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Bas Devos, Ghost Tropic (2019). (in-class screening)

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Take a walk to our class today! Any kind of walk :)

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We will begin our classes by introducing ourselves and sharing what background or experience has brought you to the course—this does’t have to and isn’t supposed to be critical reflection. Instead, I’m aiming for personal stories that draw you to the formal exploration of walking and sleeping. What kinds of walks do you usually carry out? Do you routinely walk for transit? What kind of sleeper are you? Do you wake up with one alarm or do you need ten consecutive alarms all the time?

We will also spend the second half of our class time watching Bas Devos’s Ghost Tropics, allowing ourselves to get to know Khadija, the walker in the diegetic Brussels, as well as Devos, who will be our “tour guide” throughout the semester. The reason why I’m screening the film during our class time is that Ghost Tropics inhabits a very different kind of space and temporality of walking—namely the slow and the tactile—that can be unfamiliar for many students, and the collective experience of watching a film together could potentially help us enter into his world and inhabit his temporality more easily. I’m also asking you to watch Here, Bas Devos’s most recent film, on your own after our class, as we will use these two films in our next class to map out key coordinates for our discussion.