial connection. In many respects this way of being is also infused in my own up bringing - the relation to nature and the respect in lineage to anmödrar (ancestor on motherside) and possibly its pagan/norse origin.

WALK: Seven Flowers 
Date: June 21
Participants: 4 +1 (+ 20)


Description:

After the traditional celebration at Hembygdsgården, with dancing around the midsummer pole, we headed to the next island, Arholma. The bus took us to the ferry landing in Simpnäs, followed by a 15-minute ride to Arholma Brygga, arriving just in time to see the next midsummer pole being raised.

We began walking south along the SAT trail, cutting across to the eastern shoreline. Here, the walk became Anne Arndt’s Bunker Walk.

As we reached the northern point, we met up with the Michigan Tech group again and had a long conversation on loss and passion with Lisa Gordillo, while the sun was still high in the sky—it was 10 pm when we left with the last boat. From there, we walked an additional 5 km back to BKN.

WALK: Quarry Care Walk (Unpacking Walking As Passion Embodied Thinking

Date: June 25

Participants: WAP25 artists

 

Presence takes place as an embodied action—encounters with the environment, spirit, or fellow beings that create a sense of passion. Passion itself becomes the vessel for that which is greater than us, something we cannot fully contain or embrace. In this state, mind and body merge with the surrounding landscape and with loved ones fading from view.

Passion becomes the force that animates the walk, infusing each step with intention, memory, and emotion. Embodied thinking—where cognition and physical movement are deeply intertwined—allows walking to serve as both inquiry and self-expression, bypassing traditional intellectual structures to access more visceral, intuitive ways of knowing.

Walking as an art form invites a revaluation of presence, process, and the body’s poetic capacity to think through movement. This embodied thinking, as a process-based art form, is initiated by one of the most fundamental needs of both human and non-human beings: to move, to migrate, to transfer themselves to another place.

 Shinrin-yoku

WALK: Årsgång - Midsommar

Date: June 23
Participants: 2 


Årsgång commonly translated to Year Walker


WALKING SCORE FOR ÅRSGÅNG 


1) No glair at fire prior to walk

2) The walker would abstain from food, speech, and company, sometimes for an entire day, to spiritually prepare.

3) you walk backwards around the church three times

4) where 4 roads meet you will might encouter supernatural beings, illusions, or symbolic visions to predict the year.

 

Important Themes:

  • Liminality: The idea that certain times (like Midsummer) thin the veil between the human and spirit world.

  • Personal trial: It was a psychological and spiritual challenge. Not everyone succeeded; many were scared into insanity or misled by spirits.

  • Folk divination: The tradition blends animism, Christian elements, and pagan ritual.

 

 

Cultural Note:

Årsgång (year walker) an ancient custom that was practiced well into the 19th century - some sources say the 20th century. 

Årsgång is an old folk tradition, involving a ritualistic “year walk”—a solitary, secretive journey typically undertaken on special nights to gain supernatural knowledge, such as glimpses of the future or omens of death and fortune. 

 

 

The information about how to walk varies in sources. Some suggests to visit three, sometimes seven, churches - others just say that the walk should end at one church. And you'll walk backwards around that church, three times, and on the way back you'll see what's going to happen in the coming year.


Interpretations: A wedding party means that a wedding is about to take place, if there are graves in the churchyard, a plague is to be expected. Mice pulling a hayrack, and little elves carrying sheaves of grain indicate a good year's growth. Hopefully you won't meet armed men on horseback, because that means war - just as it does if you hear that there's a felling in the forest.


 Årsgång died out by the late 19th century but has been revived in folklore, literature, and even video games—most notably in the game “Year Walk” by Simogo, which is loosely inspired by these traditions.

Sources: Tommy Kuusela, researcher on Årsgång traditions, Nordisk familjebok (1911), Nordiska Museet /Papadopoulos, Costas; Moyes, Holley, eds. (2021). The Oxford Handbook of Light in Archaeology. Oxford University Press.

MIDSUMMER 
Midsummer (or Midsommar in Swedish) is one of the most important and beloved holidays in Sweden, second only to Christmas. It has ancient pagan roots, traditionally celebrating the summer solstice, and has evolved over centuries into a vibrant national celebration of light, fertility, and community. >>>

June 21 - the night with out darkness
Midsummer brunch: 11-1 pm
Midsummer celibration at Hembygdgården 1-3 pm,
Arholma 3 -10 pm.
Dusk:  23:39  
Dawn: 01:59

 

 

 . 

Co-walker: DB Lampman

Site:  Björkö Arholma Church. 

Score: based on årsgång research

The summer solstice falls on 20, 21 or 22 of June.  In the Northern Hemisphere, it was traditionally reckoned to fall on 23–24 June in much of Europe. Until 1952, in Sweden,  the fixed date for Midsummer's Eve was June 23, but to fit in better with the working week, it was decided in 1953 that Midsummer's Eve would always be on a Friday between June 19 and 25. Midsummer Eve is thus movable between those dates."

Source: Nordisk Familjebok (1911) 

 

 

 

BJÖRKÖ SITES  
WALKING WITH PASSION - EMBODIED THINKING

PARTICIPATING IN OTHER ARTISTS WALKS

 

> June 19 Fika walk session with The Lighthouse Story Walk (remote experience). The  walk started in the BKN kitchen and continued into  Kamchatka where while listening to the audio walk a traditional fika session  took place. Lead: Annikki Wahlöö

> June 21, Bunker Walk, Lead: Anne Arendt

> June 24, Island in an Island, Lead: DB Lampman

> June 26, Studio Walk, @ BKN Collective Organization by WAP25

> June 27, Art in the River Walk, Innaguration of exhibition in Norrtälje walking along the river, Helen Hedensjö

> July 5, Sensory Safari at Simpnäs, Andrew Stuck

WALK: BKN ART TRAIL - Theme: Sister Forest
Date: June 6 - August 12 (8-10 pm)


Description: 

Sites activated Simpnäs, Stenbrottet, Medborgarhuset - Bygdegården - BKN etc. The QR Code based art walk included artworks by artists from Stockholm, Göteborg, New York, Saltzburg, Huston. They could be onsite objects or a video or sound work on the supporting page the qr code lead to. Text in Swedish with audio guide in English.

Examples
"Röttband" – Lämnad omsorg" by  MAJA ANDERSSON >>>
"These are strange times, my dear" by SHAHRZAD NIKZAD  >>>
"Träd" by BEILI LIU >>>
"Walking with Locals" by Gerhard Kowals (severla walks) >>>

WALK: Community Night Walk - Communication Towers 
Date: July 5 (8-10 pm)

Participants: WAP25+ Core teams from Björkö Arholma Hembygdsförening and Björkö-Arholm Medborgarhus.

Description: WAP25 artists shared walking stretches focusing on relational and attentative walking. The two local associations focused on cultural heritage sites along the walk with focus on the lighthouses for boats and planes. This walk was called up on to introduce a night walk in July as a companion to the night walk happening in the fall at the day light shifing, last Saturday in October.

LUCID DREAMS

WALK: Fire Walk
Date: October 30/April 30

Participants: Los Angeles Wild Fire Survivor Artists
The over arching theme for BKN fall 2025 to April was set to be Lucid Dreams. 

The 14 LA based artist whom all lost their works, stuio and homes to wildfires during 2025 came to Björkö due to a collaboration that started between Susannah Mills and Anna Viola Hallberg.

On October 30th Fire Walk was a repeat of the Fire Walk from April in the very beginning of Mills stay at BKN. The aim for the future is A Nomadic Residency for Artists in Ecological Flux.>>>

WALK: Ekudden -board walk

Date: July 24, 2025

Starting at Mariestad hospital following the road to Järnåldersvägen over to the bike/pedestrian path leading down to Ekudden. And out to the board walk and back. This was the last walk the three of us did. Out there she said "The wind feels so wonderful".
Now as I do the walk its from where ever I am to that board walk.

WALK: A Performance Ritual for my mother
Date: August 28, 2025
Site: Skogskapellet, Mariestad (Forest chapell) 
Description: my mother who passed away she was a walker, for her funeral in the forest chapel in Mariestad I conducted with assistance of my brother a performance ritual. 

OTHER SITES  
WALKING WITH PASSION - EMBODIED THINKING

WALK: Paradise Peninsula, Mariestad

Date: June 2025  and ongoing as I vist Mariestad.

This is the trail most connected to my mother. I started to walk it as she was in hospital June 2025. Starting at the University Park following the western bank of the river Tidan in to an oak forest and out on the peninsula named "Paradisudden", ie Paradise Peninsula. The route back is slightly different as it crosses the river at two points first over to the guest harbor to the eastern bank and then over the bridge by the univiersity back to the starting point.

ONCE/ONCE WHISPERED, THE LOSS OF TWO

WALK: release of score for the text  "once whispered, the loss of two" 

Date: Dec 17, 2025
Participants: invited artists by Marja-leena Sillanpää
Site: Uppenbarelse kyrkans Columbarium  (The columbarium at the revelation chuch)

Start: 17:00
End: 17:59 
Description Walked site: We wandered freely around the columbarium individually for about 15 minutes.

At 5 p.m. Marja-leena Sillanpää gathered us in a passageway we faced her and behind her was the rotunda. The passage was only a few meters wide where we as the invited formed a half circle looking at her. M-l view was us and the staircase as she welcomed us who were present and via radio waves, she opened up a channel to the other dimensions with a special invitation to Helene Schjerfbeck and Hilma af Klint. Then in a spontaneous order, each of us read our text. “once whispered, the loss of two” was the final one. I closed the room with a bear bell I brought from Kumano Kodo. The session ended at 5:59 p.m., one minute before closing time.
This was the official release of the 2025 edition from "Dark Envelope and Poetry", a text based series by Marja-Leena Sillanpää. Where she invites artists to respond in writing to a specific sentence. This time around it was 3 envelopes (see img below).

Provided sentence by Sillanpää to Hallberg: "The Sound of Humidity Drops Into Water".

Text: "once whispered, the loss of two" (written during wap)
Walking Score: once >>>

first walked at Uppenbarelse Kyrkan Dec 17 2025, prior to the release reading of the text.

my mother and daily walker was compelled by oak trees, ancestor veneration is not just a religious ritual but a daily, practical way of maintaining spiritual harmony and ensuring that deceased family members are cared for and respected
Release note

WALK: SUPERMARKET ART FAIR - PASSION

Date: April, 2025

APC did walks during the independent art fair in Stockholm, April 2025. Documentation video, introduction of artists and walks below. SUPERMARKET 2025 coined the theme of Passion. It was the first walking arts oriented programing for the art fair. WAP25 program theme became Passion – Embodied Thinking.
Lead walking artist:  Aurike Quintelier (be), Heather (HeyTheree) Kapplows (us), Juanma González (es/se)  Special walking performance: Ami Skånberg and Canan Yücel Pekiçten
Curators: John Schuermand with Berg Duo (Hallberg & Skånberg)

The synchrinisity on passion has followed since the fall of 2023 and the emergence of Berg Duo. In walking, working, and sharing life. Post walking an experimental pilgrimage on Kii peninsula  tthe path took us  to Rome for bein part of a presenting cluster on "Black-Market Truths: Performative Wisdom in Passion, Grief and Madness" >>>

 

 

WALK: Lamentation 

Date: Dec 24, 2025

Arriving at Frihetenshamn facing Saltsjön where  spray of dried flowers wehre placed on the shoreline as they flowers moved out to the sea. Making their individual walks while I I continued mine  towards the monumentt where the ritual reached its end as I passed through the portal. An act of forgiveness.

inspired by Richard Longs  piece "A Line Made by Walking" (1967) involved walking back and forth in a field, leaving a trace. The act of walking itself became the artwork.

The idea is that the invited artists are part of a meeting of minds, i.e., your contributions are independent of each other...
You have at least one and at most three A4 pages at your disposal, and you are free to choose your own text (text only, font and bullet points optional, but must be typed). 
The pages can consist of just one word or be filled to overflowing. 
The titles I provide are loosely connected to nature, the underworld, and the universe.

The form
* Texts are written and emailed to me.
* These are printed on slightly yellowed A4 paper, folded in the middle with name labels sealing the fold.
* Black A5 envelopes.
* Without commercial purposes, the publisher wants to touch on something unknown through the word.

Point of departure/direction:  “The Sound of Humidity Drops Into Water”

 

 

DARK ENVELOPES AND POETRY instructions from publisher Marja-leena Silanpää:
Edition 10th year
Atist gets 3 envelope each + 1 archive copy
Invited artists relate to a specific title concerning heaven and earth (two invited artists per publication)

At the Stora Teatern in Gothenburg, with a concert/performance in the form of a séance together with Helene Schjerfbeck and Hilma af Klint; we formed “The Three”
The publishing house invites three parallel publications per year, which conclude with a joint release.

OTHER SITES  
WALKING WITH PASSION - EMBODIED THINKING

WALK: Årsgång

Date: Dec 31, 2025


Site: Hedwig Elinora church, Stockholm
walking backwards outdoors around the church, in the style of årsgång.

Co-walker: Helen Hedensjö