Walking towards a deep humanity

A conversation between Marco Noris and Andrea Pacheco González

Marco Noris (Bergamo, Italy) defines himself as an artist, a walker and «both at once». His visual work emerges from research processes in which walking and, with it, the artist’s own body become a tool for visual and sensory exploration. As in his previous project, Sequere (2022-2024), and again in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Celeste Reyna, Cos d’Ebre inquires into the memories that the river Ebro safeguards among its waters, understood here as body, border and archive. For eighty days, between April and July 2025, Noris walked more than one thousand two hundred kilometres on foot, partly in solitude but most of the time accompanied by Reyna and other companions on the route. Crossing seven autonomous communities, from the river’s geological source at the Pico de Tres Mares, in Cantabria, to its mouth in the Mediterranean, in the province of Tarragona, he walked seeking to establish a dialogue between his human-body and the river-body from a physical dimension, but also a political and even a spiritual one.

Since the first human settlements on the peninsula, the river Ebro —the longest and most abundant in Spain— established itself as an important channel of communication for the commercial, agricultural and, later, industrial development of the regions it crossed. Alongside its economic and social importance, the Ebro was also a source of conflicts that intensified rivalry —etymologically the word rival comes from the Latin rivalis, meaning «the one who uses the same river»— between different communities. Battles, wars, alliances and trade treaties have taken place on its banks since remote times; from the Punic Wars to the border conflicts during the period of Al-Ándalus; from the Bourbon reforms that promoted navigation to wartime tragedies such as the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and bloodiest of the Spanish Civil War. At different moments in history, this river has been a space of dispute, which also underlines the geopolitical relevance of waters within a territory.

In this project, Marco Noris understands the Ebro as a dynamic system in which multiple layers of natural, social and cultural origin converge. As living archives, he says, rivers «sediment geological, ecological and human narratives». In this way, the fluvial torrent becomes a container of memories that, among its diverse materialities and organisms, mobilises and preserves stories and life experiences.

The exhibition at the Lo Pati art centre in Amposta presented a set of pieces in different media and materials: videos, ceramics, watercolours on paper and paintings on canvas, as well as organic remains and objects found during the journey. To this series of newly produced works were added the project Sequere, mentioned above, and the Roman piece Figurative representation of the river Ebro, a marble fragment belonging to the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona, which possibly corresponds to a statue that personified the river as a deity. This group of works constitutes the continuation of the path begun by the artist in April 2025 in Cantabria. They are testimonies of a journey, material signs of the extraordinary experience of inhabiting the world for months with whatever the body was able to carry.

Cos d’Ebre proposes a reading of the territory in real time, in which the act of walking activates a «corporealisation of memory» that links geography, history, ecology and community. In his research on walking and what he calls the «sociology of the body», the French author David Le Breton argues that the body is a multidimensional measuring instrument, a broad-spectrum sensory tool whose parameters are the entire cosmos contained within one’s own existence. Under the sun, the rain, the stars, in contact with water or in silence, it is the artist’s body that performs the journey, for the «immensity of the space through which to walk corresponds to the immensity of the inner universe» of the walker.

Andrea Pacheco (AP): As a starting point, I would like to contextualise the project Cos d’Ebre in relation to both your biography and your artistic trajectory. Bearing in mind these two dimensions, the personal and the professional, I would like to ask you, first, about the question of walking as a practice and as a research methodology and, on the other hand, in relation to the space or territory that is the object of the walking, which is the river Ebro. I would like you to share in this text the factors, variables and circumstances that have fostered or stimulated your approach to the river and to walking as an artistic discipline or tool.

Marco Noris (MN): Walking came into my artistic practice unexpectedly. In 2017 I was working on a project about the Republican exile when the first great migratory crisis broke out in Europe. I realised then that approaching the subject of exile from the comfort of the studio was insufficient for me. I needed a personal involvement, to put myself at stake and go out to know directly the territory I was working on. It was at that point that I drew close to the act of walking; I considered it the most powerful way to involve my body and to link my artistic —pictorial— practice directly with experience. I was looking for an experiential basis that would give my work a depth it would not otherwise have reached and, at the same time, would allow me to connect the past —the Republican exile— with the present: my body walking on the border.

In my relationship with walking, I also cannot ignore the fact of being a foreigner in Spain. The need to know the place where I live, its territory and its history, has undoubtedly been a fundamental element. I found no more powerful tool of knowledge than walking through the territory and confronting it directly.

AP: This practice or this conscious operation that the walker performs has been part of the history of art, of philosophy, of poetry, of anthropology, as a methodology, tool or creative material. How do you relate to the work of emblematic walking artists such as Hamish Fulton or Richard Long and, from them, to this category that emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the United States, which is land art? Not so much in the creation and exhibition of site-specific pieces in a territory, but rather in what concerns understanding nature and what it contains —stones, earth, water, plants, animals, etc.— as artistic material.

MN: When I began the project On the Border (2017-2022) and went out to walk for the first time, I was completely unaware of the literature, the history and the impact of walking in the world of art or culture. It was only afterwards, little by little —and not even immediately—, that I came to know the experience of references prior to or contemporary with me. I prioritised experience and my own sensitivity over any intellectual knowledge. With regard to the great artists you mention, they are obviously references, each in their own way. In their practice I recognise and share many questions that are born with walking, all the questions that arise from experience: the relationship of the body with space and time, the transmission of that experience, nature, the route, the line… I can share Fulton’s idea of how walking is a pure form of artistic experience, or with Long, the thought of the body as an action that intervenes in a place.

What undoubtedly changes is the artistic formalisation, that is, how we transmit a life experience to the world. Each of us is a different artist, comes from a different practice, we walk through a world that has changed profoundly. Today we have more than six decades of land art behind us and the ways of walking in the world have multiplied. It is incredible how something as simple as walking can take so many forms; perhaps there is a different way of walking for each person in the world.

Looking back, I realise that in my practice nature has always been put in tension with the human: the mountain and the border, the river and memory. A theoretical tension that also interrogates the exile and orphanhood of the contemporary human being. For me, the natural is an archetypal place to be reached through the experience of walking, not as a spectator, but as an inhabitant. Walking is, in itself, nature; it makes us profoundly human and returns us to the earth. We end up being ourselves artistic material, together with stones, earth, water, plants, animals. This process is fundamental for my work to manage to hold some reflection of the sacred, which I consider proper to nature. We could say that the experience and the matter of nature are the humus through which the sacred can be transferred to the world of humans by means of art.

AP: I have been very seduced by the idea of thinking of your work as an heir to the pictorial tradition of landscape in European art, which reaches its apogee in the nineteenth century with the travelling artists. Of course, together with detaching your work from the geopolitical usefulness that this artistic current had, I think a fundamental difference is the relationship you establish as an artist with the territory that your body —or perhaps your humanity— occupies, observes and represents. What have been the findings experienced on your journey in this relationship that the project poses between the body-man and the body-river? How is this translated into your work?

MN: During the journey I experienced a process of detachment that allowed me to work from another place: a space in which it is easier for me to let things happen without me, renouncing being an «author» to become a «vehicle». Now, back in my studio, it will be interesting to see what remains of this state or what remains of me in relation to it. Cos d’Ebre is inserted into a long-range process that began some time ago and is still active. During the development of my project La Entrega (act I, 2018), there was a moment in which I realised that I no longer needed to relate to the landscape through mimesis. It was a technical exercise that disconnected me from experience. I still remember observing the Pyrenean peaks while realising that I myself had become landscape. I left the place of observer to enter the place of the observed. There was no going back. Since then I have sought a different relationship with the creative act, an artistic process more interior than exterior. This process led me to the vertical landscape, a landscape format very close to cartography. It is a conceptual place based on a tension between two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the representation of the vertical territory from the external perspective of the machine —the satellite or the drone—, which assumes the absence of an observer in the territory, is typical of traditional landscape painting. On the other hand, there is the pictorial process itself, which allows me to experience nature and to be a vehicle of physical and natural processes —water, matter, the drying, the washes, the accidents—, in which I try to reduce my intervention to the minimum possible. It is a process I feel to be very close to the experience of walking, because it is a deeply processual and natural pictorial technique, which exists as matter in the same way that matter itself exists: it is not reproduction, it is being. It is painting that exists as process, as object and not as representation. In this sense, just as at some point I went from being observer to observed, so too my pictorial work ceased to be representation in order to be creature.

AP: The water of the Ebro becomes a multidimensional pictorial material in this exhibition project. Within the organic composition of the river’s waters that you have gathered and used to paint, among its salts, particles and sediments there are also memories of this territory. It is the archive dimension of the river that contains, mobilises and preserves —among its diverse materialities and organisms— stories and life experiences of the peoples and people who have «inhabited» these waters. How has your relationship with these memories been, how and how much have they been shared with you? What do you feel is your role or your task in relation to that archive?

MN: Yes, the description you make of the role of water is very apt. Let us say that perhaps water is the maximum essence of the archive, in material and symbolic terms. For me water is also a form of connection, that invisible network that interweaves and brings into communication the different bodies and elements in that fabric that is our reality. There also exists, of course, a human archive formed by the stories and experiences of the people who live around the river. In the case of Cos d’Ebre, it has meant walking a territory through vast depopulated areas, in which what is striking is the absence of humanity. Despite this, during the journey we were able to gather, collect and listen to stories and memories, mainly from the more inhabited urban centres. They are fragments in relation to the vastness of the territory, but they are also triggers to develop and continue expanding the research in the future, starting from the void, in that space of oblivion that has been generated between the previous generations and the current ones, in the process of displacement and dematerialisation of the territory. In this sense, the journey can be understood as a first exploration of the territory that would allow a first index of the archive to be activated.

There was a moment during the journey, entering Catalan territory, an overwhelming instant in which I felt within me the totality of the route happening at the same time. The flow of the river, the human bustle, the forests, the birds, the paths, the villages, the valleys… I could perceive everything happening in me. My body became memory and vehicle, what feels and what is felt, an archive formed by different layers of existing. My role is perhaps to be an instrument to unveil what is not said and to make visible what is hidden, in order to give unity to what we can only perceive in fragments. A translator of the invisible through the materiality of the body.

AP: I have cited earlier the French sociologist and anthropologist David Le Breton, who links the territory travelled with what he calls the «interior territory», as if the interior of the walker could be reflected on the exterior as in a mirror. How vast was that geography of yours, how many valleys, mountains, deserts and flowering fields did you cross during your journey along the Ebro?

MN: This quotation from Le Breton relates directly to what I mentioned before: the walker becomes landscape, becomes territory, and with walking transfers the landscape from an exterior to an interior domain. During the journey along the Ebro, that correspondence was constant. The route encompasses an extraordinary geographical diversity: from the Cantabrian mountains to the Mediterranean delta, crossing the Ebro depression, the vineyards of La Rioja, the fields and deserts of Navarre and Aragon, the sierras of Mequinenza and, finally, the rice fields of the Delta. The vastness and variety of the exterior landscape had their reflection in my own interior geography. To the geographical and climatic conditions were added psychic and emotional states that accompanied the advance, as if the mood followed the same course of the river. We crossed the canyons and the exuberance of the humid forests of the north with a sense of plenitude and openness. Then came the heatwave and the endless expanse of crops of the Riojan and Navarrese lands, followed by the aridity of the lands ravaged by the extractivism of Aragon. Here walking became harder, heavier and more wearisome. Further on, in the calm of the lands of the lower Catalan Ebro, where the river runs slower and more generous, it translated into an interior serenity, a natural and harmonious closing of the journey. I was very struck by observing how the symbiosis between the bodies, mine and the river’s, took shape with the unfolding of the route.

AP: Finally, I would like to ask you for a reflection around this idea we have shared regarding the radically human character of this project, in the sense of being able to give us back a certain hope in our own humanity. Beyond political questions and reflections —which Cos d’Ebre also opens— linked to the management of environmental disaster or the ecologist perspective with which we must draw a future, from a poetic dimension the project invites us to see that the gentle flow of a river also exists within us. I mean recovering the memory of our full goodness, of our solidarity as a species, of our capacity to understand and accept one another as reciprocal organisms. I am talking about ceasing to point out the harm in order to begin to visualise the good we have done and that we can recover (ourselves). It is always necessary to remember that not ALL of humanity has been extractivist and hostile towards its environment. A few years ago, working on another project linked to our relationship with nature, we spoke of «mothering the earth» drawing on the thought of Casilda Rodrigáñez, who calls for recovering the symbolic order of the mother that would allow the notion of care, of goodness, of complacency, of reciprocity, of the mother’s giving, to be transferred to the care of the earth, in ecological and social terms.

MN: Walking is the deepest act of memory the human being can perform: it refers to our origins, to what we were. It transports us to a remote time in which we were nomads and gatherers, and maintained an active, immediate and symbiotic relationship with the territory. To leave the everyday urban frame and walk for weeks leads to the originary dimension of space and being, to a very ancient state of connection with nature. That place of return allows one to shed the superfluous and reveals an essential purity in the relationship with the world. It is not a matter of purity in a moral sense, but of a state uncontaminated by the useless superstructures and the artifices of the system in which we live.

We were commenting with Celeste, during one of our long walking conversations, that one of the ills of our time is to have associated the human with the negative. We are aware of the harm we generate as a species —climate change, the destruction of ecosystems, violence, exploitation and the voracity of the capitalist system— and of the loss of the social value of art, of philosophy and of humanist thought. This double phenomenon seems to have activated a form of collective guilt, deeply rooted, that feeds a self-destructive drive.

I believe that rethinking the future necessarily passes through breaking this association. When I affirm that it is necessary to be profoundly human in order to be able to imagine a new future, I refer to the urgency of investing in our most essential dimension: that in which the human is not defined by moral or productive values, but by its creative capacity, its bond with life and its belonging to the natural world. It is urgent to link the human once again with the creative, to recover the gaze towards the luminous side of our condition, because only from that dimension will we be able to save ourselves from ourselves.