Sound Walk Sunday 2019 – Who are the producers – Geert Vermeire

We are shouting from the roof tops about Sound Walk Sunday that launches on Sunday 1 September and runs throughout the following month.

We thought it was only fair to give our co-producers and partners a chance to tell you a little about who they are and their interest in supporting Sound Walk Sunday.  First up is multi-media artist Geert Vermeire who will be in the UK for the weekend of Sound Walk Sunday, leading a workshop around the British Library, a silent walk in Frome, Somerset, and co-charing a mini-symposium there exploring connections between sound walks and deep ecology.

Geert Vermeire in his own words

When Andrew Stuck inaugurated Sound Walk Sunday 2017 at the Made of Walking (III) Listening to the ground in La Romieu France, during a joint event with a group of walking creatives and sound artists, it occured to me that there was till that last August day of 2017 no celebration of Sound Walking in the world. In a podcast that Andrew recorded with me in Le Couvent of La Romieu I pointed out exactly this, as well in the line the whole gathering, that walking / sound walking is a celebration, that joy, surprise, to wonder about your environment as you have walked it for the first time, is what is walking about, that there is always a joy of walking. This extends to listening. In the Made of Walking gatherings, every other edition dedicated to sound, the recurrent key event is, and was as well the inaugurational event at the first edition in 2015, a 15 km silent group walk in an unknown territory, with as only goal to get lost together, to drift and listen in a silence that connects, together with strangers – walkers coming together from all continents in the unfamiliar fields of the Delphi valley. Sound Walk Sunday represents exactly this to me, the ability to listen together, beyond borders, beyond cultures, beyond expectations, and to do this while walking together. 

My interest in silence, and I always considered silence not as an absence but as the most revealing presence of sound, goes back to my early beginnings as a poet, always considering poetry as an act of listening to what not can be heard. Michel de Certeau wrote that a city can be seen as a text written by walkers “making use of a space that cannot be seen”, extending this to our ears, it is as valid to say about walking “making use of a space that can not be heard”. We walk with our ears, we resonate with the space we move in, our steps and bodies are the measurement of the world that we create while walking it. 

Walking is not passive nor static, as also listening is never quiet, it is an act of creation, imagination, transformation, of possibilities, of embracing what comes towards you, not of what lies behind you. Walking and listening combine the force of moving towards, reaching out, as much with open hands as with open ears. In a listening with the whole body.

You can listen to Geert Vermeire talking walking on our sister podcast site here


During September, we are partnering with Placecloud, and innovative app that allows you to geo-locate stories about buildings and places.  George Fort, the entrepreneur behind Placecloud has given up a chunk of his platform, for people to record their own personal #mylandmarks of places special to them.

Over to you, George….

Placecloud #mylandmarks 

Our mission here at Placecloud is to reveal the cultural significance of the everyday places that surround us, at home and abroad. To achieve this aim, we’ve invented something called the ‘placecast’, or place-specific podcast.

Placecasts are short audio recordings with GPS coordinates attached to them. This means that, despite being digital, they sit out in the physical world. Our users can listen to them while being physically present at the places they refer to.

This is very exciting – placecasts can really change the way you experience a place forever. They reveal the human-scale stories that lie hidden in buildings and places everywhere. The more placecasts you listen to, the more the everyday world that surrounds you comes alive. This is our vision.

Placecasts are of course fantastic for cultural experts – the guardians of those human-scale stories we’re talking about. But from the beginning we’ve intended that Placecloud be used by everyone. We all have stories to tell, and all our stories happened somewhere. 

They may be personal experiences; they may stories told to us by our friends; they may be stories from our family histories. But all these stories have the potential to bring places to life to whoever listens to them as placecasts.

This is where the #mylandmarks project comes in. So far, Placecloud has been used by fascinating cultural experts – historians, cultural geographers, journalists. They’ve made a load of excellent placecasts. But it’s time to open up Placecloud to the general public. We want to hear your stories. And we want to hear them in-situ, as placecasts.

In association with the Sound Walk Sunday 2019 festival – a global arts festival of all things sound, place, and walking, taking place for the month of September 2019 – we’re opening up Placecloud to the public. 

We want you to get creative and start making placecasts. They’re really fun to make, and by publishing your stories as placecasts you’ll be giving a chance for anyone to hear them. Your placecasts will bring places to life. It’s a wonderful project – please do get involved, and tell your friends, family, and community organisations to join in! 

Here is some more info on the #mylandmarks project: https://www.placecloud.io/my-landmarks

And here’s how to submit: https://www.placecloud.io/submissions

Let’s get recording!

You can listen to George Fort talking walking on our sister podcast site here


All about walking blog posting is unpredictable – if it’s raining biblical downpours then a blog post is more likely to appear, in most other weather conditions we are out walking and not blogging on a keyboard…..