Nick Shepherd
In 2014, I started convening ‘walking seminars’ together with Christian Ernsten, a researcher based at Maastricht University, and the Dutch documentary photographer Dirk-Jan Visser. Our starting idea with the walking seminars was simple: invite the most interesting possible group of people to walk, talk, and share ideas and approaches. Since then, our ideas have evolved. We always invite a mixed group of scholars, creative artists, curators, and activists. One of the intentions of the walking seminars is to flatten out hierarchies between theory and practice and between scholarly and creative practices. We favour hybrid collaborations involving, for example, an architect, a philosopher and a choreographer in thinking about the micro-politics of collecting water from a particular city spring. We also favour a model of quick publication, whereby work is produced in multiple formats inside and outside the formal academic apparatus. Part of the intention of the seminars is to use walking as a method to engage Cape Town’s jagged and disjunctive social and political landscapes, in ways that open out to fresh understandings.
The Table Mountain Walking Seminar has now become a regular event. The most recent Table Mountain Walking Seminar took place over five days in December 2023.