An intimate, participatory and performative walk gathering sounds and images, pausing to reflect, bear witness and share with the world.

The Walk in Somerset:

Artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein led a group of approximately 20 walkers, following public rights of way as close as possible to the transposed line. The walk set off from outside the Cheese and Grain, Frome on Tuesday April 14, and arrived at Bath’s old Jewish Burial Ground at Combe Down, on Wednesday 15 April 2015, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Belsen death camp.

Another group of walker started at the unmarked Workhouse graves in OddDown on Wednesday 15 April, and  joined the main walk at the old Jewish Burial ground for the closing event. We invited walkers to actively engage in some way: gathering sounds, photographs and objects, drawing, writing down thoughts and observations, talking and discussing. At the points where our walk intersected the line of the transposed death march we stopped for a moment, a reading, silence or music. We invited people to join us online and walkers helped us engage with them by posting on face book and twitter.

We use a range of social media platforms and link up live through Social Hiking and Viewranger. There were 10 themed interventions as well as the start and finish points.

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.kag4W27uQz-M&w=640&h=480]

Why Bath/Why Frome?

The artists live in Bath and were aware of the Jewish Burial Ground, Lorna Brunstein had used soil gathered there for her 2013 piece “Baggage”. Richard White discovered that he could move the graphic of a line on a map whilst retaining orientation and scale, he  drew the line on the map of Esther’s walk , the red line on the map and then dragged that across the map of Europe to Bath.

The artists agreed that the Jewish Burial Ground would be an appropriate end point for their walk. With the awful logic of that route the starting point became a point just outside Frome.