ARTIST STATEMENT
First Steps (2017)
This project was born in my spare time, developed independently in the open, and evolved at the pace of a turtle. Countless public drafts and serene long walks have shaped it into its present state, akin to a therapeutic exercise.
The project’s lines of code first appeared online in November 2017, four months after the summer debut of walking and photographing. Since the beginning, the creative process was intuitively, leisurely, or swiftly, from time to time, offline or online. Until it was terminated with an emphasis on narrative writing, visual storytelling retrospectively, artist’s book formatting, and public timestamps.
Below is the HTML code of a Frequently Asked Questions webpage, preserved exactly as written. Note the optimistic “5 year lifespan” — the A Walk, A Day art project ultimately spanned eight years. The project outlived its intended lifespan because survival itself kept being deferred — each asylum appeal extending the legal limbo that sustained the walking practice.
```html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<!-- Last modification: 17/11/2017 17:17 -->
<title>FAQ | A WALK≡A DAY</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, I'm very glad that you have discovered A WALK≡A DAY !
</p>
<p><strong>INTRO</strong>
<br>Born out of simple boredom and burst of creativity, A WALK≡A DAY is a black and white visual arts project.
<br>Since then, every long walk ends with a collection of b&w photos snapped on-the-go by using a smartphone camera.
</p>
<p><strong>WHEN?</strong>
<br>The first image was published on Instagram (@all.day.walking) on July 19th, 2017.
<br>At least one picture is (or should be) posted on a daily basis.
<br>This art project's lifespan is 5 years.</p>
<p><strong>WHY?</strong>
<br>A single motivating quote essentially inspired the creation of the project : "The Sun is up and running, everyday, for you."
<br>In a global trend of fast-paced urbanization, generations of kids are growing without a sense of curiosity of their surroundings and adventurous drive in the unfamiliar landscapes.
<br>Instagram, with 400 million daily active users, was selected as the most compelling internet platform to host such a street photography gallery that would target millenials and inspire them to creatively join a well-being movement.
<br>Taking long walks and snapping lots of pictures along the way both became complementary in my regular young adult life and I can't refrain from recommending this kind of endeavor to other fellow youngsters.
</p>
<p><strong>HOW?</strong>
<br>Images are shared in black and white format with a white wide frame.
<br>All pics are taken from an Android phone and later, edited in Snapseed.
<br>The hashtag #awalkaday is attached to every post and can be clicked on to view in bulk similar posts shared by the Instagram community.
</p>
<p><strong>WHERE?</strong>
<br>Photos are mostly taken at any time of the day from the streets and hidden alleys of Western Europe.
<br>I'm currently based in Belgium.
</p>
<p><strong>WHO?</strong>
<br>The person behind the #awalkaday art movement is Chris-Armel (@daqhris).
<br>He was born in Burundi and has previously traveled to Eastern Asia, Middle East and North Africa.
</p>
</body>
</html>
```
The three-bar symbol ≡, synonymous with the two-way street sign ↔, piqued my interest as an indicator of logical equivalence and the monetary unit of a currency on the Ethereum blockchain.
Technical Start-up (2021)
The page listing answers to ‘WHEN, WHY, HOW, WHERE, WHO’, titled FAQ | A WALK≡A DAY, was eventually migrated from my personal site at daqhris.com/awalkaday to an independent open-source project. The art project is structured like an organization on GitHub where all the sites built under the umbrella of awalkaday found a safe shelter.
The awalkaday building blocks became once again the focus of my geeky attention and camera lenses from May 2021 onwards. That was right after receiving a developer certification from web coding classes, taught at freeCodeCamp.org, elongated into the timeframes of Aug-Oct 2016 and Dec 2020-Feb 2021.
This book displays a mix of texts copied and modified from about.awalkaday.art — an online page as old as the project’s earliest footprints — with poetic writings narrating a ‘crème de la crème’ artwork, which is illustrated by evocative awalkaday photographs.
Its pages tell the tale of a human wanderer, portray traces of what was seen, felt, done, and lived from an objective perspective, and also hint at what has come to pass.
awalkaday 48-2022
Memory Work (2024)
Peering into photographs devoid of humans, combing through scattered data trails, cleansing away trauma by crying were a weekly occurrence when recalling shattered memories during a life review at the start of 2024.
Traveling back in my mind’s timeline, against my brain’s resistance, was made a breeze by the patronage of a British artist and theatre-maker who provided rent-free housing on the hilltop of an avenue honoring Mount Kemmel in Brussels, at a flat overlooking the Park of Forest where rose up inspiration, for nearly a year and a half (2023-2025).
awalkaday 172-2022
For an accurate time-stamped record of the book’s drafts, or an analysis of my public edits scribbled down in git commits, please visit the source code repository. A visual chart showing additions and deletions of encoded texts, on a weekly basis and over a long time window, is available here.
Writing Oneself, Third Person (2025)
- **i-Protection:** Eight years of walks compress years of financial precarity, rejection letters, awareness of being the 'other' in public space, threat attack mitigation, exile's social isolation, zero employment contract, healthcare access denial, power-abusers retribution, homelessness, hypervigilance, uncertain future, etc. First person requires reliving. Third person allows recording.
- **Objectivity Under Scrutiny:** As an immigrant whose belonging rights are a subject of recurring debates, my subjective testimony is often suspect, silenced or surveilled. Immigration 'interviews' were tainted by a hostile assumption of faking suffering for sympathy gain. Third person borrows the authority of the binary archive spread around third-party networks that don't ask to be believed; they simply are.
- **Archival Consciousness:** Though forced to interrupt studies in computer engineering, I built an infrastructure for my artworks to reach all ports of the cybernetic universe on digital rails. This work is designed to outlive me across long-lasting and neutral systems, such as decentralized storage. These computing systems speak in third person. I match their voice.
- **Memory's Limitations:** I cannot reliably recall all memories or resurface all snapshots. Some periods are fragmentary, obscured by trauma or time. Photographs and timestamps contribute what memory cannot naturally. Third person acknowledges this gap between experience and evidence.
- **Julius Caesar** wrote **"Commentarii"** about his military campaigns in third person (self-documentation and self-mythologizing). Centuries later, **Charles de Gaulle** followed suit, **"Mémoires de guerre"**.
- **Henry Adams** wrote **"The Education of Henry Adams"** in third person to examine himself as case study, objectified for analysis.
- **W.G. Sebald**'s narrators observe themselves observing, creating dreamlike distance.
- **Gertrude Stein** ventriloquized herself through **'Alice B. Toklas'**.
- **W.E.B. Du Bois's**** ****'double consciousness'**: the necessity of seeing oneself through the gaze of systems that mark you as other. As an African exiled in Europe, I exist in this dual consciousness — my lived experience and the bureaucratic third-person that defines my (non-)status.
- **Afrofuturism's archival urgency**: the practice of creating permanent records when dominant systems erase or distort one's existence.
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