Walking CV

PLACE / WALK / FOLK

Claudia just loves walking and the outdoors which have given her life-long inspiration and physical as well as mental health. Claudia is a certified walking leader (Scottish Mountaineering Centre, Glenmore Lodge) with a keen interest to introduce and encourage others to come, walk and see what their locality and the wider world has to offer on its surface. Over the past 10 years Claudia Zeiske has made a name for her personal pilgrimages that link places special to ourselves with political, historic or anecdotal sites as well as art and creative intentions. Her specific interest relates to long-distance path mapping and interpretation from a variety of political, social, historic and environmental angles.

Having been brought up in and around the Alps, Claudia has walked all her life. Her personal interest started in her late teens when she crossed the Alps from Germany to Verona with only a tent in her rucksack. Since then she criss-crossed on foot in many places, near and far, ranging from the Cevennes to the top of Mount Kenya; from the Atlas Mountains to the contested Tigray Hills in Ethiopia; from the disputed olive tree terraces around Rammallah to the now non-permissible Sinai desert. However, at the same time she thrives on discovering her own very turf, always with a finger on some of the NE-Scotland local maps.

Since coming to Scotland, she has walked all the munros, hills over 3000 feet, listed by 18th Cent mountaineer Hugh Munro. As many of those were in mist and haul, she is repeating the ones where she never had a view to remember, as well as those that have been demoted over time. Meanwhile she also walked the 1000k width of Austria across its peaky spine from Lake Constance to Neusiedl See on the Hungarian border in multiple stretches.

Peace, borders and human rights play an important part in establishing her personal walks. 2013 saw her walking along the contested Uganda-Congo border walking in the Rwenzori Mountains in the footsteps of Alexander McKay a Scottish missionary. This led to a return walk in collaboration with Ugandan artist Sanaa Gateja, bringing the missionary back home over the Aberdeenshire hills to Rhynie. In 2018 she walked the Sentiero della Pace – the much fought over WW1 border between Austria and the Italian dolomites. In 2019 she undertook a three-country peace related walk in the Accursed Mountains of Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo.

Her most important walking project so far was Home to Home a Brexit-considered 1800km+/90day walk linking her home town of Huntly in Aberdeenshire with her childhood place near Munich where her mother still lives (2017).

2019 saw her re-appropriating the Brewsters Wife walk in Portobello/Edinburgh as part of ARTWALKPORTY festival. With a beer by her husband in her rucksack it was leading up Arthur’s Seat, where a groaning cheese was to be won.

In October 2019 she led a group of women in the north-German Havelland from the village of Strodehne to the Fashion Museum in Meyenburg – looking for new strategies of international collaboration in the rural through art, design, political and socially diverse patterns in relation to femininity.  At the Partnerlook project she also took up the idea of knitting while walking for a quest of what women walking means?

This was followed by a walk during the Culture Action Europe conference that re-traced the final walk of Georg Elsner through the town of Konstanz trying to reach the Swiss border. Elsner attempted to assassinate Hitler in during a Munich speech to avoid the war. Sadly the Führer left 13 minutes before the bomb went off.

Many of her walks are artist led, for which she set up the Walking Institute, now nested in the work of Deveron Projects, where she was Director for 25 years until March 2021.Through this she organised important artist walking projects, to include Hamish Fulton’s 21 Days in the Cairngorms, Michael Höpfner’s Walking around the Grid and Anthony Schrag’s Lure of the Lost.

Since 2012, Claudia created an annual thematic Slow Marathons – 42km long walks where people can walk as slow as they like. They always lead to her hometown Huntly - linked to such local-global topics as borders, transport, energy or land use. During the 2020 lock-down, she reorganised a planned walk that motivated 360+ people across the globe to walk around our world – all Under one Sky.  June 2021 sees her working with artist Iman Tajik – on a marathon length walk from the contested Dungavel Removal Centre to Glasgow Airport as part of Glasgow International Festival 2021.

Claudia also organised a number of walking art related conferences and seminars. There are too many to name, but highlights are the Hielan’ Ways symposium in the Moray town of Tomintoul which brought together prominent mountaineers such as Doug Scott and walking artists such as Richard Long and various walking gatherings that followed the thematic Slow Marathons.  In summer 2020 she organised an online conference entitled Walking as a Political Gesture bringing together a number of politically motivated artists from across the globe.

During Covid-19 she did not stop walking, but walked a full marathon around her own house; she also undertook new routes in her own Huntly/AB54 patch, which resulted in a weekly column in the Huntly Express. She now researches all the existing paths in a 5 mile circuit of her home.

Her most recent walk (May 2021) covered the Cape Wrath Way, the remotest long-distance path on the British Isles.