When walking was too precarious a pastime : Indian artists in Europe share the experience of their journey afoot.

Baffled by the images of grim situation of migrant labours and a caravan seething humanity in India the Indian artists shared the experience of their gritty journey on foot when there were left astray in Amsterdam. Pankaj Tiwari and Abhishek Thapar wrote the first day after embarking upon their arduous expedition back to the UK from their studio in Amsterdam that walking is a question of inequality, power, privilege, power.

Tiwari and Thapar walked almost 30 km every day, meandering their way through beaches and forests, bridges and highways. They encounter various characters during their journey, each on his/her on own conquest, there was a biker got off and walked alongside them. Another time, a woman in The Netherlands told them of her parents who had migrated from Baghdad. It has to be  quite an enlightening experience to walk one’s way through with the solitary hope of getting a Researchers, artists and scholars in the three countries turned out for the walk. In the evening, the two would rest at the homes of well-wishers or in tents.

This walk was a way of offering tribute to the migrants in india whose hardships were beyond pale and also to seek awareness of the issue when the media moves to other topics and also interrogate what it means to be a migrant artist in Europe 13 days, During their thirteen days journey they  shared the anecdotes from the migrant experiences in India to whoever joined them on the road and concluded the the piece, titled ‘The Art of Walking’, at a refugee camp in Calais, France, where a vast number of migrants were waiting to be received in UK.