” When the public space disappears, the body is no longer enough to transport the person. Walking helps to protect against these attacks on the intelligence, the body, the landscape, even the urban landscape. Every walker is a guardian who watches to protect the ineffable. ” The unspeakable, including dance.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York, Penguin, 2001

” … while all kinds of thoughts agitated me strongly, because on a walk many sudden ideas, flashes of light and illuminating illuminations, occur and enter spontaneously so that they can be exploited and elaborated with care “.

Robert Walser, The Walk, 1917

Exploring the movements, strolls, drifts in the art of the late twentieth century and in particular the contemporary research of Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alÿs and the Stalker laboratory.

” Then appears a universe where displacement is not only the means of a spatial translation but also a psychological fact, a tool of fiction or the other name of production. This cineplastic that makes the city its theatre of operations, these movements with multiple resonances, trace the face of a world where reality is a process. “

Thierry Davila, Walking, Creating, Travelling, strolling, drifting in the art of the end of the XX. century, Ed. du Regard, 2002

” The score has no edges. It is so extensive that any event, whether concomitant or not, distant or nearby, visible or invisible, infiltrates, affects, and redirects it at any time. […] Scores are everywhere. They can take on an infinite number of forms and natures. […] Even a shopping list or a calendar, for example, are scores. [… And] the score, even the “found” one, already there, ready made in the literal sense, is said to be the product of a specific cultural activity, a construction, an extremely skillful interplay of intervals, multiplied reference points. “

Laurence Louppe, Poetic of contemporary dance (the continuation), Contredanse, Brussels, 2007

” Without this learning of the nomadic state I might not have written anything. For the vagabonds of writing, travelling means finding by uprooting, availability, risks, destitution, the access to these privileged places where the most humble things find their full and sovereign existence. “

Nicolas Bouvier, Reflections on space and writing, Revue des sciences humaines, 1989

“… you still walk, you still hang around. You invent complicated journeys, full of prohibitions that force you to take detours. You’ll see the monuments. You count churches, equestrian statues, pissotières, Russian restaurants. You will see the great works along the banks, near the doors, the streets ripped open like ploughed fields, the pipes, the buildings that we bring down. “

Georges Perec, A man who sleeps, 1967

The traveller brings back objects, stories from his trip like the gypsies every year to the village of Macondo ” were sharing new inventions. They started by bringing the magnet. A large gypsy with a bushy beard and sparrow’s hands, who answered in the name of Melquiades, publicly demonstrated in public what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. “

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

” to feel the aura of a thing is to give it the power to look up. “

Walter Benjamin, The work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility, 1936

” Representation makes manifest what would otherwise be unnoticed; […] It is a re-taking of the immediate. [which] also indicates an echo as in ”res-ponse, re-tain”. Representation can be thought of as the act of re-gathering what is lost and as resistance to what is dispersed. “

Frédéric Laupiès, Philosophical lesson on representation, PUF, 2001

” the actor is a traveller about whom no certainty is possible. He himself questions the certainty of his past. All pasts are possible. It is continuously erased by the wind of its march. “

Marc François, Where is Theatre going? under direction of J-P. Thibaudat, 1998

” What I ask to birds: to open our imaginations to other ways of thinking, to break with certain routines, to make perceptible the effect of certain types of attention – what do we decide to make remarkable in what we observe? To make other stories possible. […] Less deterministic stories, stories that leave more room for manoeuvre, stories that elude the temptation of models […] and honor the emergence of an infinite number of ways of being.
[…] If the territory is defined as a place of spectacular intention, aggressiveness is no longer the motive, in the psychological sense, or the cause, of territorial activity, it is the motive in the aesthetic or musical sense, it gives its style, its form of presentation, its energy, its choreography and its movements. […] Territories exist only in acts. In other words, they are objects of performance, both in the theatrical sense and in the sense that their existence must be performed. It is about understanding that making a territory is about dealing with powers. It is a matter of honoring them. To make a territory is to create modes of attention, it is more precisely to establish new modes of attention. In short, to stop, to listen, to listen again: here, now, something important is happening and being created. ”

Vinciane Despret, Habiter en oiseau / Living as a bird, Actes Sud, 2019

« Rethinking the city beyond modernity implies the reintegration of the awareness of the polarity of every being, the reintegration of the non-rational dimension of the human being, the reintegration of the awareness of the unity between man and nature, and finally the reintegration of the essence of aesthetics. […] The sign of the tao unites the pictograms of “head” and “walking”. “Head” could indicate consciousness and “walking”, travelling a path. So the idea would be “walking consciously” or “conscious path “. »

Carl Fingerhuth, Learning from China, the tao of the city, Birkhäuser, 2007