Most people walk through a city without giving it much thought. We follow familiar routes, take the quickest shortcuts and move between destinations almost automatically. For artist Alisa Oleva, walking is never a neutral act. Every journey contains stories, memories, choices and possibilities that can go unoticed.
We are meeting as part of the Nuart Aberdeen Festival ‘Poetry is in the Streets’. Bringing her distinctive practice of walking art into the Granite City. Rather than creating a mural or physical installation, her medium is the city itself and the act of moving through it.
The Art of Walking
Oleva’s projects take many forms. Some are intimate one-to-one encounters. Others involve large groups moving together through public space. There are audio walks, sound walks, workshops, blindfolded walks and performances that unfold through the simple act of moving from one place to another.
What unites them is a fascination with how people connect to places.
“It’s always happening in the streets,” she says. “It questions how the public space operates and how such a simple thing as a walk through the city is never actually simple and neutral.”
Rather than focusing on historical facts or established narratives, Oleva’s walks encourage participants to bring their own experiences into the journey. The city becomes a space of shared discovery where personal memories and observations matter as much as any official story.
Interview with Alisa Oleva at Nuart Aberdeen
Finding Home Through Walking
A recurring theme within Oleva’s work is the idea of home and belonging. It is a subject that runs through many of her projects, but one that also emerges from her own experience.
Raised in Moscow and later moving to London as a teenager, she found herself navigating an unfamiliar city with little money, plenty of time and no clear sense of connection to her new surroundings. Walking became both a practical necessity and a way of making sense of the place around her.
Before moving to London, home had been something fixed and familiar. Centred around family and the neighbourhood where she grew up. Arriving in an unfamiliar city transformed that understanding. The places she returned to were no longer private spaces but public ones. The streets, bus routes, parks and overlooked corners that gradually became part of everyday life.
Over time she developed an intimate knowledge of the city, learning its hidden routes, unofficial shortcuts and the small details that most people pass without noticing. Walking became a way of building a relationship with place, transforming unfamiliar streets into something that felt personal and meaningful. What began as a response to circumstance would eventually evolve into the foundation of her artistic practice.
Deep Hanging Out
Before creating work in a new place, Alisa Oleva likes to spend time doing what she calls “deep hanging out”. It’s a phrase that captures her approach to understanding a city.
Rather than arriving with a fixed plan, she wanders. She spends time in streets and public spaces, returns to the same locations, talks to people and gradually becomes familiar with the rhythms of a place. It is a process built on patience rather than destination.
For Oleva, understanding a city is less about finding the right path and more about remaining open to what happens when you get lost. Places reveal themselves slowly. Conversations emerge naturally. Connections form over time. What might initially seem ordinary can become significant through repeated encounters and careful attention.
Many of her projects develop over months or even years. They allow for relationships with both people and place to evolve organically. She describes this process as allowing a city to reveal its “nerves” and hidden connections rather than imposing a narrative upon it.
Following Desire Lines
One of the most compelling ideas within Oleva’s practice is with the idea of “desire lines“. These are the unofficial paths created when people choose not to follow prescribed routes.
Often visible as worn tracks across grass or informal shortcuts through urban spaces. Desire lines reveal how people actually move through a city rather than how planners expect them to.
“I really like the term desire lines,” she says. “It holds this poetic potential.”
These routes represent a subtle form of urban authorship. They show how residents continuously reshape their environment through everyday actions.
The idea connects closely to Alisa’s interest in parkour philosophy. Particularly the notion of treating obstacles as opportunities. Rather than accepting a city exactly as it is presented, she encourages people to look again. To move differently and discover possibilities hidden in plain sight.
Rewiring the City
Alisa’s walks can contain elements that some people might find a little unusual. Participants might be invited to walk backwards, touch a wall, follow an unexpected route or pay attention to details they would normally ignore. These activities are designed to help people experience familiar places in unfamiliar ways.
At the heart of Oleva’s practice is a belief that small acts of attention can transform our relationship with the city. A route walked every day can suddenly reveal something new. An overlooked corner can become significant. A familiar street can feel entirely different when approached from another perspective.
Sometimes those changes are subtle. Participants leave with a heightened awareness of places they thought they already knew. The city remains the same, but their relationship to it has shifted.
At other times the experience becomes collective. Reflecting on a recent walk involving more than one hundred participants connected by a single thread. Oleva described the feeling as surprisingly powerful. Moving together through the city created a sense of shared purpose and possibility.
“It felt like we could change the city,” she recalls. “Or rewire its paths, or rewire the stories.”
Poetry in Motion
At its heart, Alisa Oleva’s work is not really about walking. It is about attention.
Through simple acts of movement and observation, her walks encourage people to slow down and engage more deeply with the spaces around them. Participants begin to notice things that might otherwise remain invisible; a worn path across the grass, a detail in a building, or the subtle routines that shape everyday life.
The streets themselves do not change. Yet something shifts in how we experience them. A familiar route becomes an opportunity for discovery. A place once overlooked becomes meaningful.
Perhaps that is the real power of walking. Not simply to take us somewhere new, but to help us see what has been there all along.
Alisa Oleva was interviewed as part of the 2026 Nuart Festival in Aberdeen. Her art is experiential in nature, inviting an audience to experience the city in new and different ways.
For other Inspiring City articles you will like, take a look at…
- Poetry is in the Streets – All the artworks from Nuart Aberdeen 2026
- From Style writing to Abstraction – Remi Rough paints Aberdeen
- Robert Montgomery launches Nuart Aberdeen with Poetic Installation
- The Art of Flying: The enduring power of Fly Posting
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