WAP : Walking + Art Practice
INTRO WAP och WAPC
In the autumn of 2023, we carried out our first residency for walking‑based artists in the northern Stockholm archipelago. The site functioned as a hub for artistic work in a coastal, rural environment. Each walking year had its own research theme, which the artists approached through their specific practices.
In 2025, some of us formed a coalition and participated in the artist‑run art fair in Stockholm. Since then, the initiative has consisted of two branches: the WAP Program and the WAP Coalition.
WAP PROGRAM
WAP is a process‑based artist residency where we deepen our knowledge by learning from one another and from what we encounter together on Burch Island/Björkö. Together, we explore proximity through artistic expressions rooted in walking practices. Each year has its own theme or focus. Some participants come from WAPC, while others are selected through an open call.
The interventions weave through different temporal layers and places. The focus lies on how walking is intertwined with our practices. Fieldwork and seminars are carried out collectively to locate and unravel structures, narratives, and forces. We believe in a safe and kind attitude as a natural part of the artistic environment we share.
The framework of the WAP Program is intentionally porous and co‑created, allowing participating artists to influence its direction. The program draws inspiration from posthumanist and new‑materialist perspectives, particularly those working to dissolve familiar dualisms through non‑hierarchical and relational approaches.
WAP‑program på BKN 2023–2025
BKN fosters a collegial environment: “thinking together, learning together” – a resource and a semi‑public forum for exploration and experimentation.
Together, we create a shifting and dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature through critical and poetic inquiry, shaped by the immediate surroundings: the forest, the lakes, the sea, and the people living in the rural landscape.
WAP26 – Entanglement and Proximity
WAP25 – Walking As Passion – Embodied Thinking
WAP24 – Spaces of Anticipation
WAP23 – Attentive Walking
WAP COALITION (WAPC)
WAPC 2026 edition consists of practitioners committed to traversing and transgressing spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries—using movement as a way to interrogate and reimagine the social and ecological systems that structure contemporary life.
WAPC maintain a strong interest in methodologies that foster critical discourse around the structural constraints encountered by artists, activists, and diverse cultural and gendered bodies. Their work challenges normative frameworks and proposes alternative configurations of social agency grounded in vulnerability, reciprocity, and collective practice.
In WALC the artists do not come to present “a product”, they do not come to put on a show or to show a finished work, outcomes of objectified art but they are involved with the people of the territories and with its walkers, to deploy a process of shared creation.
Walking with and as communities are made of groups of people who come together around a common goal or cause and who, together, walk towards transformation.”
We are part of WALC/WalkingTogether “Actions in the public space allows artists, with their cross-disciplinary tools and methods, to map our living world in an alternative way, engage in relation, forging significant links with community, making them active agents for change.
