WAP : Walking + Art Practice
INTRO WAP and WAPC
In the fall of 2023 our first residency for walking artists took place in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. The venue was a node for the artis in a rural coastal context. Each walking year held a research topic that artist approached from their specific practice. In 2025 some of us formed a coalition and participated in the artist run art fair in Stockholm. The two strands are since then WAP Program and WAP Coalition.
WAP PROGRAM
WAP is a process-based art residency, where we delve into each others’ knowledges and things we encounter together on Burch island/Björkö. Together we explore proximity through artistic expressions in the field of walking practices. Each year has its own theme/focus. Part of participants are from WAPC and part from an open call.
Interventions weave across different registers of time and site. The focus is on how walking is interlocked in our practices. Fieldworks and seminars are jointly done to locate and entangle structures, narratives and forces. We believe in a safe and friendly attitude as part of the art scene we share.
The framework of the WAP Program is intentionally porous and co-constituted, allowing participating artists to shape its direction. It draws on posthumanist and new materialist perspectives, especially those concerned with dismantling entrenched dualisms through non-hierarchical and relational approaches.
In this context, walking is treated simultaneously as an artistic medium and as a methodological framework for critical and creative investigation. As artists move through lived environments, they explore how agency may be extended to human and nonhuman others, to place, and to ecological processes. These practices emphasize relational care and collective attunement as strategies for cultivating co-presence and emergent forms of togetherness.
WAP Programs at BKN 2023-2025
BKN fosters a peer-based environment: “thinking together, learning together” – a resource and semi public forum to explore and experiment. Jointly, we form a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature towards critical and poetic explorations, influenced by the immediate surroundings; the forest, lakes, sea and people living in the rural area.
WAP26 – Entanglement and Proximity
WAP25 –Waking As Passion – Embodied Thinking
WAP24 –Spaces of Anticipation
WAP23 – Attentative Walking
Keywords: walking, asymmetry, entanglement, beyond violence, not-knowing, desire, nature, responsibility, deep listening, close seeing, territory, contested sites
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.
