Dutch artist, writer, historian, educator and walker Monique Besten answers the video call from Galicia, in the North-West of Spain, where, last year, she moved into a 19th-Century house. The house needs a lot of maintenance work and has a large garden. “The idea here is to restore the house, have a good place to live, and to work with the people in Galicia. I also have many friends here who do interesting projects,” she shares.
Monique calls the house “the Headquarters of the Bureau of Slow Endeavours”. She is planning for the Headquarters to be a place where locals can come in and where artists can develop their practice. Of course, all of it very slowly. The house is a place where living, co-existing and creating artistic work can all linger simultaneously.
I am immediately curious about the Bureau of Slow Endeavours. It seems to be a common experience that the world is getting faster. We have more immediate access to information, places, experiences, connections and so on. In the midst of all of this, you have a fascination toward slowness. Could you expand a little on what Slow Endeavours are?
At some point I realized that a lot of the things I do are about slowness. They’re about slow processes and slow artistic media. I walk a lot. I make long distance performative walks, crossing borders and sometimes walking for months on end. Walking is a way to be in the world in a different way. I am also working with embroidery, with plants and seeds and symbiotic cultures, with photography, drawing, writing, and I make site specific installations.
I realized that we live in this really fast world and it drives everybody crazy. I think being an artist makes it easier to embrace slowness because my artistic process is slow by nature. I need a lot of time to go through different steps and have the space to try things out and to fail. For me these two things are really connected: being an artist and being slow and attentive.
I find it quite interesting that, for a long time, slowness was considered as something negative. In these days, but already at the beginning of the last century, it was all about progress and moving forward. The faster things go, the better. First, we walked, then we had horses and then bikes and then cars and planes. Now more and more people are starting to realize that sometimes it’s much better to be slow, because otherwise you miss things.
When I started my walking practice, it was a very natural thing. I was already doing a lot of things that were about walking. Then I found out that there’s a whole network of walking artists – that it’s an art discipline in itself. At first I didn’t consider the walks as a very political thing to do, but then people told me that it is actually political. I started thinking about it, and of course, it is true. It’s important to live at a different pace. In a broader sense, if we want to continue living and being on this planet in a good way, we really have to slow down.
As I was reading about you and your work I started to imagine walking as a soft base rhythm at the core of your work. Walking is something many of us do daily. It’s something so mundane that one might even consider it a non-event. You mention that walking can be political. When might walking become political? When does it become performance art?
I think the fact that this line is not always very clear is interesting. You’re also touching upon the question, when is something art? I think that’s very hard to say. When you call it art, you could say it is art. I quite like it when it’s really not clear if it’s art or not. And maybe it doesn’t matter
The fact that I’m wearing a business suit while walking tells people that it’s an artistic act. But I’m also wondering: if I’m walking and I don’t meet anybody, then is it a performative act? To what extent do you need an audience? Who is the audience? Would it make a difference if I was not wearing a suit? I guess it’s about intention. Being an artist is maybe also performing your life in a specific way or leading your life in a specific way.
Perhaps for instance in a capitalist model of thinking, one might think art is the products that appear out of an artist. What you’re saying has a more holistic view to what art is.
For me walking is a way to be in the world and get in touch with people. On the one hand, it’s an anti-capitalist statement to be walking in a business suit that gets dirty and stained. I am sleeping outdoors and gathering wild edible plants while wearing something that is a capitalist symbol. On the other hand the suit is a way to get in touch with people. People see it, come up to me and start talking to me. What I like most of all is that I can be anybody in it because people see what they want to see.
Some people see an artist, some people see a tramp, some people see a businesswoman. The storytelling is a very important aspect of the suit. I am collecting stories, listening to other people’s stories and looking around me, sensing what is important. I write almost daily online on my solar powered iPad. The stories that are exchanged on the road are just as important, maybe even more. It sometimes reminds me of how, in the past, before social media and radio and tv and newspapers, there were people walking from village to village to tell everybody the news. These days, when there is an overload of news accessible at every moment, people are in need of other stories again. The stories about me also start to travel, sometimes people I meet have already heard about this strange woman walking in a suit. In that sense, I consider myself almost as a neutral person, giving other people the opportunity to create a story around me. And most of those stories I will never hear myself, which I like.
It’s an art project, but I am also performing my own life. It’s a 24 hours a day performance, but it’s also just my life. Where is the border? When I started doing these long walks, I was a bit ….. maybe naïve. I thought, maybe I can do this continuously. But it’s also quite tough. And that is why it is usually a project with a beginning and ending. For example, I walked 3 months from Amsterdam to Austria to take part in the Nomadic Village, I walked from Barcelona to Paris for the COP21, the big climate conference, and I walked across Spain to join a project week about the notion of “territory”.
It’s hard to separate the art from the artist, particularly in this kind of process-based work. I am curious about this suit that you wear during the walks. You wear it, but you also embroider sentences, texts and maybe also drawings into the suit inspired by the people you meet. You have called this suit a “soft armour.” What is soft armour? Could you share some perspectives on this act of embroidering the suit as you go?
It’s a soft armour because it protects me, it keeps me warm, it makes it easy for me to completely immerse myself in what is happening. It’s a costume, but it’s also just what I wear. Maybe it also allows for me to do things that otherwise I might be a little bit shy about or afraid of. I’m there in the world as this person in the soft armour.
I think I’ve got 8 suits now in total. There was one suit I wore for 108 days, just walking around every day, embroidering a little drawing or a text on the inside daily. On the outside it had a QR code and when you scanned it, you could see the embroideries on the inside and where I had been every day. The embroideries are different every time.
For one of the first suits I wore while walking I asked people to adopt one of my walking days and give me something to help me through my day, like money, a poem or the address of a friend on my route. In return I embroidered the name of this person on the inside of my suit. So, during the walking, more and more names got collected inside the waistcoat. And that also felt like an extra layer of protection. People were helping me and moving me forward. I spend every day, usually between an hour and two hours, embroidering a name while thinking of this person. I dedicated the story I wrote about that day to them.
Usually I wear a new suit for every new project. However, I’m going to wear an old suit again when I’m going to travel to Germany for the Tiny Spaces Deep Connections residency in June 2026. That suit has a lot of questions embroidered on the outside. I collected them through social media and while wearing it. They are not my own questions, but other people’s questions. This is a suit I’ve been wearing more regularly and new questions are being added all the time. I very much like the process of embroidery because it’s very slow and you can do it anywhere. And I’m looking forward to this journey that for a change will not be a walk but take place on trains and a boat. I will leave a trail of seeds and travel with a sourdough starter, a living culture I will take care of while travelling and share with people I encounter.
I know a lot of people who go on walks when they need headspace to understand something. You have quoted in one of your articles Raine Maria Rilke: “live the questions for now, perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” You have also playfully morphed this question by Rilke into a statement: “walk the questions for now.” What happens to you when you walk? What goes through your body and your mind?
That’s a good question. I think it very much depends on the kind of walk but any walk gives me space and pleasure. Being in movement, it’s easier to let go of things that I worry about or things that might be urgent. It calms me down. It gives me a break from other things and allows me to be in the world in a different way.
It’s really about the little things that happen around you. Walking makes it far easier to notice things than when you’re on a bike or when you’re in a car. What I also experience is that it makes me feel small and humble in a very good way. Sometimes you sit at home, and everything seems so important. You live in your own head and your own body. And then when you’re outside walking, everything is changing. There’s so much present. Nature is amazing. In the city, you see the craziest architecture. Also, you see horrible things like people who live on the street, or trash lying around everywhere. It’s a very good way to let go of the border that is between you and the world.
When you go on performative walks you also write during them. What’s the relationship between walking and writing for you?
Writing and walking are for me always very connected. I think they’re also, in a way, similar processes. They’re both slow. In writing, you go from word to word, you make lines and it turns into this story, and a walk can also be quite similar in that sense. When I’m walking, stories start to happen in my head and I want to write. When I’m writing and I sit behind the computer, then I want to go out and walk. On a long walk, I always write about what has happened but sometimes while walking, a story is shaping in my mind that is ahead of the moment and it influences how I experience the walk.
For example, once on a walk from Amsterdam to the south of France, one day a lot of things went wrong. I was in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t find a good place to put my tent. I had no food left and there were no villages nearby and worst of all there were big storm clouds coming in. But then I realised it was Friday the 13th and it would actually be good for the story if it would rain like crazy. I already imagined what I would write and was almost looking forward to putting down how I ended up hungry and soaked in a muddy tent. It’s fine, I thought and walked a little bit more, and then I turned a corner and met a woman who gave me shelter for the night, a soft bed and a warm shower and some food.
Weather is obviously a big part of walking as well. What kind of experiences have you had with different weather while walking?
There have been all kinds of weather from extreme heat, extreme storms, rain, and thunder. I never really experienced extreme cold and walked in those kinds of circumstances. Every weather is different and brings something different. I do have to admit that when it’s raining like crazy, then it’s also a very good excuse to go somewhere to have a coffee and write or have an unexpected meeting.
Twice a year I take part in a project called British Summer Time by Blake Morris, where people walk from 15 minutes before sunrise until 15 minutes after sunset. You have to stick to these exact times. You walk no matter what. You might have to find a solution for this if the weather is horrible. Perhaps you stay inside and you walk in your house or you go for a walk in your imagination.
Going for a walk is usually an act of taking yourself outside. We spend, at least in the Western world, a big portion of our lives inside also due to our working conditions – so many people do office work. You have used the word and activity of “rewilding” in your artistic work. Is walking an act of rewilding our bodies and minds?
These are two things, of course, rewilding your body or entering a wild space. Rewilding is also something that can mean many things. In Europe, we don’t really have wild nature anymore. However, sometimes when you walk through a city, you see all these small plants that grow in between the cracks of the pavements. That’s something wild as well.
I think it’s definitely important to embrace a more natural way of being. It’s very unnatural how we survive these days. Survival means having a job so you can earn enough money, so you can buy your devices and go on holidays. I even think about this sometimes myself as the logical way to live your life these days. And it isn’t. It has sort of turned into this system.
Rewilding doesn’t mean living in a little hut somewhere in the forest. It is more about resetting our brain, rewilding our lifestyle. I think that rewilding your body, your brain, your way of doing things, is a way to become more aware of the senselessness of modern life. We, as a human species, didn’t live like this for a long time. The Industrial Revolution had a big impact, but the main change took place when people moved from a nomadic existence to a sedentary way of living, farming the land and building houses. When being on the move, you live from what you find, and you don’t take more or grow more than you need.
You touched upon this word “survival”. You have taught artistic survival skills to future artists. What kind of skills do you teach when you teach survival?
In general, I think it is hard to survive as an artist. There are a lot of people who give up. Artistic survival skills are about living with an artistic mindset and living your art. What do you need to continue to be able to do this? All these young students and artists growing up now struggle with this question, how do I do this as an artist? How do I earn my money? How do I survive? Being an artist means training a different mindset, creating space for failure, playfulness and not-knowing. One of the main things to train is to believe in yourself and listen to your gut feeling. That is very central.
Teaching about artistic survival skills is not about how you get a really big audience. It’s more about what kind of audience do you want? Maybe you prefer a small audience, or you want a very specific kind of audience. Maybe you want to work online. In a sense it’s also about unlearning and rewilding, remembering how you played and created as a child. How do you survive as an artist, not only in a practical way, but also in your mind space, in your body? How do you get the confidence and the trust to do this? How do you create a network? How do you learn new things? How do you find your inspiration?
Are these different slow endeavors and the practice of walking simultaneously your artistic practice, but also your survival skills?
Yes. They allow me to have a lot of slowness and enjoyment in my life. I’m really trying to do the things that give me pleasure. They are the things that are calling me somehow. I am working with symbiotic cultures and with plants and with seeds and photography, but in a slow way. It’s a very wide spectrum of a lot of different things.
My practice is walking through life, encountering things I’m curious about and giving them a place in my artistic process somehow. Sometimes it’s literally walking and bumping into things. Sometimes wandering around brings me in contact with something. For instance, in one project I worked with sheep and then I discovered the possibilities of wool. The wool entered my world. Another example is that I always baked bread and then I started to think about these living cultures. I did a big project with scobies – the kombucha cultures. it really changed my thinking and being working with these living organisms. Completely new questions and new approaches popped up.
Through being in motion all the time, walking, moving from project to project in different places in Europe, I encounter different things. Walking is always central, but all these other things, they become part of it. It’s very much about curiosity. Maybe sometimes even the curiosity of a child. What is this place? What is this material? What is this culture? What is this plant? What is this new technique? I find it important to work with things I value deeply, with people, with nature, and to make the process enjoyable.
Monique was talking online with Silja Tuovinen