This research investigates walking as a subversive, reflective, and poetic strategy in the works of Sophie Calle, W. G. Sebald and Robert Smithson. It considers how their artistic and literary practices deploy walking not as a romantic gesture, but as a critical tool to interrogate urban space, memory, and the societal frameworks imposed by capitalist modernity. Rather than accepting the rationalist, functionalist and productivist spatial model inherited from the nineteenth century, these authors—like flâneurs and detectives of the postmodern city—reclaim wandering as a political and aesthetic act. Drawing upon the theoretical lens of Walter Benjamin, the study contextualises their practices within the broader shifts in urban perception that emerged with the modern metropolis. Calle’s early work is examined as a feminist reclamation of public space, challenging gendered restrictions and introducing play and unpredictability into the urban narrative. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn is interpreted as a melancholic dérive through the post-industrial English landscape, fusing autobiography, history and ruin in a literary cartography of entropy. Smithson’s “suburban displacements” are framed as dialectical encounters with the American periphery, where entropy, decay and industrial waste reveal the contradictions of progress. These acts of movement trace alternative geographies and produce new modes of subjectivity. Methodologically, the work adopts an interdisciplinary approach, privileging critique over historical chronology, and engaging with the spatial, temporal and anthropogenic transformations of the post-Fordist city. Ultimately, these practices constitute a “constellation” of experiential resistance, producing knowledge through movement and visibility through slowness. As Benjamin anticipated, they respond to an era of experiential atrophy, not through acceleration, but through deliberate wandering that opens ruptures in dominant spatial narratives and suggests the possibility of other urban futures.
López Martínez, I. (2018). Paseos a contra-tiempo: Sophie Calle, W. G. Sebald y Robert Smithson, caminantes con ecos de Walter Benjamin. PhD thesis, Universidad de Murcia.
