Would you walk a mile holding hands with a stranger? This performance piece is asking you to do just that

Queeries is a column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens. 

This weekend, something quietly transgressive will happen under Toronto's Gardiner Expressway: people will walk a mile holding hands with a stranger. It's part of a performance project at The Bentway called Walking:Holding that's rooted in queer activism.  Participants will go on a guided walk where they'll encounter and hold hands with a series of people along the way. 

What Walking:Holding essentially asks is how identity, intimacy, hypervisibility and vulnerability can intersect in public spaces. It comes to Toronto via Scotland, where artist Rosana Cade created the work in 2011. 

"I was responding to my own experiences of same-sex hand-holding and the complex tussle between visibility and vulnerability, public and private intimacy, activism and fear," Cade says. "I was interested in the distance between perceived equality through legislation and the reality of people's lived experiences."

Cade began doing some experiments walking and holding hands with different people.

"I became fascinated by the multiple ways in which our identities — including ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, disability, body size, class, etc. — and our personal history or relationship with certain places affect our experience of public space, as if we are all carrying around personal psychogeographic maps in our heads, constantly being etched with new memories as we move through the urban landscape. For some, this can mean very real physical barriers that don't allow them to enter particular places. For others, the barriers are psychological or maintained by the unknown crowd."

So Cade created Walking:Holding. Their intention was to "share and understand some of these differences," in order to "collectively build more accessible public spaces in the future."

Over a decade after its inception, Walking:Holding now comes to Toronto. It is being presented during the opening weekend of The Bentway's Summer exhibition, Softer City, which is a program of installations and experiences that ask the question: "In an increasingly hard city, how do we soften the barriers that separate us?" 

"As we're navigating this new life as we come out of the pandemic, we're seeing that Toronto is very socially isolated and lonely," says The Bentway curator Alex Rand, who led the project's Toronto iteration. "This exhibition positions our public spaces — and by extension, our public art — as an essential tool for softening these barriers, and as a vital contribution to the well-being of our city." 

Rand says that Walking:Holding is a project that The Bentway's curatorial team has long been a fan of. 

"We felt everything Rosana's work was saying about connection and intimacy and being together in public space was exactly what we are trying to convey with this season's exhibition," he says. "We're so glad the timing worked out, and it's been beautiful working with Rosana and a team of local artists to bring the work to Toronto."

The performance will be for one audience member at a time, who will encounter and hold hands with seven strangers throughout the walk. Audience members will be guided along a predetermined path, and then the performance will end a short distance from the starting location. In total, it will last approximately 45 minutes.

"It is a rare experience to be so close to a stranger, to allow yourself to be led and to be given their undivided attention," Cade says. "Audience members are told before beginning that they can speak with the people they meet, there is no script and it's also fine if they want to be silent. The space this opens up can sometimes create moments of deep connection or profound conversation with people feeling able to reveal things about themself they wouldn't tell a close friend."

Cade says that there is something "freeing" in the structure of the work. 

"It is an opportunity for the audience member to be who they are in that moment with someone whom has no prior knowledge of them and whom they will probably never see again. The most common response to the project is one of joy, connection, liberation."

Rand says that he hopes Toronto participants are able to "take a moment to connect with a new person, and to soften some of the barriers that we all put up in the fast-paced hustle of the city."

"I hope they are able to see the city through a new perspective or even meet a new friend," he says.

For those who are unable to make the performance, The Bentway will be creating a companion installation of photographic portraits produced in collaboration between Cade, local photographer Kirk Lisaj and the participant performers of Walking:Holding. 

"These portraits will not only create a physical memory of the performance work, but further explore queer connection and visibility in our city as one of the anchor installations of the Softer City exhibition," Rand says. 

The installation will open at The Bentway in time for Pride on June 26 and stay on display until October 6. Walking:Holding itself takes place this Saturday, May 25 and Sunday May 26.