a film by Dario J Laganà
Embarking on a full sustainable solo circular walking tour of Norway to elevate my affinity for walking into a more consolidated artistic practice. Exposing my body to the wild, raw, unforgiven environment, the journey is a blend of performance and introspection, where slowness and solitude are the preconditions to uncover vulnerabilities, to create a deeper connection with the landscape and the weather, exploring connections between nomadism, discipline, rituality and energy
In Norway, my carbon-free journey involves camping and walking to showcase the fusion of slowness and sustainability, aligning with nature and societal deceleration. To ease the load, I've designed a wheeled trolley to carry equipment and goods, including a solar panel electric motor, aiding uphill travel - totaling 160W. Purifying water with filters, sourcing local food, and single-night tent setups during walks between inhabited places ensure eco-friendly practices. It's not a battle against nature and it's not a trip of loathing humanity.
It's not a challenge-against. It is a path of reappropriation of one's spiritual self, which is built with effort. Walking on foot is marking time in kilometers. it's your personal pace, the clock of your gait, the ability to predict where one will be, based on a personal natural speed.
original Music Will Gardner will-gardner.com
Duration: 13 min - English with English / Italian / German subtitles
FULL LOGBOOK
So this is the third rain shower for today. It's getting a bit annoying and heavy on my body. The weather is still not the best. There were some parts with sun but most of it was coming and going. Let's see.
The hardest part to start the trip with the rain is that you need to establish routines. And because it's raining it's very hard to remember where you put things, organize your luggage and on top of it, the trolley is to be set up.
Today is a half-and-half day and I'm going to the city so at least I try to re-breathe, gain some energy because yesterday was very hard, I slept a lot. And yeah, let's see in the next few days how it works out. But for today just city walking.
I like nature when it's raw, wild and unforgiving. And this wind is formidable. Nature is down to us. It's not playing with us. It's not helping us or against us. It just exists. We are the ones who have to adapt to it. So enjoy the wild.
These woods are amazing and I'm all alone in this beautiful place. I crossed the gate from a farm and then I went deeper into the woods. I'm not sure where it leads but it's majestic. There is always a crazy moment for which I go in trance. I started walking and always doing the same movement with my legs and body and my mind got completely lost in thoughts. I actually don't realize how fast I'm walking or how long or how much is raining. It's just a really crazy trance experience where you just repeat and repeat and repeat the same movement.
It was a very hard day today. I broke the trolley two times. I was under heavy rain four times and the trolley broke in the middle of the road which was not funny at all. I had to repair it and luckily it will last but I don't know for how long. And in the end I did these 32 kilometers to get here.
This is the sand which is lovely and I really fucking deserve my beer. This is me at the end of the day.
I'm exhausted. I walked for almost 40 kilometers and I took a ferry in between. I didn't expect to walk so much and it was raining all day long. Now it just stopped. I'm wet. My socks are full of water and I think it's the longest I walked in, I don't know, with this trolley on the back. It's been the longest stretch ever. Just one kilometer to the camp. I need to rest. I need a shower.
And I need my fucking beer.
So what I did was to lower the center of gravity of the trolley and to repair a couple of parts. So this morning was repairing time and I hope it's working better. It finally turns better. I'm not sure if everything is really working.
This is kind of ridiculous. I'm walking like this because I've been surrounded by so many flies for three or four kilometers. It might be my sweat. It might be the rain. I mean, because there are no humans around me. But fuck, they are annoying as hell.
It's fucking cool. A guy just stopped by and gave me a bottle of soda from his car window. Smiling and saying: you need one. And he said, what the fuck are you doing? I said, I'm just going for 1,000 kilometers. And he told me, you're crazy. And then he just left.
It was amazing. Very nice.
When we hike, we get the illusion of leaving no trace. Or at least we try our best not to leave traces. But it's still an illusion because every time we walk, every time we move into nature, we force animals to move as well. And every time we walk the same trail, plants are not welcome. We destroy the path from left to right and we trace a road. But the beauty of it is that nature doesn't care. It will adapt to us and we'll grow again in another place. We'll move as much as possible. What we did was to destroy the opportunity for nature to move when we created boxes around it. And then the beginning of the end for them to adapt to us. And one day we will disappear and they will move free again.
There is no shame in resting, taking breaks and saying you can't make it anymore. Nobody's watching. If you're alone, the choices you make are for your own good. And the last 500 meters uphill can be very tough.
I'm starting to describe what home means when you are on the road like this. And home is inside the tent. Outside the environment is changing every time. Now I'm on top of a mountain. It can be by the sea. And the environment can be harsh. But inside everything is calm. The space is always the same. You always arrange your belongings in the same way. And give you a kind of familiar feeling. And this is the closest thing till now that you can call home no matter what the outside world is about.
We started the worst way ever. I've been hit by maggots tonight. A cloud of them. I don't know what the fuck happened. Usually they don't bite me so much.
It was raining all night long. Now there's a break. It is the same kind of rain of the first week that was whining about. But circumstances are changing. I'm more focused, more prepared.
I'm going uphill now. So it doesn't really look great. But again, we walk. And today is a long walk. Maybe 45 km. Because at the end of the road there is a campsite and a supermarket. And today is Sunday. Would like to get some food. Something warm to cook.
The trolley is an extension of my ability to be independent on the road. Because I have everything with me. It's a shelter. It's protecting me from the cars. Because it's bulky. Especially now with the solar panels. So it is really important to have it with me. And on top of that is also a social tool. People stop me with the car. Or when I arrive at the campsite. People gather and usually ask me what is it? What are you doing with it? It's also helping me to create a structure of people of interest around me and my trip.
This part of the road is way too extreme for the trolley. I think I have to give up. And start again tomorrow from some other place. I need to find a place for the tent for the night. There are no trains. And it is raining.
We can count time. We can understand that the slower we go, the more details we can imprint in our memories. Going from uphill to down to the fjords means understanding the difference in vegetation. In the structure of the landscape. See that the flowers are not the same. And that we can really enjoy nature as it changes around us. The same is not when you walk fast. Or you have a bike. Or you go by car. Or you have a train. Or an airplane. You see the immensity of the world from behind.
I didn't expect that. I know it was stiff. But this is kind of a lot more. It's a road for horses, not for men. Although I feel like a donkey.
There's a break in the rain. Bit of sun. Let's enjoy it because I don't think we'll last too very very long.
Coffee is one of the rituals that helps me to cool down a bit in the morning. Unfortunately, I will just wake up, pack everything very quickly and start walking again. And it's not healthy. You need something to re-breathe, regain your energy and re-establish your balance before walking. And I found out that coffee, the waiting for the coffee, doing the coffee and drinking it helps me a lot to establish this new balance. And it is really good because I need to wait, calm down, slow down a lot. And then in the end, I can just move on and keep on walking.
I don't have a lot of stories for today. Yesterday was very hard. And I arrived at the campsite very late. Got tea, went to sleep. I fixed the trolley and this morning I'm on my way to the coast. But I had to follow a road which is on the side of the highway, which I don't like.
My body is very heavy. I think yesterday I stretched a bit too much. And I'm really slow and clumsy. But it's ok. I'll try to get the best out of it. Even though I'm not really in the best walking mood. But at least the trolley is fixed for now. Talking about things that you lose on the road. I lost my filtered water bottle and I had to go back 2 km downhill. I left the trolley so at least my stupidity is paying half way back. And fuck it.
Before leaving I was speculating with my friend Lucia about the meaning of this practice. And she came out with this keyword that resonated to me a lot. Which is exposure. Obviously I'm exposing my body to the wind and the rain and the sun. So to nature as it is. But it also has a meaning of putting the body at the center of the action. And to expose myself as a person to this adventure and to this practice as a functional element of the journey. So not only documenting what I see, but documenting also what I'm doing. And recording these videos is also part of it. To make a better documentation of all the actions that compete into the creation of my artworks at the end of the road.
I don't pretend for people to understand why I'm doing this. Some people think that I'm crazy. Some other people think this is extreme. And I have to admit that it is at least exotic.
Perception of time has shifted very rapidly during the last weeks. I moved from a very anxious beginning when I had to be sure that all the preparation for the trip was enough for 1000 km. And thoughts and actions were overlapping. And then all of a sudden all this was gone. I'm embracing the long days that this country can offer you. And making more breaks.
Enjoying nature. Watching more closely the small elements of nature. And the beneficial effect of this is that at the end of the day the amount of kilometers that I'm able to do is the same. So the overwhelming beginning was not beneficial for my trip. And now everything is getting much easier.
I'm crossing a valley of 80 km without any villages and no human beings around. Apart from some cars.
It's all about rocks and some small trees and the mountains with the snow in the background. And it's a good opportunity to embrace wilderness and solitude. I know that people are afraid of being alone and most people might not be comfortable about doing a trip like this when you are all alone and you are. And you know that in the next 80 km there's nobody. But it's also an opportunity to regain social energy. To empower yourself with the fact that being alone is not a burden but is something that you can embrace. And feel your body, feel nature. And go back to life, to the social life we know with more energy and a bit more passion about interacting with people.
I also wanted to give myself the opportunity to be bored. To experience this whole world around me to the point that there's nothing here. The cultural gap is gone. The immense landscape is known. And you are actually just walking.
I started traveling on foot a bit because I was reading Kerouac and the regeneration.
I will try for myself what it means to travel for the only reason of traveling. The experience of being alone on the road and to create connections that are not obvious. So as far as this is exotic, I am in my element. I'm not overdoing it. I'm just trying to get to a point for which I am completely confident.
In all the choices I'm doing and have the ability to change paths when it's necessary. No matter how many kilometers a day you do, the last two are the hardest ones. Even if you know where you're going or how far is it, it is really crazy how all of a sudden your body
goes down with energy and just wants to arrive. And it is so long.
After walking for weeks like this, I'm still very curious about what's behind the next curve or the next valley. On how the landscape will change when I go downhill. And this is
the center of this trip, which is all about curiosity. And it is also a bit scary because a part of me knows that I might go on forever like this because this curiosity and these changes will never end whenever you travel along.
And I know that I have to go back home. And this is why I give myself these 1000 kilometers.
Some days are very hard to find motivation. Today is windy, the weather is horrible. Not heavy rain, but raining and cold. I finished my gas tank. I managed to have a cup of coffee by camping for free, which was nice. But I'm lacking motivation.
For today, the road that I'm going has a very promising look and looks like I'm zigzagging around the country without a real destination.
While walking on foot, I managed to contemplate all together, glaciers forming lakes on the mountains and then falling down with these huge waterfalls to the fjords.
In front of me I had a full cycle of water. And suddenly I found myself like a fern between rocks. A small, slow movement in a huge, enormous landscape.
This shouldn't be a place where to put a tent. It's full of stones, but I did 42 kilometers today. I can't walk anymore. I'm setting camp there, here, no matter what.
I want to make a point before starting the second part of this trip. I'm waiting for my boat and the next few days I will be a bit off-road and there might be no connection and no campsites. And it's a bike road of a street that has been built for when they built the railway. So it's a service road. And I don't know what it looks like. I've seen some short videos and some documentaries, but it looks nice. It looks cool. And I arrived here yesterday after 20 kilometers of mistake. I thought that my boat was from another harbor. And well, I was lucky because I could take a bus and come to this harbor.
It's already 17 or 18 days that I've been traveling and I'm fit. I'm happy. It's going well. I'm not really happy about the trolley. I'm struggling a lot. I try to fix it and repair it and make it work better. This halfway was intense. I managed to get used to the ups and downs of Norway in terms of valleys going uphill, downhill, which takes a bit because I'm not used to it. I'm not used to going very high in terms of altitude change. It cost me a lot of energy, but then you realize that what you get when you go up, then you will have to go down at a certain point because this is how it works.
And most of the time I managed. My relationship with time itself has changed a lot. I was very anxious in the beginning to do things, to start, to run, to arrive. And after the big rains, all these started slowing down a lot. And now I'm much more relaxed. I'm just taking it for what it is. Now I'm spending one hour waiting for the boat without any anxiety of: oh my God, I haven't done the 30 kilometers that I wanted to do. Fuck it. It's another pace. It's another way of counting. It's another way of trying to get somewhere and achieve something. And I'm embracing it. It's all about this. It's all about trying to find a different time and different
balance and rhythm. It's more harmonic because when you go uphill and downhill, you have to balance forces and strength and your resilience to go up until you get there. Some streets are really, really steep. Like it's very hard to get up and some others are slowly going down, but really slowly. But really constantly. So there was this road that was from 200 to 777 and it was a killer. I was really khoping that was the end of it, t was a lot of energy that was used to get on top of it. But then the view was amazing and I had a great night in the wild.
And it's not a reward, but it's more like I understand what I'm doing now. And I'm really embracing this time to reorganize myself and to get this balance working.
balance and rhythm. It's more harmonic because when you go uphill and downhill, you have to balance forces and strength and your resilience to go up until you get there. Some streets are really, really steep. Like it's very hard to get up and some others are slowly going down, but really slowly. But really constantly. So there was this road that was from 200 to 777 and it was a killer. I was really khoping that was the end of it, t was a lot of energy that was used to get on top of it. But then the view was amazing and I had a great night in the wild.
And it's not a reward, but it's more like I understand what I'm doing now. And I'm really embracing this time to reorganize myself and to get this balance working.
Food wise, everything looks easy, when I can, I eat salmon, when I can't, I have my own food and that's it.
When I decided to embark on this adventure, I knew that there was a duality to it. On one side, there is the physical engagement. It is hard on your body to walk so much and for so long. On the other side, there is a part that has nothing to do with physicality, but it's more emotional and emotive in terms of vulnerability. Being alone and not having the possibility to share with others the good and bad of things is always like, is a double coin. On one side, we do a lot of things because we want to share them. On the other side, there are some intimate trips that are hard to explain and are hard to share with others. And this is one of them. I think a lot while I'm traveling and I talk a lot to myself when the situation is harder.
Not all the thoughts bring you a solution. And most of the time is about speculative thinking, flow of consciousness, jumping from one topic to another without a real continuity. Sometimes I stop and I keep on thinking. Some other times I try to find a better wording for the same thing, because what you feel and what your experience doesn't always come with the precise wording of it.
I don't think that what I'm doing is strange in terms of complexity. If you think about it, it's about sleeping and walking and sleeping and walking. It's minimal, simple, basic, I would say.
Not all the thoughts bring you a solution. And most of the time is about speculative thinking, flow of consciousness, jumping from one topic to another without a real continuity. Sometimes I stop and I keep on thinking. Some other times I try to find a better wording for the same thing, because what you feel and what your experience doesn't always come with the precise wording of it.
I don't think that what I'm doing is strange in terms of complexity. If you think about it, it's about sleeping and walking and sleeping and walking. It's minimal, simple, basic, I would say.
Obviously, when it's not raining, it's fucking windy. Resilience is not a passive attitude of resistance, but is an active ability of collecting energies where they are needed. Sometimes also giving up, changing roads, understanding a long play strategy to get where you want. So when it's about to get to 1000 kilometers, it is not about playing harder and getting to the top of a hill, but maybe realizing that if you want to do on top of the hill in the evening when you don't have energies, or in the morning when you have more energies, but the top of the hill is still there.
Like a fern between rocks comes from this idea that I saw a lot of fern growing between rocks and I was admiring how a seed so small can penetrate, find a place and start growing in between very hard bits. And this is a bit the situation that I found when I was crossing the country where at a certain point I was between a glacier and a fjord and you are in between and you can admire all of it.
You can see the full process of water evaporating, raining, snowing, freezing and then going into waterfalls and waterfalls falling into and forming lakes and lakes forming other waterfalls that go into the fjords which are salt water, so directly to the sea. And you can see this in one picture, you can see this in one moment and that is extraordinary to me. I never experienced all this complexity in one picture, in one single moment of your eyes watching and trying to describe nature. I talk a lot about nature because my good friend Werner Moron taught me how to watch nature in a different way and I'm grateful for that. Not because I didn't like nature before, but because now I have a key to try to be more analytical about it. Like a fern between rocks is also the explanation for what happens when you go to very high altitude to the fjord all in one go and in one day you see the different flora and plants and trees. The more you go down hill there is a stratification, you will see that some plants grow at a certain height and then they stop, when you go lower than that you do not see them anymore and then you go up again you start seeing them again and that was very interesting to experience as well. I've never been in a vertical experience of a country and Norway is very vertical.
You can see the full process of water evaporating, raining, snowing, freezing and then going into waterfalls and waterfalls falling into and forming lakes and lakes forming other waterfalls that go into the fjords which are salt water, so directly to the sea. And you can see this in one picture, you can see this in one moment and that is extraordinary to me. I never experienced all this complexity in one picture, in one single moment of your eyes watching and trying to describe nature. I talk a lot about nature because my good friend Werner Moron taught me how to watch nature in a different way and I'm grateful for that. Not because I didn't like nature before, but because now I have a key to try to be more analytical about it. Like a fern between rocks is also the explanation for what happens when you go to very high altitude to the fjord all in one go and in one day you see the different flora and plants and trees. The more you go down hill there is a stratification, you will see that some plants grow at a certain height and then they stop, when you go lower than that you do not see them anymore and then you go up again you start seeing them again and that was very interesting to experience as well. I've never been in a vertical experience of a country and Norway is very vertical.
Trust me, some walks were really intense. I didn't experience any altitude gap in terms of being too hard to breathe or too stressed on the body and still I did from 0 to 1100 meters high. But it is also interesting how the experience of the country changed the kind of rocks that you meet, how the valleys are formed, what you expect when you cross a certain level and here it is very intense because after 500 meters up, there is snow and snow is already a different landscape for us. It creates a different empathy and a different quality of what we're watching. We are not used to it, I mean at least I'm not easily experiencing the sea and the snow on the same day. It's very unique in that sense and that creates a lot of interesting connections in your brain when it's about trying to analyze nature.
When it comes to devotion, it's always expressed by pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is the art of walking through fate with sacrifice and suffering. Even though I have a big respect for this kind of practice, I truly believe that you need a lot of strength to go through it. Suffering is not part of my trip. I don't enjoy it and I don't embrace it. I will do everything possible to make my trip as comfortable as possible.
As 1000 kilometers is just a number, it is also setting the experience in your body. When I first managed 42 kilometers in one day, I was surprised, I was proud to some extent. And then I did 47 and then I did 50. And now my body knows what this experience is about at all stages. It's not about putting numbers, but now my body knows what it means. So if tomorrow I want to do 500 km, I know as a feeling, as my body, what it will take to do that in terms of energy, in terms of emotion, in terms of resilience. It's all connected now. So 1000 kilometers is just a number, but it's also the opportunity for me to feel it.
Because theoretically we can talk about numbers and we can talk
that we can do 10 K or 10,000 K and doesn't matter because it's just about us projecting in that direction, in that dimension. Now it is different because now I know what it means. I know that my shoes will not last more than 1000 kilometers, for example. I know that the trolley starts collapsing after a while. I know that the food and the water I need, they have a specific schedule in time.
that we can do 10 K or 10,000 K and doesn't matter because it's just about us projecting in that direction, in that dimension. Now it is different because now I know what it means. I know that my shoes will not last more than 1000 kilometers, for example. I know that the trolley starts collapsing after a while. I know that the food and the water I need, they have a specific schedule in time.
Starting the trip with the rain paralyzed me. And not because of getting wet, which was not a very nice feeling, but because I was not ready to walk. I rode with the airplane and all my things were packed together like Tetris and I didn't know where they were. And the thing you learn about rain is that you need to be quick. You need to be quick to set up the tent, to cover your stuff, to know everything where it is.
My routines were not set. I couldn't really start walking the first two days. And that would mean a very strange feeling because I didn't know if I really wanted to start a trip with so many problems to start with. And then I decided to wait a bit and to wait. I went to a couple of supermarkets. I bought some plastic bags, just to be sure. And I start to relax a bit about the rain. And also the rhythm of the rain is important because every country is a different one. In Norway it mostly is like rain showers, which means that you have heavy rain for, I don't know, 20 minutes and then it stops and then it starts again after one hour. So you get used to the rhythm as well. You know that they will not be forever. But it was hard to start like this.
My routines were not set. I couldn't really start walking the first two days. And that would mean a very strange feeling because I didn't know if I really wanted to start a trip with so many problems to start with. And then I decided to wait a bit and to wait. I went to a couple of supermarkets. I bought some plastic bags, just to be sure. And I start to relax a bit about the rain. And also the rhythm of the rain is important because every country is a different one. In Norway it mostly is like rain showers, which means that you have heavy rain for, I don't know, 20 minutes and then it stops and then it starts again after one hour. So you get used to the rhythm as well. You know that they will not be forever. But it was hard to start like this.
My body is at the center of this action. I will not consider it as a performance, but it is an action. And listening to your body is the most vital part of this process. That brings you to zero to one thousand kilometers. I've been lucky. I trained in Kung Fu. And because of that, there is a discipline that my body is able to feel. I listen to my body and try to see which part is more loaded and less loaded, where the strength is, in which part of my body, at which time of the day. And I try to balance it. It's a very long process. It doesn't come easily. And I'm very grateful that I did another part of my life. But this shouldn't discourage people from walking. You can create your own. You should just start doing slow trips and very short ones and to see what you like.
One of the most complicated things for me is when people think about walking referring to the landscape, they think about where you walk or where you go.
And for me, it's always been the thinking about: do you like walking? Because this is the point that lasts longer. If you don't like the activity of walking, you don't like putting one step after another, putting one foot after another, being alone, isolated in loneliness, in solitude, then walking doesn't apply.
Yes, the landscape can be amazing, but it's not always like this. In between two beautiful spots sometimes there are 200 fucking boring kilometers, And this happens a lot. So the process doesn't pass from the country you choose, but from the idea that you like or you don't like walking.
And for me, it's always been the thinking about: do you like walking? Because this is the point that lasts longer. If you don't like the activity of walking, you don't like putting one step after another, putting one foot after another, being alone, isolated in loneliness, in solitude, then walking doesn't apply.
Yes, the landscape can be amazing, but it's not always like this. In between two beautiful spots sometimes there are 200 fucking boring kilometers, And this happens a lot. So the process doesn't pass from the country you choose, but from the idea that you like or you don't like walking.
And walking is a process that is so simple, because we all do. It is also very complex, because it is so basic that it requires a lot of attention. It is always the same movement. It is always the same process of putting one step, one step, one step, and listening to your knee, you listen to your feet, you listen to your toes, and trying to get the best rhythm out of it. And this is why I talk about trance, about walking, because after 20 or 30 minutes you walk, maybe a bit more, you go through the main thoughts that you have that day, and then you keep on walking, and at a certain point these thoughts will disappear. And you just walk, and you get completely lost in your mind, and you find yourself 20 kilometers later, trying to understand what happened, where are you. And this is a bit destabilizing, but on the other side is a cool activity. You are completely absorbed by the movement and the process, the physicality of it, that you just lose control on time. And this allows you to walk longer, but it's not a process you can force. Sometimes it doesn't happen. A lot of time happens because you're tired and so you just want to keep on going, because you just want to arrive somewhere, and so you just lose control of your body, because you just keep, keep, keep the same movement, hoping that the campsite is closed. And I don't know if everyone has this kind of process when they walk, but I do.
This is the amount of trash I collected today in 20 kilometers on foot. We all lose things on the way, we all produce trash, but sometimes it's also nice to give something back. It doesn't cost much. I just slowed down a bit from my trip, and decided to collect some of it, and help to heal the environment that is hosting me.
I love nature when it's wild, raw, and unforgiven, because it gives you no alibi.
My good friend Werner Moron told me: nature exists without us.
My good friend Werner Moron told me: nature exists without us.
This wind today is formidable, gives you power. Understanding nature is not against you or with you, it just exists. It's you that you have to find your way through it. It's not a wall you have to crush, but you have something you have to find your way through it.
It's not as extreme as walking to the Himalaya without oxygen, or doing very crazy things that I admire, but maybe they don't belong to me at this moment.
So, what I'm trying to prove, walking, is that you can establish a nomadic pattern, a nomadic paradigm of walking, and bring everything with you. You stop by, you buy food, you cook, you walk again.
You see places, you stop and then you keep on walking and start again. This is what I'm trying to achieve here. It's not just about the 1000 kilometers that I might not get, to be fair, but it is more a pattern, a rituality of it.