Bertram Weisshaar is based in Leipzig, Germany. He does walks influenced by the theory of strollology, which was invented by Lucius Burckhardt:
“We are conducting a new science,” Burckhardt explained to Hans-Ulrich Obrist in the preface to his book Why is Landscape Beautiful? “It’s founded on the idea that the environment is normally not perceived, and if it is, it tends to be in terms of the observer’s preconceived ideas. The classic walk goes to the city limits, the hills, the lake, the cliffs. But walkers also traverse parking lots, suburbs, settlements, factories, wastelands, highway intersections on their way to meadows, moors, farms. Coming home, when the walker tells what he has seen he tends to speak only of the forest and the lake, the things he set out to see, the things he read about, had geographical knowledge of, or saw in brochures and pictures. He leaves out the factory and the dump. Strollology deals not only with these prefabricated ideal images, but with the reality they eliminate.”
