Re-visioning #9: A conversation with Cliff Andrade
This is the ninth in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty that followed, I found myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Cliff is a visual artist whose work draws on personal and social histories, referencing migrant and particularly Portuguese diasporic experiences. He is interested in how walking as an art practice intersects with those concerns. Through the summer of 2021, and living with the consequences of surgery for bowel cancer, he walked from John O’Groats to Lands End to put his research into practice. He made the journey with his companion Martha (doing her walk for her own reasons), without whom he would like to stress he would never have made it. Having just finished my own pilgrimage, I wanted to ask Cliff about his post-walking experiences.
IN: So, Cliff, I wanted to talk to you because I just completed a pilgrimage of 250 miles following a lost Medieval pilgrim route from Southampton to Canterbury, which is the founding act of my project The Book of Visions. A couple of years ago, you got in touch with me because you were planning a project walking the length of the UK and some mutual connection had suggested that you talk to me about the relationship between walking and art practice. I’m not sure I was that helpful, because to some extent I’ve been moving away from walking as an artistic practice and towards walking as a spiritual practice. Nevertheless, I then followed your odyssey online through the course of last summer, and now that I’m in the immediate aftermath of completing my pilgrimage, I’m really keen to reflect with you about how it feels that bit later. At the moment, I’ll be honest and say that I don’t really feel anything.
CA: This is going to sound way too grandiose, but I was thinking about when people win stuff at the Olympics, and then you read those stories about how some of them will have mental health challenges afterwards. Like, now that they’ve achieved their goal, they’re totally lost, they don’t know what to do next. For a long time I was feeling a bit like that. And I think that, because of the limitations of my physical disability and the anxiety that causes, the walk was really quite taxing mentally. The adrenalin disappeared but I was left quite shaken.
IN: When we initially spoke, you didn’t share the detail of your physical situation, which, for the benefit of readers is that you have reduced bowel control and suffer from severe IBS and fatigue due to operations you underwent following a diagnosis of bowel cancer. When I learnt about it from reading your blog of the walk, and it became clear what you were dealing with every day, I have to say I was very much in awe of the undertaking.
CA: When I used to work in film, we called it ‘wrap flu’. That phenomenon by which when you’re functioning for an extended period at such an intense level, as soon as you stop, your body just gives up for a bit. I think for a while was in a mental version of that — I was in recovery basically, and was not quite sure how it would unfold, and where it would leave me. Now, it’s almost a year to the day since I set out on my walk. I feel at some point over the last 6 months the walk has moved from ‘recent’ memory to ‘historical’ memory. And part of that process inevitably involves the sharp edges of the experience becoming rounded, and I find myself having to remind myself to not let the rose-tint of nostalgia make me forget the reality of the walk. Somehow, when I was in the middle of it, and some evenings when I thought I had no chance of being able to walk again the next day, my body seemed to magically recover overnight. So the actual mechanics of walking were never insurmountable.
IN: And how about the art aspect? You set out, framing the walk as art, you met with other artists along the way. How do those intentions and processes look in retrospect?
CA: Right now, I can only feel like I achieved something on a more basic level than that. All I can say is that I set out to think about the relationship between art and walking and spent seventy-seven days doing that. So while I might not have any grand conclusions at this stage, I have, at least, done it ,and that’s enough right now. Before this walk, I was always completely intoxicated by the romantic notion of walking long distance. I was heading north on the train the other day and looking out of the window at the moors. A year ago I’d have been thinking about how amazing it would be to be out there walking, but this year I was really glad to be on the train. People would ask me if I was enjoying the experience and I just couldn’t respond ever because I didn’t know the answer. I spent a lot of time between being asked the question trying to work out for myself how to answer it the next time and why I found it so difficult to answer. I think now that the experience was so completely consuming that it was like being asked if I’m enjoying my life. Because for that time, the walk was my life.
IN: I’ve actually had exactly the same experience. Because I’m doing it in parts, in between times, people ask me if it’s going well, and I have literally no idea how to respond. I’ve also been completely bemused by my failure to find an answer. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m so immersed in it though, more like the experience doesn’t seem measurable on a scale of enjoyment or success.
CA: Ultimately I found it quite isolating, because I wanted to talk about the experience but just not in such limited terms. You know, I use walking in my work to take an objective position in relation to my daily existence or real life or whatever you want to call it. I can step outside of my life and find space for critical reflection. Also, in mental health terms, I always think back to the work of Mark Fisher, who talks about the way in which our physiological makeup doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the systems that we’ve built, our bodies find our environment overwhelming. Walking is how I deal with that, my space for working through these things. I don’t know any other way. So it’s not like I wasn’t having thoughts about the experience, I just couldn’t make small talk about it.
IN: We’ve spoken before about how I frame my own walking practice, which is, broadly speaking, as pilgrimage. Was there any spiritual dimension to your walk?
CA: Not really, to be honest, although before I set off, one of the things I wanted to think about was the possible relationship between walking and Zen Buddhist ideas of transcending reason through repetition. Walking long distances, my mind quietens and I become very present and I was hoping to go deeper into that. I didn’t find it on the walk because I was totally pre-occupied with my bowel movements, after my illness and operation, and the not-knowing how that would play out. So while it might not sound glamorous, it was a crucial part of the experience because I re-learnt how to walk long distances with my body as it is now.
IN: You also mentioned a post-colonial angle.
CA: Well there’s a sense in which I wanted to traverse the country in order to find my place in it, as a person with spilt heritage. My parents were migrants, they came here from Portugal, so crossing the country became a physical metaphor for becoming British, to try and plug a hole that I’ve always felt. Rural England is the mythical home of what it means to be English, so I felt I had to do battle with that, both inside myself and with the places I passed through, over seventy-seven nearly consecutive days of walking.
IN: So what kinds of learning has come out of that process? What kinds of self-realization did you come to? What have you learnt about the country, or the landscape or the people? Or is all that still emergent?
CA: I was conscious the whole time that I don’t really fit in, but I always have been. I’ve never known whether i was made to feel that way or it’s my own paranoia but the walking didn’t change that feeling. It’s also a class thing. It’s about how I felt as a working class migrant walking through rural Britain, which is the home of Englishness, and by that I mean whiteness. It seems trite to say but I keep going back to the fact of just having done it. You know, when you’ve lived in London all your life and someone talks about the Pennines, you can only imagine what the Pennines are but actually all those landscapes are used to build the identity of the country that I live in, and so they run through my body and psyche everyday, especially as someone who in many ways doesn’t belong to that identity, or is pushing at the edges of that identity. It’s not limited to migrants of course, most people living in this country have probably never been to the Pennines, and of course the counter-image to this purity of rural England is the multi-ethnicity of the inner city, which is where I come from. And then when you actually walk through the landscape and think about why the countryside looks the way it does, and how it’s divided, you quickly find this not-so-hidden history of empire, exploitation and slavery, that is a domain of untouched whiteness. Who belongs where and who’s permitted to be where and how that impacts on the body and spirit feels like a lifetime of learning and thinking and art-making so I didn’t really expect any quick answers. I just wanted to have that picture of the country through having walked it. I wanted to have that physical experience, in order to start working through these inner landscapes, if that makes any sense.
IN: It’s really interesting to set that against my own experience of walking. Because I’m from a rural background, and I’m white, both my parents are British, and I’m very familiar with the British countryside, I don’t instinctively feel the things that you’re describing, and actually, it’s when I pass through towns that I feel most on edge. Because I’ve made this decision to other myself in terms of how I look, and there have been instances when people have literally been shouting at me, I have a different experience. I also think it’s interesting that the approaches we’ve taken are almost polar opposite in some way, but that we seem to be arriving at similar destinations.
CA: What do you mean by that?
IN: Well, you walk to encounter the physical landscape that you pass through, with an understanding that it might lead you towards an understanding of identity, whereas my broad intention is to encounter an inner landscape, so that I might better understand my place in the world around me. Really, they’re probably the same thing. I wanted to move towards closing the conversation by going back to this question of learning, and asking where you go from here. When we got towards the end of making Taking the Michael, we met a mystic in Cornwall who said that it was after the physical journey is finished that the real pilgrimage starts. I’ve tried to integrate the walking more into my life and vice versa by doing the walk in sections but I wonder how it feels to you? What’s moving? What’s emerging? Where can you imagine it taking you next?
CA: I’m interested in what you say about your rationale for doing the walk in sections. My walk was very much a walking ‘binge’. I think it had to be. I think that’s what I felt I needed to do to really get into exploring walking seriously, but I’ve been pondering is whether that is the best approach moving forward. I think the further I am from the walk the more the focus of that experience is exactly what you said: about exploring an inner landscape so that I might better understand my place in the world around me. I am still interested in the political and social aspects of walking, but as the walk is distilled by time it is that inner exploration that is remaining. What I am tasking myself with now is how to convey that visually. Until I feel I’ve got somewhere with the visual element my mind won’t turn to future walks, because the making of visual work is a way to help me further process the walk. I think I need to do that before I walk again.
IN: So, I have a final question. Having finished my pilgrimage, and not really feeling anything other than slightly pleased that I’ve done it, is there anything you could say to me from your experience of the months since you finished yours?
CA: Put it away for a while. Forget about it. Try and carry on with other things. And then hopefully you will find that your pilgrimage will start to bubble up back into your thinking in ways you could never have predicted.
