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Applications are now open for the Marŝarto Awards. Click here to learn more about this opportunity, if you are eligible for it, and how to apply for it.
Opportunity Details
The Marŝarto Awards recognise exceptional walking art. The Awards culminate in October, coinciding with Walktober, the global call to promote walking as a creative experience. Winners walk away with a cash prize of up to 1000 euros.
Any walking piece created during the previous or current year, and submitted to the walk · listen · create website, is eligible. So, for the Marŝarto Awards 2024, work created in 2023 and 2024 is eligible.
Sound walks are not eligible. For these fine works, we host the Sound Walk September Awards.
Work can include a variety of formats, approaches, and subjects, from a wide range of creative disciplines, including arts, heritage and history, health and wellbeing, social practices, journalism, performance, literature and theatre, ecology, tourism, and more.
Every walking piece that is not a sound walk, created after January 1 in the previous year, and is submitted to WLC’s library of works, is eligible.
It is perhaps necessary to mention that winners and honourable mentions are recognised as an artist’s project or piece, not an artist’s body of work.
Work by members of the Online Jury and Grand Jury can be submitted for the awards. Members of the Online Jury can not vote for their own work. Work by members of the Grand Jury and work by founders of WLC can be shortlisted, but can not win, or receive an honourable mention.
Members of the Grand Jury who have been involved with shortlisted work, but are not listed as one of the creators, are requested to excuse themselves from voting on that work.
It is unlikely that the jurors can experience a site-specific work in-situ. Therefore, it can be difficult to assess a piece that is designed for a particular place, without physically being present.
To somewhat ameliorate this, creators can add third-party links describing their work, and can invite others to write about their experiences ‘consuming’ their work, all within our website.
In principle, jurors only review what is submitted. They are not expected to look for context of the work, or the artist, even if some might.
Walking pieces are judged against the following criteria:
Walking
‘Walking’ is integral to the work. That is, it is experienced as a walk. Walking is what gives the work its meaning, or it is the medium through which meaning is produced.
Research and context
The work grows out of research, or a line of inquiry, that contributes to, or expands, the field of walking art, in terms of either discourse, practices or concepts. Such research may derive from, but is not limited to, fields such as ecology, psychogeography, kinesiology and performance, landscape understanding, body-mind relationship, community building, territory awareness, political contexts, or occupied territories. The piece demonstrates awareness, on the part of the artist, of the questions that ‘walking art’ raises, as well as how it contributes to the discourse.
Contribution to walking art
The work makes a contribution to walking art in particular, that is, it furthers discourse, expands practices, deepens concepts. This can also mean it has an artistic, or poetic, dimension, and can bring out an emotional response, reflections on the part of the audience, or involvement and commitment, either directly from ‘consuming’ the work, or from following the documentation process.
Production quality
The piece is professional and well designed.
Apply for 2024 Marŝarto Awards