Reviews and Reflections
"A challenging, radical and playful handbook for anyone interested in subversive walking, public art performance or psychogeographical interactions with the constructed environment. Smith offers ways into a creative relationship with the city and out of the deadening limitations of built ideology, positing an invisible insurrection of a million ambulating minds re-imagining our urban spaces and dancing into a new intersubjectivity. Read it, then get out there and explore!"
J.F. Lawrence on GoodReads "I've become a devotee of a man named Phil Smith. He does a lot of walking. But it is the act of walking, of being in the world, that his walks are all about and for. For him, walk is play. He makes up walking games, not so he can win, but so he can deepen the experience.
Walking, just walking, if you give yourself to it, is victory enough. And I learned through him, and through his most recent treatise Walking's New Movement, that just walking, walking itself, can become a journey into deeper consciousness - of the act, of the place, of the world. He's helped to illuminate and propagate an entire community of walkers and thinkers in a philosophy of walking he calls mythogeography. Yes, a philosophy of walking. A walking philosophy. Of just walking. Not so you can get anywhere. But so you can simply be more present, in the world. Walking, just walking, if you give yourself to it, is victory enough." Bernard De Koven on Deep Fun "a passionate, entertaining and an incisive view of 'radical walking' in its many-tentacled elusive forms." Roy Bayfield
"Phil Smith, the dériver's dérivist” McKenzie Wark
"E se il situazionista Debord parlava di “psicogeografia” e di “vagabondaggio urbano” anche come reazione alla Società dello Spettacolo, anche oggi il camminare per scopi non prettamente utilitaristici, il camminare consapevole, quindi oltre quell’andare da A a B di cui sopra, si porta dietro un ricco apparato di manifesti, pratiche artistiche, istanze politiche, dalle opere di Richard Long all’ Alpinismo Molotov del collettivo Wu Ming fino al Walking’s New Movement di Phil Smith."
Simone Sbarbati in frizzifrizzi magazine - read the full article |