ABSTRACT
Urban Emptiness is an international network of scholars and practice-based researchers that works on the role of silence and emptiness in contemporary cities through a participatory, interdisciplinary process. This chapter looks at the role of silence in walking activities organized by Urban Emptiness between 2015 and 2017 to unravel how places in the city become sites of encounters performed through the agency of the body subjects: their position in space and time, moods and modes of reflection, the intercommunication between the imaginary and the real as expressed in them. It discusses that silence was a structural element of the walking activities. Walking in the arts world has been used as a method, an outcome and a performance, among other ways. One of the ways uses to trigger encounters through silence is the design of workshop-specific sketchbooks to be used by the participants in different actions of the same cluster of events.
