Step by Step (4), an interdisciplinary seminar with a focus on walking

This seminar is the fourth in a series bringing together artists and researchers from across disciplines whose work uses, addresses, results in, or engages with walking. This year’s first Step by Step will focus on issues of walking and migration, and feature Dr. Göze Saner (Goldsmiths); Marion Vargaftig (Manifesta); and Dr. Georgie Wemyss (University of East London). There will be wine and nibbles, and time for discussion following the presentations.

Dr. Göze Saner is a lecturer in theatre at Goldsmiths University. Göze has trained with The New Winds, led by Iben Nagel Rasmussen of Odin Teatret, with Claudia Contin and Ferrucio Merisi on commedia dell’arte, with Enzo Cozzi on leather mask-making and with Alison Hodge on her clown. Since 2005, she has been working with The Quick and the Dead led by Alison Hodge. In 2005, Göze founded her company, cafila aeterna, www.cafila-aeterna.com. Currently, the company is working on developing a traveling performance in response to the tortoise as archetype. Dr. Saner will be discussing her project Migrant Steps, a community theatre project that engages migrant women living in the UK and Europe. Starting from the figure of a travelling tortoise and combining methodologies such as psychogeography, performance art, physical theatre and autobiographical writing, the project aims to transform participants' relationship with the urban environment.

Marion Vargaftig is a founder of Manifesta, which aims to facilitate creative expression of marginalised and youth voices (including migrants) using arts and culture and film-making, in order to express young people’s ideas and perspectives, and put them ‘centre stage’ - using traditional exhibition sites as well as more unusual public spaces to reach the widest possible audience mix, and to provoke refreshed discourses on key current social and cultural affairs. She will discuss her project In My Footsteps, which used walking to create interactions between people and place - combining local history and heritage with communal culture and personal identity. First piloted in London’s East End – Whitechapel, Limehouse and Poplar – it has engaged local residents, young and old, in living-heritage activities: unearthing, highlighting and celebrating fresh ‘takes’ on particular places that matter to them.

Dr. Georgie Wemyss is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging. She is currently working on the EUBorderscapes project, investigating the evolving concepts of state borders in Europe. Her interest in the everyday processes of bordering grew out of her D.Phil ethnographic research about Britishness and belonging together with insights gained from 20 years teaching social anthropology to adults returning to education in East London. Previously she worked as a youth worker in Tower Hamlets and lived in India and Bangladesh where she studied at the Bangla Academy.