Knowledge becomes public not when it leaves research behind, but when it acquires a form capable of returning to the situations from which it was made. Walking makes this return literal. Van Es and de Lange describe datawalking as an embodied and situated method able to reconnect apparently abstract infrastructures with their material occurrence in everyday space: sensors, platforms, interfaces and computational processes become legible because the body encounters them as urban conditions rather than as remote technical systems. Antunes extends walking into an expanded artistic field in which movement, narrative, sound and locative technologies produce knowledge across aesthetics, politics, ecology and infrastructure, while Sinner’s a-r-tographic walking refuses the separation of artist, researcher and teacher by treating bodily encounter with public space as an epistemic operation.
Ruitenberg’s account of walking as non-formal education sharpens the point: the pedagogical force of the walk lies not in delivering predetermined content but in making repetition, contingency and unplanned curriculum productive. Springgay and Truman push this further by treating walking as research-creation that unsettles chronological and colonial time through speculation, counter-cartography and anarchiving. The walk therefore does not merely collect information from a stable environment; it reorganises what can count as evidence, who can produce it, and how a place can interrupt the categories brought to it. This is precisely where curatorial practice becomes more than display. Sternfeld and Ziaja’s post-representational curating shifts the emphasis from representing already stabilised meanings toward performing archives, organising publics and enabling collaborative knowledge production whose outcome cannot be fully prescribed in advance. Their curatorial space is an active grey zone in which agency is redistributed among objects, participants, institutions and contexts. O’Neill’s co-productive exhibition model gives this redistribution an organisational grammar: background, middle-ground and foreground are not neutral layers but temporal and social positions through which curatorial authority is negotiated. The institution becomes a framework for relations rather than a terminal container for objects. Richter’s account of the educational turn similarly identifies discussions, archives, screenings and new forms of mediation as modes of knowledge production capable of linking artistic work to activist, postcolonial, gendered and anti-racist discourses. Kolb and Richter translate situated knowledge into scores that can travel, be enacted, modified and re-uploaded, turning publication itself into an invitation to further action. Their model is neither the closed artwork nor the fixed archive, but a transmissible instruction whose identity survives through variation. UNIDEE’s own statement makes duration central to such a model: knowledge-sharing, cross-pollination and public engagement acquire force through accretion in time, repeated encounter and the relocalisation of processes once participants return to their own contexts. Across these practices, the decisive operation is therefore not participation as an event but return as a structural principle. A trace acquires epistemic force when it can be reopened; a walk becomes research when its observations can be compared; an archive becomes public when it can be performed; a curatorial framework becomes rigorous when it allows consequences it did not script. The public life of knowledge emerges through this recursive movement between encounter, inscription, argument, circulation and renewed encounter. The distinction matters because situated knowledge is often weakened when it is mistaken for anecdote. Here, situatedness is not a reduction of scale but an increase in accountability. It binds a claim to the route, medium, body, institution and temporal sequence through which the claim became possible. That binding does not prevent circulation; it makes circulation intelligible. A score can travel because its terms are explicit, a datawalk can be compared because its attention has been organised, and a public intervention can generate knowledge because it leaves traces of how positions changed. The curatorial field thus behaves less like a stage and more like an epistemic relay in which each act of mediation transforms the conditions of the next one. Participation gains precision when understood in this way. It is not automatically democratic, emancipatory or even collaborative; it becomes meaningful when participation can alter the object, framework or interpretation at stake. The possibility of modification is what distinguishes a public from an audience and a research process from a dissemination exercise. Situatedness is not a claim to authenticity or local truth. It is a discipline of revisability: every proposition retains the conditions under which it was made and therefore remains available to correction by another body, another site, another time or another technical environment.
Socioplastics can operationalise this recursive condition by treating its corpus not as a terminal accumulation of texts, markers, images and references but as a field whose units remain exposed to renewed contact. The relevant architecture is one of controlled incompletion. A node, photograph, map, essay, citation or diagram should be sufficiently stabilised to circulate, index and be cited, while retaining enough provenance and relational structure to be returned to the circumstances that produced it and compared with subsequent evidence. The curatorial sequence ARRIVE / WALK / TRACE / COMPARE / ARGUE / PUBLISH / RETURN / CONTINUE gives this architecture a practical temporal form. ARRIVE establishes the initial conditions rather than pretending to neutrality; WALK subjects assumptions to spatial encounter; TRACE converts ephemeral experience into heterogeneous records without collapsing image, sound, text, object and data into the same evidential category; COMPARE tests differences across people, places and moments; ARGUE transforms discrepancy into proposition rather than consensus; PUBLISH makes one compact public trace available before the research is considered complete; RETURN reopens that trace as active material; CONTINUE makes accumulation longitudinal rather than merely numerical. The value of this sequence is that it distributes epistemic authority across time. Publication ceases to be the final stage and becomes an intermediate surface on which later evidence can exert pressure. This aligns with the digital questions raised by Mersmann and Ohls, for whom curating, exhibiting and collecting now unfold within image ecologies, virtual conditions and networked systems where mediation, access, ownership and visibility are continuously reorganised. Digital circulation expands the reach of a trace, but it also risks detaching it from the situated conditions that made it intelligible. A Socioplastics object therefore requires both mobility and friction: enough interoperability to travel through repositories, websites, search systems and machine-readable infrastructures, and enough contextual density to resist becoming a contextless fragment. Provenance, versioning, place, date, method, rights status, relational links and subsequent modifications are not administrative supplements; they are the means by which an object can remain revisable without losing identity. This architecture also gives duration a methodological role. Long-term work is not simply more time allocated to the same procedure; duration exposes discontinuities that a short project can conceal. Repetition reveals whether a relation is persistent, seasonal, accidental, infrastructural or dependent on a particular configuration of participants. Returning to a place after publication allows a public trace to be tested against consequences that were unavailable at the moment of release. Returning to a concept after it has circulated reveals semantic drift, appropriation and resistance. Returning to a digital object after platforms, interfaces or standards have changed exposes the infrastructural dependencies that were initially invisible. Continuity therefore becomes an analytical instrument. It permits a corpus to record not only what was asserted but what survived revision, what changed category, what accumulated evidence and what had to be abandoned. Such temporal legibility is especially important for a distributed field, where authority can otherwise be confused with simple persistence online. This also changes what an archive is for. Instead of preserving finished cultural residues, the archive becomes a repertoire of possible returns. Images can be resequenced against later walks; earlier propositions can be tested in new cities; bibliographic clusters can be reopened when a missing genealogy appears; a public comment can move from reception into the evidential record; a digital object can remain citable while acquiring a documented afterlife. The strongest curatorial function is consequently neither selection nor presentation alone, but the design of thresholds between closure and emergence. Too much closure converts research into authority without permeability; too much openness dissolves objects into ungoverned flux. The operative task is to hold enough form for comparison while permitting the site, participant, archive or medium to alter what the form was presumed to mean. This is why situated practice expands rather than narrows the conceptual field: locality becomes a testing apparatus for generalisation, and recurrence becomes a way to distinguish durable relations from convenient assumptions. Public knowledge is strongest when it can survive being returned to the world. Within Socioplastics, this operational condition condenses as AssumptionPresence.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, epistemology, archives and public knowledge infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
situated knowledge, walking research, curatorial practice, public space, research-creation, archive, mediation, digital ecology, participation, open knowledge
Walking and curating become recursive methods for producing public knowledge that remains situated, revisable and reusable.
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