Camino de Santiago, 500-miles, 2017-2023

Being A Pilgrim is a durational, site-responsive social practice project that mobilizes the Camino de Santiago as a long, walking-based research practice. It treats the route as an expanded site of exploration where participants become co-researchers, generating drawings, notes, sound recordings, and situated reflections shaped by landscape, labor, hospitality, empathy, and the shifting demands of the trail. The work approaches pilgrimage as an embodied methodology that interrupts routine perception and asks participants to confront the material realities of distance, shared movement, and the instability of place. Creative inquiry unfolds through the push and pull of terrain, the social texture of the route, and the daily negotiations of orientation and endurance. The project frames these lived conditions as a platform for research-creation, allowing ideas to surface from the accumulative pressures of walking rather than from predetermined objectives. In this framework, pilgrimage functions less as a theme and more as a working process, generating forms of knowledge that can only arise through lived contact with landscape and the shifting relationships formed along the way.