PRESENTATION: International Walking Arts Encounters-Prespa 2025 (WAC 25)

From June 30 to July 6, 2025, the tranquil and ecologically rich landscape of Prespa, Greece, became a site of convergence for artists, writers, visual practitioners, researchers, and art critics from around the world. The International Walking Arts Encounters – Prespa 2025 (WAC 25) unfolded under the evocative title “Walking Home / Walking in Transition”, offering a fertile ground for the exchange of ideas, practices, and artistic expressions rooted in the act of walking. More than a conventional gathering, WAC 25 served as a living laboratory — a place where movement became method, and place became praxis.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Yannis Ziogas Archive

This year’s Encounters are part of the larger European cultural initiative Walking Arts and Local Communities (WALC), a four-year project launched in January 2024 and co-funded by Creative Europe. WALC represents a transnational effort to establish a permanent and inclusive International Center for Artistic Research and Practice in Walking Arts, anchored in the culturally layered and geographically significant region of Prespa — a tri-border zone between Greece, Albania, and North Macedonia. Complementing its physical base, the Center also extends its reach through a digital platform dedicated to archiving, connecting, and promoting walking arts on a global scale. Prespa’s compelling geography — marked by the twin lakes of Small and Great Prespa and surrounded by dramatic mountain ranges — offers an ideal setting for artistic inquiry and embodied reflection. This unique environment is at the heart of the long-running, site-specific initiative Visual March to Prespa, a program of the First Studio of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Western Macedonia (UoWM). Since its inception in 2007, the Visual March has served as both an academic fieldwork model and an experimental artistic practice, blending walking, performance, community interaction, and landscape engagement. It was within this framework that the first three editions of the International Walking Arts Encounters (WAC) were launched — in 2019, 2021, and 2023 — collectively drawing more than 600 participants from across the globe. With the support of Made of Walking / the Milena principle, the WAC platform has since matured into a significant node within the international walking arts movement. The 2025 edition marks a new phase of expansion and integration under the WALC umbrella, deepening its commitment to cross-disciplinary research, environmental consciousness, and socially engaged artistic practice. This year, 127 artists and researchers from 20 countries and regions — including Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, Hong Kong, the United States, and across Europe — came together to present 61 walking-based artistic actions and 33 research presentations. These contributions explored walking as an artistic, political, and philosophical act: a means of reconnecting with place, negotiating identity, challenging systems, and imagining alternative futures. In total, 28 universities and cultural organizations were represented, emphasizing the event’s deeply collaborative and pedagogical spirit. Over the course of the week, more than 300 individuals — including artists, theorists, students, local residents, and visitors — engaged with Prespa’s landscapes and histories through a multitude of formats: from performative walks and soundscapes to participatory rituals, site-responsive installations, and academic talks. WAC 25 was not merely an event but an unfolding process — immersive, experimental, and profoundly situated. A particularly resonant aspect of this year’s program was the inclusion of children through the thematic unit “Walking with Children”, which encouraged young participants to explore their environment through sensory play, collective storytelling, and embodied curiosity. As they walked alongside artists and educators, they became both transmitters and receivers of energy, transforming the territory into a shared ground for intergenerational exchange and creative agency. The WALC consortium is composed of six partners from five countries, each bringing unique perspectives and methodologies to the initiative: Visual March to Prespa (lead partner – University of Western Macedonia, Greece); walk · listen · create (WLC, Belgium); WalkLab2.PT (University of Minho, Portugal); Centre de Creació Contemporània Nau Côclea (Catalonia, Spain);, Association Temps Réel / Gigacircus (France) and Action Synergy SA (Greece). At the helm of the WALC project is Dr. Yannis Ziogas (UoWM), serving as scientific director, alongside Geert Vermeire (WLC) and Ziogas as the artistic coordinators. Together, they are guiding this ambitious endeavor toward its ultimate vision: to cultivate a transdisciplinary, inclusive, and ecologically responsive framework for walking arts that resonates far beyond the physical borders of Prespa. As the WALC project continues to evolve through 2027, and as future editions of WAC unfold, Prespa stands not only as a host but as an active collaborator — a terrain that listens, guides, and responds. In walking together, across paths known and newly imagined, the community of WAC reaffirms a collective commitment: to art that moves, to thought in motion, and to walking as both question and answer in times of transition.

Photo: Anny Kaltsidou, Patricia Miranda & Molly Wagner, WAC25 CoBorder Interweavings, photo Vasilis Ganiatsas, Yannis Ziogas Archive