Clare Qualmann

Bio: Clare Qualmann is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

Ways to Wander

Abstract: This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander. 54 Ingtriguing encounters produced by artists involved in the Walking Artist Network and beyond. Edited by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann.

Postcards from the Underground

Abstract: This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where participants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum. The aim of the walkshop was to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia. This article focuses on two key elements of the walkshop: (1) First, they interrogate an attempt to engage bodily with an elemental phenomenon—groundwater—that is for the most part inaccessible to human experience. The authors thus draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis) to explain how bodily attunement to our own wateriness, alongside the “proxy stories” of arts and sciences expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. (2) Second, they ask how walkshopping—as a coming together—can nonetheless hold onto the ambivalences, tensions, and glitches that are part of sharing space in the face of fraught issues such as mining. Here, the authors turn to Lauren Berlant’s recent writing on the commons. They suggest that their walkshop was what Berlant would call ‘training’ in living with the awkward and complicit relations of being in common. Funding acknowledgement This research was supported by the FASS (University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and Artsource Global City AIR - State Government of WA funding.

No Woman’s Land - Walking as a Dramaturgical Device in Performance of Maternal Migration

Abstract: In 2015 Garton and her collaborator walked 220 miles across Poland and Germany, re-walking the route of a traumatic familial journey as a result of a violent expulsion in 1945. This article discusses the performance walk of ‘No Woman’s Land’ as a methodology towards a dramaturgy of migration, enabling an authentic representation of the migrant mother through the staging of the exhausted female body, the interweaving of documentary footage, and the real act of walking. During the performance, performers (and spectators), walked on treadmills through projections of archival and recent footage of migration. The article argues that through viscerally representing migration, the performance and documentary produced a kinesthetic empathy with the physical demands of escape and in turn provided an ontological ground for disseminating historical and political knowledge of forced maternal migration.