This Walk is a Pause

Nienke Scholts

Care Ecologies

Ways of Knowing

Publication

The Weather, the Forest, the Sky, the Sky, the Colors of the Day, and the Sky - 2019 © Nienke Scholts

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“I started walking in Scotland, in Japan. Or was it an island closer to home; Terschelling, my dreams? I started walking at the age of 2, in the living room, the backyard. Never liked it as a child, always wanted to be carried. Somewhere along the way I started to enjoy walking. The exact point is a forgotten moment of crucial change. I started walking as part of my artistic practice in the Finnish countryside and pine forests of mid-winter, dark at first glance, so colourful inside. I started walking when I had to stay home. Every morning and afternoon, while the world slowed down. I started walking when I got burned-out, trying to remind my body how to relax, how to be restful: how to pause. This walk is a pause. This pause is a walk.”

Nienke Scholts

What: Audio walk

When: When in need for a pause

Where: Wherever your feet take you

Duration: 50 min (or a longer while)

This Walk is a Pause is a poetic sound piece in which the narrator invites the listener to walk along with her through both actual and mental landscapes – Finnish pine forests, fields of exhaustion, tingling brain gums, the neighborhood, experiences of disorientation and comforting darkness – eventually arriving in a surrounding where walking offers a form of pausing.

Exploring walking as a pausing practice, this piece asks which potential space might open if one steps aside from given pathways for a shorter or longer while: If pausing would be what you most need, what would you need it to be?

Published: September 2022

Concept, Text, Voice: Nienke Scholts

Sound design: Femke Dekker

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