A reading, a reflective walk, a quiet drift, a correspondence, a playful pedestrian exploration… how do walking a distance, writing letters and (not) speaking interrelate? Starting from Small Projects, Marie Nerland and Nickel van Duijvenboden will lead the way on a shared walk. En route, certain sites and their specificity will serve as cues to read portions of text that were drawn into their exchange on the topic of walking and writing, with the aim of exploring a sense in which correspondence can be approached as a ‘conversation with ghosts’.

‘I once spoke to someone about the activity of exchanging letters as a means of measuring distance. There’s the distance implied by posting a piece of mail, the amount of time it takes, the stamps and traces and creases it collects along the way; in other words, the physical distance. But there is also the distance of minds, which may in fact be so aligned as to cancel any physical distance. Letters trace the incompatibility of thought. This is all about the question, to what extent do you and I differ – are we ‘of one mind’? – but also to what extent the you that I am conjuring in my writing differs from the real you, and in what sense the writer of the letters is of a piece with me. It is perhaps in this sense that exchanging letters is like a conversation with ghosts.’
[…]
‘Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Wanderlust that walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. That the mind is a landscape as such – and walking is one way to traverse it.’

Nickel van Duijvenboden has been active as a writer, a visual artist and most lately as a singer. His long-standing preoccupation with the written correspondence and the discovery of voice have disrupted his relationship with art. He is currently finishing a project called *Post*, which consists of an artist’s book, a record and a film, and which details this process.

Marie Nerland is an artist and a curator. She has been working with different collaborative performance-based projects, of her most recent projects was a lecture performance at Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall. In 2008 she founded Volt, a long-term curatorial initiative that commissions and presents new projects by contemporary artists in Bergen.

An earlier iteration of the project took place at the Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen last year.
The project is supported by The Mondriaan Fund.