Contribution short abstract:

Visual unwriting is an investigation of the experienced knowledge beyond words, an embodied mapping as a way of understanding how people discern and construct meaning within their environment. We will exhibit variations of (and insights from) our visual wayfaring and sensorial walking workshops.

Contribution long abstract:

Unwriting may denote surrendering to another form of speaking than one’s habitual expression. It is a process of learning to see the world with a creative awareness and sensitivity, softening the limits between the self and the environment, and a continuous restructuring of this encounter.

Visual unwriting could be defined as a method that leaves a safe (yet adventurous) “blank space” to recall and restructure embodied memory, to cast a new light on spatial experience, surrender to imagining a reality that is not imposed and reduced to a mere survival. Visual unwriting is a form of investigating experienced knowledge, a modality beyond words that delivers personal maps of inner wayfaring as platforms of understanding how people discern and construct meaning, within their living relationship with the environment.

The presentation will exhibit variations and insight from visual mapping workshops, made after sensorial walking. We will discuss maps of intentional wayfaring in both nature and urban context, while trying to avoid radical separation of the importance of both contexts. The aim is to illustrate how people with different backgrounds experience and relate to places, and how they desire to communicate atmospheric impressions to others.

The method we are developing is a mode of enquiry in trying to capture elements of people's experiences, emotions, memories, and relationships with environments and other-than-humans for research purposes. In other words, the method is not being used (at least by us) for purely artistic expressions.