Embodied research
We treat sensation, emotion, memory, and lived experience as serious forms of knowledge alongside maps, histories, and ecological data.
Future Prairie · Walking as Social Practice
We walk to know the world together.
Across forests, wetlands, transit stations, sidewalks, and other shared spaces, Future Prairie uses walking as an art form and a research method. Moving side by side helps us notice what a room or route cannot hold: how a place meets the body, how attention becomes care, and how strangers begin to belong to one another.
Photo by Shawon Shorter
The central idea
The walk is the artwork.
It becomes a temporary commons where attention, trust, and relationship can grow.
Walking together has always been a way for Future Prairie artists to learn about the world and about ourselves. We move slowly enough to notice birdsong, traffic, moss, temperature, scent, changing light, and the textures beneath us. We also notice one another.
As a social practice, the meaning is not contained in an object. It is made through the encounter: the route we share, the stories that surface, the pauses we choose, and the new relationships that continue after the event.
We began this practice to gather LGBTQ2SIA+ and ALAANA artists, friends, neighbors, and strangers. Our aim is to build belonging with people who often feel unseen and to make more room for many ways of sensing, moving, speaking, and knowing.
Our use of walking is expansive
Participants may walk, roll, pause, sit, listen, hum, use sensory tools, or move at their own pace. Access is part of the artwork from the beginning.
Our broader goals
What we are practicing
Each gathering is specific to its place and its people, but the practice returns to six connected goals.
Belonging in public
We gather people who have learned to move through public space with vigilance and practice being visible, accompanied, and known.
Sensory access
We center neurodivergent and disabled ways of perceiving, making space for different paces, tools, thresholds, and forms of participation.
Ecological relation
We listen for human and more-than-human life, building an ethic of reciprocity with forests, waterways, streets, weather, and shared land.
Shared voice
Poetry, story, breath, and song help strangers move from self-consciousness toward connection without demanding performance.
Networks of care
The relationships made on a path continue into galleries, classrooms, transit, parks, hospitals, homes, and neighborhood life.
Three field notes
One practice, many terrains
These projects show how the same approach can shift with a forest path, a wetland soundscape, or the sensory intensity of an urban transit hub.
Future Prairie archive
Walking as Research Practice
Slow, meditative walks through neighborhoods, parks, rivers, and forests created space for poetry, conversation, forest bathing, deep listening, communal grief, and trust. The practice asks what becomes knowable when we move side by side and let the land witness our worth.
Read the field note ↗
Photo by Shawon Shorter
Singing the Forest
Led by Onry and Liam Whitworth, this wellness walk joined sensory meditation with breath, movement, and simple vocal exercises inspired by birds, wind, grass, and water. People who had never met listened and blended their voices into something larger than themselves.
Read the field note ↗
Future Prairie archive
Neurodivergent Sensory Stroll
Led by Vo Vo, this workshop moved through indoor and outdoor spaces near a MAX station, attending to sound, texture, temperature, and light. Disability justice and community care framed neurodivergence as a creative way of engaging shared space.
Read the field note ↗A flexible method
A walk has a score, not a script.
Facilitators offer enough structure to support attention and safety while leaving room for the group, the weather, and the place to change what happens.
Arrive
Orient to the place, the group, access needs, and the body through breath or grounding.
Attend
Notice the sensory field and what the environment asks of each participant.
Move
Travel at a shared pace with choices to pause, adapt, observe, or rest.
Exchange
Make room for story, poetry, reflection, song, questions, and silence without pressure.
Return
Carry observations and relationships back into creative work and community life.
Access is the practice
No single body defines the path.
We want people to have agency over how they participate. A good route is not only visually interesting. It communicates terrain, invites adaptation, respects sensory thresholds, and makes rest part of the experience.
- Share route, terrain, duration, transit, restroom, and seating information in advance.
- Build in a slow pace, planned pauses, and multiple ways to join.
- Welcome headphones, fidgets, scents, mobility tools, comfort objects, and support people.
- Use small groups when possible so facilitators can respond to the people present.
- Never require anyone to speak, sing, disclose, or match another person's pace.
- Keep public programs free or low-cost when funding allows.
Where the path leads
From a series of walks to an ongoing public practice.
Our next chapter is about depth, continuity, and wider access. We want the knowledge made on each walk to support artists, communities, and places long after the group reaches the end of a route.
Community-led routes
Develop walks with people who know a place through lived experience, including artists, neighbors, land stewards, transit riders, educators, and care workers.
Paid artist facilitation
Compensate facilitators whose creative methods and lived knowledge shape meaningful, accessible encounters.
Creative documentation
Translate field notes into writing, sound, maps, film, performance, and other forms that preserve feeling without extracting from participants.
Long-term partnerships
Build relationships across arts, parks, transit, health, education, disability justice, and neighborhood organizations.
Learning that returns
Bring observations, resources, and creative outcomes back to participants and the communities that made them possible.
More room to breathe
Keep centering people historically excluded from public and cultural space, creating conditions for trust, resilience, joy, and collective imagination.
Walk with us
Help make the next path.
Future Prairie welcomes artists, educators, care workers, public agencies, neighborhood groups, and land stewards who want to host a walk, support the practice, or imagine a new route together.
