Walkers is a video piece by Shaughn Martel, which explores a prolonged moment of urban dissociation. Informed by the artist’s experiences with ADHD and aphantasia, it presents the viewer with an everyday scene, a POV shot of a figure resting on a stretch of city sidewalk, and then dissects that moment; tearing down and apart the viewer’s vision, only to (harrowingly slowly) piece it back together. While I have no experience with ADHD or aphantasia, I do suffer from anxiety, brought on by a prolonged experience of vertigo in the first half of 2021, and the ways in which Walkers portrays the dissolution of an everyday setting / moment spoke to that experience potently.

This response is going to be more personal than most which have appeared on the site so far. Not unlike Mortimer, Be Quiet’s Close Quarters, Walkers is a work which I had an immediate and visceral reaction to. In early January of 2021 I had to have emergency dental surgery, and as a postoperative complication I suffered both positional vertigo and a condition called vestibular neuritis, which induces effects similar to vertigo while still being distinct enough to stand out from it. Of course at the time I had no idea what was wrong, which condition(s) I was experiencing; and with the pandemic still in full force getting a diagnosis, let alone treatment, took several months. Several months during which I could barely walk to the bathroom and back.

Happily, neither condition is permanent (or at least weren’t in my case). However, the experience left me with an equally (if not more) debilitating anxiety, which likewise left me trapped at home for many months. This too has thankfully since been treated, though my level of anxiety has not completely returned to normal. The more than a year long experience of these overlapping conditions forced me to perceive and navigate my surroundings in completely new ways. Whenever I left the house during the initial six months of dizziness and vertigo, the streets, people and buildings around me alternated between violently vibrating / shaking and drifting and tilting at strange angles, suddenly dropping out from under me. Later, at the height of the resulting anxiety and panic attacks, I suffered several moments of public dissociation and derealization; experiences which give one's surroundings a terrifyingly alien quality for their duration.

And I was one of the fortunate ones. None of my conditions were untreatable, and those episodes of dissolution have now thankfully passed. Reflecting back on them now, I very much felt at moments like I was seeing beyond the veneer of the world around me; that there were rifts between people, buildings, objects, and that these rifts were ever present, not forming in those moments but simply passing into visibility. From vertigo and anxiety arose a feeling of being on a precarious edge, about to fall through the cracks and into the earth.

And as I said, I was one of the lucky ones; for me this experience of the world was a relatively short lived one. Many must live with it as a constant, and the architecture of our contemporary world is not one which is kind to them. Even living with a physical and mental disability for only one year made it painfully clear how inaccessible the world under capitalism is. And this inaccessibility is far from limited to our physical structures and networks either; our bureaucracies, digital infrastructures and economic systems are all actively hostile to those whose navigation of the world falls outside of a very narrowly defined norm. There are far too many who are knowingly, maliciously, allowed to slip through the cracks.

Even this term, slipping through the cracks, which is often applied to those whom society has failed, is a form of erasure and disavowal. The onus is placed upon the victim, and the nature of the problem is presented as unintentional, even natural. The cracks are merely there, unavoidable, and we misstepped, fell through, failed to be careful. This is, of course, mere propaganda. The faults within our contemporary world are not cracks in the sense of accidental breakages or natural and unavoidable erosion, nor are their victims random or complicit; they are carefully laid out rifts, traps put in place and then hidden for those who neoliberal systems do not deem valuable to fall into. They are the gaps between people, buildings, systems, and they are always present whether we see them or not.

Walkers, with a restraint I would not be capable of in discussing these topics, makes visible these faults; the rifts and cracks we are all, in one form or another, always on the precipice of. I feel bad for not directly discussing Martel’s piece more in this response, but as I said it created a powerful reaction in me. There are certainly more ways to read it than what is presented here, and I can only imagine that those suffering from permanent or more sustained conditions, like the artist themselves, would gain insights completely lost to me. Regardless of your experiences, I strongly urge you to view Walkers, and to sit with it a while. It makes visible something that we would all do well to investigate more closely.