Migrating VOICES: walks across distances
Migrating VOICES is an emerging artistic creation supported by Creative Europe over a four-year period, developed in France in collaboration with five European countries within the project Walking Arts & Local Communities – W.A.L.C.
It unfolds simultaneously at both local and international levels.
The project is a participatory artistic exploration of contemporary mobilities, unfolding through walks connected across distance, linking the voices of participants situated in diverse territories across Africa (Egypt), North America (USA and Mexico), Asia (Mongolia), and Europe (Spain, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, and France).
Drawing on digital tools as spaces of co-presence, this work in progress develops sensitive forms of listening, relation, and hospitality, directly engaging artists and inhabitants in shared walking experiences.
Rooted across multiple continents — and most recently in Mongolia, between China and Russia — the project proposes a decentering of the Western gaze through nomadic practices and reflections on contemporary territorial transformations.
Conceived as a platform for activating new ways of thinking and forging connections, Migrating VOICES takes the form of a 360° immersive artistic device, interconnected through communication tools that operate independently from GAFAM platforms.
It brings into relation participants physically present on site with “distributed” participants across the globe, through ethical and interactive digital networks.
The work brings together several interwoven dimensions:
Live, in situ and online: simultaneous performances unfolding on site and via live streaming
Fusion of places and voices: sound, speech, and gestures of artists and participants intertwine within a shared moment in time
Diversity of participants: musicians, walkers, writers, artists in exile, local historians, members of transnational digital communities, nomadic herders, and companions of global migratory routes
In 2026, the project’s anchoring in Mongolia with the support of the French Ministry of Culture and the Mongolian Calligraphy & Art Center, Kharkhorin, constitutes a central and defining dimension of its development. Situated between the borders of Russia and China, this territory offers a singular vantage point from which to interrogate contemporary mobilities. Nomadic ways of life, vast open landscapes, and the rapid transformations driven by urbanisation and digitalisation create the conditions for a decentering of the Western gaze, inviting a rethinking of notions such as territory, distance, and circulation.
Within this context, Migrating VOICES brings into dialogue diverse ways of inhabiting and traversing the world, revealing variations in perception, rhythm, and relationships to others and to space.
The project also critically engages with the digital infrastructures that both accompany and constrain mobility — including geolocation, surveillance, and digital borders — while exploring their potential as tools for connection, co-presence, and relational exchange.
The materials gathered — voices, sounds, traces, and cartographies — give rise to hybrid forms: sound installations, relational mappings, performative walks, and living archives.
