Path of Awareness – Sounding Chinatown (Panel Discussion) / katrinem

Path of Awareness

Path of Awareness is an artistic walking format that explores how space is experienced through conscious movement and listening. Developed for Chinatown in Boston, this edition responds to the neighborhood’s layered architecture and the presence of Interstate 90, whose continuous infrastructural sound shapes the area’s atmosphere. Through a steady, moderate pace and deliberately open listening, participants expand their auditory field beyond the habitual filtering of everyday life. The walk invites attention to subtle acoustic shifts: reverberations between buildings, the masking and revealing of voices, the rhythm of traffic, and the sound of one’s own footsteps meeting pavement and concrete. Shoes become instruments; walking becomes a dialogue with architecture. The site-specific route turns the path itself into the destination. Thresholds—between quiet and noise, enclosure and exposure—emerge as lived spatial moments. Listening while walking reveals that infrastructure is not only seen but also heard, felt, and embodied. Since 2012, more than 25 Path of Awareness works have been realized worldwide, including in Berlin, Linz, New York, Tehran, Mexico City, and Marseille. Sounding Chinatown continues this evolving practice at a critical moment of urban transformation.

Please note that the activity is organized as two separate events on different days: one walking event and one artist talk.

Time: April 29, 1-3pm
Place: Harvard Artlab, 140 N Harvard St, Boston, MA 02134

in collaboration with, Sematic Matter Lab / Northeastern University and Goethe Insitute.

katrinem's artistic practice explores the relationships between sound, space, and movement, with walking and listening as fundamental acts. For over twenty years, she has investigated the walkability, acoustics, and atmospheres of urban and architectural environments through performative and installation-based works such as go your gait! and Path of Awareness. These projects reveal the rhythmic interplay of footsteps, spatial structures, and ambient sound. Everyday life serves as the starting point for creative transformation in her work. Ordinary objects—such as brooms or shoes—are reimagined as instruments that intertwine movement and sound in projects like Andante, BesenBallett, and Raumspiel, often involving participatory elements and collective action in public space. Her projects emerge from intensive site-specific research and interdisciplinary collaboration with artists, scientists, architects, and urban planners, inviting audiences to reconsider their habitual experience of space and discover the often-overlooked musicality of everyday movement and listening.

The Walking Festival of Sound

Walking Festival of Sound is a transdisciplinary event exploring the role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. It combines a number of free and public events including walking performances, walking seminars and listening sessions, all taking place in diverse public spaces and online. Walking Festival of Sound facilitates a meeting point for the international network of practitioners and researchers interested in sound and walking. Through diverse events we explore how walking and listening practices can augment and challenge the way we perceive, navigate through, and care for our shared environments. In 2019 the festival took place in two cities, Stockholm, Sweden and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. In April 2021, the festival moved to Krakow, Poland and Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2022, the festival visited Seoul, Korea and Vancouver, Canada. Zurich, Switzerland, was the festival's site in 2024. In 2026 the festival visits Cambridge and Boston in the USA.

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