Other durations, other rhythms: walking-drawing-writing with Bergson’s concept of intuition

This paper focuses on the first eighteen months of an ongoing autoethnographic, art pedagogy research project focused on working with Henri Bergson’s concept and method of intuition (which offers a durational rather than spatial way of knowing the world). The project involves the development of an open-ended, evolving practice of walking-drawing-writing, carried out in the parks and streets of Stockholm, Sweden. This research asks whether the act of walking-drawing-writing, as a means of coinciding with other durations, has the potential to shift our engagement with the world, allowing a better appreciation of uniqueness and becomings in the world, rather than seeing the world primarily through the categories offered to us through social/historical/cultural context. The paper explores whether the embodied process of walking-drawing-writing has the potential to access pre-reflective and pre-conceptual temporal experience and to pick away at the perceived boundaries between the human and more-than-human world. The artistic practice of walking-drawing-writing is interrogated through an ethnographic process of thinking-reading-writing. The paper considers possible applications of this approach within the field of environmental education.