The launch of Walking Cities: London, edited by Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Simon King, Amy Blier-Carruthers and Roberto Bottazzi, and published by Camberwell Press.

Through bringing together a new interdisciplinary field of artists, writers, architects, musicians, human geographers and philosophers Walking Cities: London considers how urban walking informs and triggers new processes of making, thinking, researching and communicating. In particular, the book examines how the city contains narratives, knowledge and contested materialities that are best accessed through the act of walking. Ultimately, Walking Cities: London seeks to understand the wider significance of changing geographies to generate critical questions and creative perspectives for navigating the social and political impact of rapid urban change.

The launch features contributions from four of the contributors to the book: Sean Ashton, Douglas Murphy, Rosana Antoli and Peter Sheppard Skærved.

Programme

6.30pm Arrival and drinks

7pm Jaspar Joseph-Lester: Introduction

7.10pm Sean Ashton: Reading from ‘Point to Point’ and ‘Public Notice’

7.20pm Douglas Murphy: Discussion of his text ‘London has to Continually Refresh its Offer’ with Roberto Bottazzi

7.40pm Rosana Antoli: a reading performance relating to her work in the book, Walkative: A Choreography of Resistance, followed by a discussion with Simon King

8pm Peter Sheppard Skærved: Performance of music from his text ‘Practise Walk’ with Amy Blier-Carruthers

8.30pm Drinks

Rosana Antolí, born in Alcoi, Spain, is a London-based artist who studied at Valencia Fine Arts University before finishing her MA in Performance/Sculpture at the RCA in 2015. Her work combines performance, dance, moving image and drawing and is focused on the intersection of art, choreography and everyday life.

Sean Ashton writes fiction, criticism and poetry. Recent work includes ‘Hello-Goodbye in Gethsemane’ (Poetry London, 2015), and ‘Mr Heggarty Goes Down’ (Collapse VIII, 2014). He is the author of Sunsets and Dogshits (Alma, 2007) and the novel Living in a Land (EROS, 2016). He also writes for Art Review.

Douglas Murphy is an architect and writer living in London. He is the author of The Architecture of Failure (Zero Books, 2012) and the recently published Last Futures (Verso, 2016), a study of technology and nature in post-war architectural avant-gardes.

Peter Sheppard Skærved is a Grammy-nominated solo and dedicatee of over 400 works for violin. He performs worldwide, and has recorded over 70 CDs of music from the 17th Century to our own time. He is the Viotti Lecturer in Performance Studies at the Royal Academy of Music, and works with museums worldwide.