"Alice Walks" started in Johannesburg in 2014 and will continue from August to October in Kinshasa. It should go further in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. It’s only a start!!

This project questions the place of the body in complex urban environments, mostly post-colonial, particularly where social segregation, gentrification, social disparities are effective but also where several cultures coexist in a limited space. Those are urban contexts where the body becomes a messenger, of individual and urban identities.

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11a

Our body is a « relay » between our inwardness and the outside world, expressing our culture, our desires, our fears, our story, our relationship with others... It’s interesting for me to connect that with questions of theatricality and performance: What picture of ourselves should our body communicate? How to communicate it? Which strategy? How and by who are we seen? What is our awareness of spaces and people around us?

Just like actors contribute to give structure to their scenic space, body give structure to the city reciprocally. Both dialogue and negotiate their territory, oscillating between constraints and freedom.

Step by step, we walk, we shift our thought while we move our body. This project of “Alice Walks” means to build a three voices communication, between my identity, another identity and the urban identity and to question the balance of such construction and to communicate it.

This project involves walking with people I met in the city, following those walkers and exchange with them. Then, a work of memory and communication of those experiences takes place, with the help of mind-maps, words, collage, and photography when the situation allowed it. The objective is to communicate those itineraries and the questions they raise by a book.

18b

Following my first residency in Johannesburg for « Alice walks », I realized that the book had a big importance in the project that I didn’t take enough time to consider. For this next residency in Kinshasa, I would like to work to develop this object, in direct relationship with the walks and depending of the technical means I will have.

The book passes from hand to hand, we can lend it, open it from any pages, close it to browse it later... In French we say “parcourir un livre”, meaning to cross or travel a book.

The process of the walks will be inherent to the conception of the book and will be communicated by it. An inner and intimate relationship takes place with the reader, a specific temporality that I like to connect with the walking time.

19a

19b

Alice Walks, in Kinshasa

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