My walking works are a series of collaborations.
Where The Jungle Meets the Sea…The World is Split in Two made with Emma Elliott considers concepts surrounding ecological decline and the intrinsic human connection to plants. The footage was shot in Armila, Panama in June 2022. Emma Elliott and Susie Olczak spent time together researching and experiencing living with the Guna Yala people, a matriarchal autonomous Indigenous community. This jungle region, the Darien Gap is also one of the world's most dangerous migration routes consisting of miles of dense roadless rainforest, mountains, and swamps.
Are we nearly there? Is a collaborative video work by Sally Stenton and Susie Olczak. Filmed simultaneously from two locations using video chat software, it was made in response to the impossibility of walking side by side during the 2020 UK lockdown. The work aims to push the boundaries of what it means to walk together.
In Solidarity is a video work created collaboratively between Emma Elliott and Susie Olczak. Made in direct conversation with their past work Where The Jungle Meets the Sea… The World is Split in Two, In Solidarity combines stories from their time in Armila, Panama where Elliott and Olczak spent time together researching and experiencing living in the Darien Gap, with footage shot in 2023 in Cornwall. The artists walked parts of the St Michael’s Way together, a coast-to-coast micro-pilgrimage in the Westernmost reaches of Cornwall and shot footage at Tremenheere amongst the sub-tropical planting where the film work will be shown first in the summer of 2023. Olczak and Elliott also incorporated personal anecdotes from their time in the Darién Gap.
This work will be a response to the relationship between landscape, and the deliberate act of walking, and to human connection and shared experiences. Pertinent to their discussions and to the core theme of work is their time spent in the rainforest, which holds the world's most dangerous migration routes consisting of miles of dense roadless rainforest, mountains, and swamps. The migrant crisis in Armila became an unexpected and significant dynamic of their residency with hundreds of migrants passing through the town everyday their presence quickly became a large part of the story of Armilla and their time spent there together.
The work considers the significance of walking throughout human existence and the connection to survival and place. We walk to save our lives, for spiritual enlightenment, for healing and for leisure.
