Taking Dictation was a participatory, walking-based piece about tyranny created for the 2025 SUPERMARKET Art Fair and occurring in a shopping mall.
The piece was part of a program called called WALKING WITH PASSION, curated by John Schuerman and Berg Duo. It included myself and two other artists from the Walking As Practice Collective, Juanma González and Aurike Quintellier.
Description:
Do you have a passion for rule-following? A deep-seated desire to please authority figures? If so, you’ll love Taking Dictation, a grownup, walking version of the kind of children’s games called “Simon Says” or “Follow the Leader” in the USA (and “Gör si, gör så” or “Följa John” in Sweden.) But this version has so much more complexity that it might be unrecognizable. Which means that if you hate rule-following and pleasing authority, but are gaga for entropy, then you’ll also love Taking Dictation. The title is a play on words around the practice of transcribing speech, which is a practice that is meant to be faithful to exactly what is spoken, but often has unintended variability. In this case there is an effort to see how far variability can go, to the degree that the “taking” of dictation becomes potentially a taking away of dictatorial power. Led by Heather (Hey There) Kapplow (USA), we will move together in a state that vacillates rapidly between obedience and disobedience, fairness and unfairness, freedom and restriction, order and chaos. The combination of movement, prompts, and sound will build simultaneous, contradictory routes through time and space as an experimental method for discovering previously unseen paths of resistance to the imposition of the ideas of others upon ourselves.
Walking As Practice Collective is a group of artists dedicated to traversing spaces, rethinking and critiquing systematic constraints. In motion, they challenge norms and propose the distribution of agency, deploying vulnerability as a strategy for togetherness.