Caminography as a foreign practice

Abstract

This essay proposes urban walkgraphy as a foreign practice, addressing the tension between belonging and non-belonging within urban space. Walking through the city produces trajectories between the ordinary and the extraordinary, transforming space into a territory of passages and displacements. Walkgraphy is understood as both method and aesthetic, political, and sensorial practice, one that takes place through movement and alterity. The text engages with Freud’s concept of the uncanny (Unheimlich), Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of difference, and Francesco Careri’s aesthetic practice of walking, considering the act of walking as a gesture of continuous creation, openness, and listening. Its ethical and political dimensions are also affirmed, as it restores visibility to marginalised zones and asserts the right to narrate and to inhabit space. The work of the artist Paulo Nazareth exemplifies this practice-in-becoming, constructing sensitive cartographies of encounter and difference, and transforming walking into an exercise in co-authorship, restless hospitality, and resistance within urban space. Thus, walkgraphy emerges as a critical device for the decolonisation of urban meaning, articulating ethics, aesthetics, and politics through the sensorial experience of the body in movement.