Caminhando

Lygia Clark

In Caminhando (Walking), artist Lygia Clark proposes the following action:

Take a pair of scissors, stick one point into the surface and cut continuously along the length of the strip. Take care not to converge with the preexisting cut - which will cause the band to separate into two pieces. When you have gone completely round the circuit of the Moebius strip, it's up to you whether to cut to the left or to the right of the cut you've already made. The idea of choice is capital. The unique meaning of this experience is the act of doing it. The work is your act alone. To the extent that you cut the strip, it refines and redoubles itself into interlacings. At the end, the path is so narrow that you can't open it further. It's the end of the trail.

Try not to know - while you are cutting - what you are going to cut and what you have already cut.

If I use a Moebius strip for this experiment it is because it breaks our spatial habits; right-left, front and reverse, etc. It makes us live the experience of a time without limit and of a continuous space.

Even if this proposition is not considered as a work of art, and even if one remains skeptical in relation to what it implies, it is necessary to do it.

There is only one type of duration: the act. The act is that which produces the Caminhando. Nothing exists before and nothing afterwards.


Lygia Clark, Caminhando (Walking), 1964