#walknow | Forced Walks

Belsen behind the barbed wire

admin on February 3, 2016

Its about layers and what we tell ourselves and are told about each one. What happens when you dig through them and question through. Lorna took her first soil sample from the yard of a house built within the barbed wire perimeter of the Waldeslust camp. A pile of earth pushed aside from the building work, dark and sandy. Perhaps Esther trod on that earth. New house, white walls, shoes outside on the porch, dog barking and as I stood guard on that strange and rather furtive new ritual the central heating kicked in. Only steam from the chimney. Mix of guilt and catharsis, maybe they were just ignoring us.

We recce the arrival at Belsen discussing dilemmas and legacies with the archivist Bernd Horstmann. We visit the rest of the Belsen story still held behind barbed wire. Deep in the Nazi built military camp occupied by the victorious British and now returned to the Germans we saw buildings where survivors of Belsen were cared for and where some died and were buried. We saw their meeting places and heard echoes of their stories. Into the vast Round House once a concert hall, once makeshift hospital, now echoing, empty and cavernous. Full of ghosts. The British military have handed it over in full working order. Along with the site and buildings including churches and shops and cookhouses, a new built secondary school for 500 children, also stands empty. Cold War front line spaces idle and silent. Meanwhile refugees trudge their way to makeshift camps. History knocks on the door.

At last walking through the ghost gates of Belsen as Esther did when it was hard real and deathly 71 years ago. The landscaping tells its story, the horror is not concealed. I hear Esther retold talking about the shakey sensation of early fever, the creeping awareness of death approaching, saying to to herself and to her dead mother that she had done her best, she had tried to make it, to tell the story but that she feared she would not be able to carry on. Thanks to the soldiers she did, we will be there on Friday ensuring that the story continues to be told.

Crowd funding campaign launched, invitations to walk open

admin on November 11, 2015

Today launched the crowd funding campaign to a tremendous early response. With a small fund rolling over from the first phase Richard and Lorna are confident that the walk itself is secured are now offer invitation to join and participate in the final phase of the project.

Check out the crowd funding campaign here….. 28 days to raise £3000!

Forced Walks: Honouring Esther. Germany. 2016

Please share the link widely.

If you are thinking about joining the walk check out the details here and please get in touch on the contact form at the bottom of the page. Please like the facebook page and join the twitter stream…see the column to your right.

Good contact are being made in Germany, Richard and Lorna are especially keen to engage with walkers, artists, those working with refugees and anyone wishing to share second and third generation experiences. The contemporary resonances are poignant and powerful.

” We walk inspired by Esther’s spirit of internationalism and humanitarianism”

Exhibition in Bath

admin on July 16, 2015

The exhibition of work from the Somerset walk is currently up and running in central Bath. In the first exhibition room we have curated a series of 10 panels using research and documentation from the walk. In the glass box there are ‘relics’ gathered by the walkers and in the alcove, the notebooks they kept on the walk.

The second room show a series of floor pieces. Each room has its own looped audio ambience forming a randomised mix of bird song, trudging feet and comments recorded on the walk. These sounds mix with the voices of tourists and their guides, buskers, abbey bells and city seagulls calls filtering in the open door. A unique audio experience in each room. Every hour on the hour the exhibition sound is silenced by the call of the shofar and the sound of one of the interventions is played as a memorial candle burns momentarily. At the end of the intervention the sounds return and the air is briefly tainted with the smell of burning.

An orchid blooms in the darkness, a resonance of the orchid farm supposedly operating from the site of the Waldeslust slave labour camp.

The light from the projection reflects into the installation room. A series of short films representing the experience of the walk are projected across the hall disappearing along the wall out to the door. Sometimes it seems like a walker has dissolved out of the film and into the world and sometimes it seems that an exhibition visitor disappears into the film. Across the digital divide.

On the corner of Abbey Street we look out on the Abbey, the Roman Baths and the ceaseless ebb and flow of tourists. This week is Bath Spa University Graduation week, students in gowns and proud parents getting their souvenir shots in front of Bath’s historic architecture. Strange and powerful juxtapositions.

The exhibition runs at 44 AD Gallery, Abbey Street, Bath until Sunday 19 July at 16.00

Recce for Honouring Esther

admin on February 3, 2015

I did a complete walk of the proposed route today almost 70 years to the day when Esther was forced on her march from the slave labour camp to Belsen. It was cold and there was a sharp wind but I just keep thinking how this was nothing to compare with what she experienced. I was well fed, I had had a nice breakfast and was armed with plenty of goodies to keep me going.

I heard woodpeckers and thought of machine gun fire, I trudged along frozen ground and through small settlement. I was consumed with thoughts about this parallel journey, the one in my head and the one I was walking. I kept thinking about the cold and Charles Wheeler’s newsreel images of Kurdish families at a cold and windswept at a mountain pass in some recent war came to mind.

As my body kicked in to remind me I forced myself to run and walk at pace to hear the voices in my head keeping me going. I could slow and relax at will though.

So for those thinking about actually doing the walk with us…day one is quite a stretch an all day walk including the ‘interventions’ which we can now start planning. Muddy with a couple of steppish climbs and descents. Walking boots definitely and maybe a stick for the slippy bits. All walkers are asked to register and will receive detailed updates about route and meet points etc