What role for art, artists and museums in the society of complexities?
A dialogue with walking artists Hamish Fulton and Michael Höpfner
Walking is an act profoundly linked to the evolution of the human species. From Orrorin tugenensis, our oldest ancestor who 5.8 million years ago made his first steps on Earth, to Neil Armstrong, who on 20 July 1969 stepped onto the Moon, up to the marches of activists focusing attention on the ongoing climate emergency, walking bears witness to the extent we have appropriated the world and the quality of relationships we have established with it.
To walk along a path that leads to a mountain, without necessarily having to conquer it, is therefore a transformative experience that shifts the centre of gravity of those who experience it. While walking, we are more susceptible to our surroundings, naturally receptive and exposed to everything that is other than us, attentive to the unknown, vulnerable, freed from the overabundance of meanings, bonds and thoughts that crowd our accelerated and disconnected existence.
These concepts are the basis of the exhibition Walking Mountains at the Museo Nazionale della Montagna, presenting the works of 20 artists whose research is driven by an awareness that walking can be a revitalising and subversive act.
For some of them, walking is at the center of their practice; for others, it is one of their areas of research, although inserted within a production characterised by a particular sensitivity for environmental themes.
The movement of the body in space – not that of a flâneur – is intended by them as a gesture of mutation and opening towards the other. In the crossing, an attitude of focus and awareness can lead to rethinking the way of being-in-contact with the world. A state of biological and psychological blending, partly conscious and partly not, with everything that is visible and invisible, activates physical and mental reprogramming. The relationship between the human and beyond-human dimensions almost always occurs through an action bordering on performance. This leads to a reaction, produces a break, opens up to worlds and images, deconstructs cultural certainties and mental constructs, forces the overcoming of all types of materialism, and stimulates the conscience, and a sense of responsibility, symbiosis and participation.
In order: Hamish Fulton, postcards selection exhibited in the context of Walking Mountains exhibition, Museo Nazionale della Montagna, Turin 2025 Views of Hamish Fulton and Michael Höpfner works exhibited in the exhibition. Walking Mountains exhibition, Museo Nazionale della Montagna, Turin 2025
Cover image: Public walk, Hamish Fulton exhibition Bombas Gens, Valencia - Spain, 2018
Walking Mountains pays homage to Hamish Fulton, founder in the 1970s of Walking Art. The artist has always declared that there is an unbreakable bond between walking and art, contributing to a pooling of messages, ideals and works that urge us to fight for a better world.
His thinking, historically close to the principles of Deep Ecology and far from the materialism of Land Art, has triggered a broadening of the concepts of art and artist. Even today, his practice stands as one of the most radical and capable of providing answers to the complex issues that humankind is facing.
The figure of Hamish Fulton as the project's mentor, is joined by that of Michael Hopfner, one of the most interesting artistic figures internationally for his path-centered art practice.
Walking Mountains exhibition is flanked by a program of social walks with the aim to unite Museum, City and People, amplifying the message of the exhibition. Performances by Hamish Fulton, Sibylle Duboc, Claudia Losi and Bepi Ghiotti use the public space like a theater for a direct dialogue with people. Art and artists expand their role and become interlocutors stimulating participation, responsibility and attention to issues of global significance.
In recent years, the complex nature of the changes that humankind is passing through has meant that it is necessary to rethink the role played by museums, artists and art institutions within society. The relationship between art, culture and ecological thinking is triggering deep artistic-theoretical reflection and a rereading of the ways in which museums interact with the collective.
Starting from this awareness, the dialogue with walking artists Hamish Fulton and Michael Höpfner is the attempt to explore these topics.
Hamish Fulton, Walking Every Directions, 1st November 2024, communal walk, Museo Nazionale della Montagna.
Andrea Lerda
Dear Hamish and Michael, I would like to start our conversation with some thoughts about the role of art and artists today. Museums and cultural institutions are called to rethink and update their position in contemporary society. Considering their being “social actors” and fundamental guides to renew the global community, I wonder and I ask you if the identity of the artist has also changed. In this sense my first question: what role you think belongs to your being figures who use creativity as a means to bring together different sensibilities?
Michael Höpfner
Just as a thought to start: personally I think art and museums as guideline for societies are completely overrated.
In a healthy democracy it is the civil society where these debates should happen; art is the rational and irrational part and artists contribute with opening doors and visions through contradictions and alternative routes.
We had 30 years where every second sentence that was written in the art context used the term politics. I think philosopher Slavoj Zizek mentioned already years go “if you want to do politics work in politics”.
The problem we face: democracy is not healthy any more - we, the civil society, did not care for all our lifetime. It is in the hands of us, our local communities, in what is a civil society; not in a global society that is currently defined by oligarchs and super rich. Still, in saying this, we have to reach out behind our local horizon - to listen, see and learn.
Hamish Fulton
I take this question to be about two different approaches within contemporary art.
1. The conventional practice of art object production by the individual artist (including production teams employed by individual artists) and 2, the more recent spread and expansion out into society, of what art could potentially be, rather than what it has been. This approach reaches out around the world and into the conditions of life today, human life and the impact of human life on nature.
I do not mean to present this as a competition between sellable and unsellable art, between art-for-arts-sake ’objects’ (investment) and woke ‘life’ (experience). As an artist myself, I respect the creative decisions made by sister and brother artists…whether individuals, pairs or groups of artists working together.
Currently under attack, the US acronym, DEI meaning diversity, ethnicity and inclusion, the survival of which, when applied to art education is of the greatest importance.
More possibilities, not fewer possibilities.
Michael Höpfner
Teaching at an Art-Academy I can hear every day about the responsibility of art in context of ethics, moral, social, political, philosophical and media dimensions.
I do experience how these expectations reduce the interest of young people and young artists to engage further and in a different way. A possibility that only art is able to provide in our society thank to its creativity and inspiration power.
Before one starts one already gives up, better don’t touch it, it’s too big anyway.
So…what I mean here is before we walk out into nature we give up, better stay home and stare at our smartphones.
In order: Michael Höpfner, Retracing Kyong Two Times in Ten Years, 2025; Circumambulation of Tangra Tso, 2025; View of the exhibition Retracing the Footsteps of Others at Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna 2025; Walking Towards Targo Ri, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna.
Andrea Lerda
Dear Hamish and Michael, It is very interesting what you write. Your words open our conversation towards many directions.
Michael, you say that museums as guidelines are completely overrated, and I agree with you in part. It is quite evident that in our time there is an ongoing huge debate on the social role of art institutions. That could be positive and negative at the same time. Positive If we consider that art is also part of the social and political dimension of our society, and that I feel it is interesting to blend more and more different topics, sectors, awarenesses, in order to encourage a process of increasing awareness and knowledge. Negative if we only delegate to art the role of monitoring rights, ethics, responsibility and critical vision, wilfully deresponsibilizing politics and the organs that should deal with this every day, for the sake of people and humanity.
But would it not also be a gesture of deresponsibility not to update the role of institutions in this present of complexity?
The same thing for the role of artists in our society. Personally, I feel that a lot of artists with which I worked and I currently work, feel very strongly their need to be part of a process of change. It is as if their initial and historical vocation of opening wide the doors to the imaginary has now turned into an awareness that they need to bring their gazes back to reality. Obviously this is not the case for everyone, but for most of those working on environmental issues I think it is.
I believe that the artist’s identity has inevitably changed today, and that this brings with it what art will be in the future. A different way to experience visionary power. Perhaps this process is the result of democracy and important for democracy. Just as revolutions have always taken place in the streets, it seems to me that art is again coming out of its conventional and traditional spaces to try to make its revolution.
At this point my question is: how can we improve the presence of art and artists in our society? How can artists be even more involved in an effective process of social imagination?
Michael Höpfner
Perhaps as an inspiration we better look at artists from outside the western art making sphere. I just received a video by an artist friend from Yogyakarta who is highly interested in how to get better and clean water for communities in his country. He did a project with friends in a small village years ago by planting trees. These local trees have roots to clean the soil from toxic waste. Within a couple of years the village had clean soil and with the trees a birdlife returned that was already forgotten.
Here I can see not just the creation of a piece of art, but with it a civil society that was inspired by it. To experience art and the work of artists in a communal way.
Lately I though perhaps the time of the mega art centers might be over.
Perhaps it is better to have smaller, de-centralized and thus flexible institutions that can better and more radical re-act with the ideas of artists in our society.
But we have to be aware of one thing: event-culture and accessibility art does not mean better for our society. Visual art has an important function in our civil society… it is a watchtower, a critical place of people who let new questions arise.
This creates new contradictions. Artists should to be a highly critical force in our society. They might for some time better act from outside of society, not always from within prefabricated places/institutions.
As an artist I see it as a game…thus walking became not just a way to explore nature, to look behind the horizon, but – and this is essential – run away from society and create my own way to look and reflect; at least for some time.
Walk out - walk back in.
In order: Hamish Fulton, Slow Walk. Valencia Spain 8 January 2008; Postcards selection exhibited in the context of Walking Mountains exhibition, Museo Nazionale della Montagna, Turin 2025. Courtesy the artist.
Andrea Lerda
Dear Michael, thank you for your wonderful answer. The image of "the game of art" is very funny. And what you wrote gives me the possibility to think that we are now experiencing a new game level. Beyond the level of awareness-raising, we are playing with a level where action emerges as necessary, where it is necessary to delegate an artistic role and awareness also to new generations (students, young artists, normal people, everybody is around us). But, paradoxically, that level is the same indicated by Joseph Beuys with his theory of social sculpture and his thoughts about art as an individual and collective experience to shape a better world. A level that we have not yet successfully passed. For now it is still a game over!
In any case, your words drawn a clear image of this updated role of artists in society. The work of your artist friend from Yogyakarta that you were describing, perhaps it would be better to use the term community based practice or environmental based action, is close to the approach of artists like Carolina Caycedo, Cecylia Malik and Katerina Seda - three women figures that use their time and energy to achieve their artistic mission: working with community to build a new sense of social justice and environmental preservation.
These words give me the opportunity to think that walking artists (in this case I am specifically referring to you and Michael) are in my opinion social actors using the silence of footsteps to talk with and within the world in order to convey messages and raise public awareness. Isn't it?
Hamish Fulton
Now, in re-reading Andrea’s questions, I am starting to get a better bigger sense. My immediate answer to the last part of the recent question is…there may be many artists who have no interest in being involved in larger social issues, they just want to get on with their own work. Personally, I’m attracted to the possibilities of social projects with the public.
In reading both of your last comments, I realise that I am in a totally different place. You are both involved in positions, in Torino and Wien, (and many other locations) where you can sense and eye-witness actual evolutions within your art communities. My situation is that, as a self-employed English artist specialising in walking with a particular concern for nature…unfortunately… nature-as-nature and walking-as-walking are nonexistent topics within contemporary UK art history.
Walking has immediate social potential. All kinds of walking, rural and urban. Not only group walking, but also solo walking. We live in a political era of wide spread mass protests, members of the public marching against the failures of various governments. The solidarity of ‘the people’ taking to the streets on foot. Not forgetting, that in the current climate of increasing authoritarianism…it is military parades that are always favoured.
There are potentially many forms of community ‘art walks’ where nothing three dimensional is built except for new experiences with different and previously unknown people. Each walk has a life and a dispersion, every participant is an eyewitness…documentation is optional. In this scenario, the emphasis is on human action. Experiences, not objects.
Ordinarily, construction of all kinds is encouraged and profitable. ‘Allowing’ space for local nature to exist, is therefore considered wasteful.
At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century…we need to change our minds, not continuously disrupt nature by endlessly changing the land.
WALKING IS THE BEST WAY I KNOW OF
FOR BEING INFLUENCED BY NATURE
Andrea Lerda
Your words are so clear and I am totally in tune with your vision.
That is the point. I think that your extraordinary intuition between the 1960s and 1970s was to say “WALKING IS THE BEST WAY I KNOW OF FOR BEING INFLUENCED BY NATURE”. No to the heavy interference of Land Art, no to the devastation of the anthropic impact, yes to walking as a gesture of empathy, listening, awareness and change. This revolutionary approach in art, this innovation of the artist role is something that, in my opinion, is constantly happening in our time.
You and Michael represent two examples of what I am saying. I agree with you that the art system does not recognize this aspect enough, yet I still believe that the art of being - more and more - made with people, outside museums. Your communal walks are in my opinion a fundamental part of your work and represent a huge occasion to amplify something that you personally experienced and that you still experience during your solo walk.
On the occasion of your performance titled “Walking Every Directions” - that you presented in the context of the social walks program, part of the exhibition Walking Mountains at Museo Nazionale della Montagna - I had the possibility to personally feel the transformative experience of that public walk.
Of course, not all artists are inclined to use this participatory dimension, Michael for example does not need it. What is the aspect you feel is most important in involving the audience in the realization of these participatory walking performances?
Hamish Fulton
For me, what feels like the most important part of my communal walks is basically that people who don’t know each other are willing to come together to physically participate in experiencing one unfamiliar eccentric walk. Rightly or wrongly from my perspective, that is where the ‘benefits' lie…that strangers come together to experience one short and unfamiliar walk, together as living humans…not AI objects. This is not figurative painting.
My feeling about all this cannot just end here, comparisons and contrasts, connections and opposites are necessary so as to position the experience.
We haven’t mentioned mountaineering. The advent of commercial mountaineering expeditions to the world’s highest peaks over the last thirty years have become popular and lucrative (some would also say, environmentally damaging.) It is important to point out that there is a giant difference between a commercial expedition of amateur ‘strangers’ and that of a small handful of trusted friends, of peers exploring a new route, in ‘alpine style’.
Finally, I now refer importantly to Michael and his solo walks. In my work, I wanted to contrast my own solo walks with communal walks, and I even had the concept to experience Himalayan commercial expeditions. Some years ago in the UK there were many understandable complaints about self important, solitary white males walking heroically off into the mist…We can fill in this whole relevant sociological gendered scenario, but now I raise another area of consideration, also dismissed years ago by the art world, that of shamanism, not artist-joke-shamans, but authentic Indigenous shamans out in nature with the two classical descriptive words : solitude & suffering.
Knowing from his artworks, that Michael has made so many solo walks on the Tibetan plateau gives me such a sense of ‘hope’ for ‘balance’.
In order: Hamish Fulton, Slowalk in support of Ai Weiwei. Turbine Hall at Tate Modern London Last day of April 2011; Public Pavements Slow Walkers and Pedestrians. Oslo Norway. 30 January 2014; Walking 14 Circuits of the Bodnath Kora. Nepal 28 October 2008
Michael Höpfner
Dear Hamish, dear Andrea, I was following your thoughts and conversation while having a group of artists from Yogyakarta here at the Academy in Vienna.
I learned in the last two years that listening, seeing, experiencing how artists from Ghana or Indonesia work in relation to land, nature, spirit, history work was liberating.
Hamish, you mentioned how our approach was misinterpreted in the last years in our countries or in the western art context.
None of this with female or male artists in Asia or Africa: here artists immediately understand why one should walk (also in solitude) - be it female or male needs this sort of solitude or place of silence to observe and to find a sort of spirit of being and of nature. I think because they understand that humans have to be partly rational, partly irrational. They understand that an artist, who works in solitude in the same moment can work in context of human friendship and communal work.
In our western world of postmodern ruins we can’t see this, we are distracted and constantly have to point at other things, be it human, technological or even worse we mix it up and think we can get away with some cyber-human utopia in what we call "worlding" or world building. Again, a world of humans - not of insects, water, trees etc.
On top of this there is an unbelievable arrogance in the western art world - and most of us still do not see it - still we get lost in ideologies and fear that we lose our leadership position.
Hamish mentioned “more possibilities”! That is exactly the case, this is what we have to allow.
WALKING IS THE BEST WAY I KNOW OF FOR BEING INFLUENCED BY NATURE
Andrea Lerda
Dear Michael, your words are very clear. How could I not totally agree with what you write? As much as technological evolution, artificial intelligence, the new frontier of the cyborg represents something inevitable and something we have to deal with (certainly there are extremely important aspects connected to this historical evolution) I am deeply convinced that the loss of the connection you describe of is a great lack that will mark humanity in the future.
In your practice, walking is an extraordinary way to explore and to be in touch with otherness (the series of drawings Talking To stones is a very interesting example), with the visible and invisible aspects of the world we live in, but also a direct way to map what remains of that ancestral, resonant and deep connection between human beings and nature.
It is a very complex exercise for all of us, almost impossible within the society in which we live, engulfed by techno-capitalism.
An exercise that also changes us as human beings, intimately. Which is what we ultimately deeply need.
Michael Höpfner
This also happens in my latest project presented at at Galerie Huber Winter in Wien, based on personal memory. After working with you on the exhibitions Stay with Me. The Mountain as a Space of Resonance and Walking Mountains, that were based on walks I wanted to look back on, my own life again.
In January I suddenly felt the urge to do something about one day/ one moment in my life while walking. A moment that deeply moved me and left a deep human impression on me.
In late summer 2007 I did this expedition walk over the Transhimalaya into a silent and thinly populated plateau region to a lake called Tangra Tso. It was my longest most challenging walk I ever did.
After four weeks, already at the lake, I climbed a no name 6000m peak (too much energy and curiosity). The view onto the plateau was incredible - it showed something one can only see in Tibet: that the earth mirrors the sky, the clouds cast fast moving shadows on the hills and everything is moving.
On that day I had a sun stroke I remember the night was horrible. I lost much liquid and on the next morning - I had my tent next to a nomad camp - I looked like living dead. The nomads were concerned; one man came with a donkey and he offered to walk with me for a day until we reached the holy rock formation of Kyong Zhong. A female pilgrim joined and also a herder who looked for his yaks. I walked behind them watching them touching rocks along the way, plants and even little insects. In them was an excitement to "be", to be here on earth that I have never experienced before. Perhaps I felt so overwhelmed because of my health situation and the resulting perception of the environment. Hence the title of the show: Retracing the Footsteps of Others
In order: Michael Höpfner, Retracing the Footsteps of the Caravan II, early morning 18.9.2007, 2025; View of the exhibition Retracing the Footsteps of Others at Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna 2025; Courtesy the artist and Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna.
