Don Gill walks Paul Valéry used to say walking was a fundamental part of his work. By walking, his ideas appeared with more clarity, and the rhythm of his footsteps helped him give the correct timing to his own thoughts for the development and appearance of his work. Enrique Vila Matas a Catalonian writer, told me he and his neighbor, Juan Marsé the writer, used to go down from his house in the Travessera de Dalt to the Barrio Gótico with the excuse of buying cigarettes, a journey in which the conversation made both writers forget their intention of smoking until they were lost in the Barcelona night. In the city of Mérida, Mexico, while walking, we discovered that the street names where given not only by a foresighted numeration which calculated the city's maximum possible size, but by the strange names some corners have, illustrated by drawings the Bat, Cow, and Canary corners because of the legends, centuries before, that made it easier to locate the streets for an ancient population which didn't always know how to read. For Don Gill, walking is the optimal way to achieve collaboration work. Collaboration begins when Don Gill picks his travel partner and establishes with him a double route: that of walking and that of thought. The roaming along the cities, and the conversations help both travelers absolutely confide in the instability; their encounter with the landscape is as equally unexpected as the other's ideas. Thus, there is no privileged position, nor comfortable situation. Both have to walk through the trails and words, in parallel voyages, with no correctness or hierarchy mediating between them. The true governor, which may be a silent one, a pleasant one or a rough one, is the journey itself. Don Gill invited us, my wife Ximena and I, to walk through the streets of Mérida. Because of its monstrous dimensions, Mexico City, the city we live in, we don't walk much. To cross the city by foot is a symptom of madness, thus we try to walk as much as possible every time we leave the city. We accepted Don Gill's invitation with pleasure. The heat was acute. The three of us talked through the southeastern, so called "White City" of our country, amongst the vestiges of Hurricane Isidore, which days before had brutally pounded the city. Huge trees had been torn from their roots and thrown against the majestic houses' walls. Some constructions turned up in ruins and at the end of the street there where three Rauschenberg portraits painted on a wall. We know that any journey is a way of learning. We learn the route to our houses; we memorize certain street names and we associate them with something. Sometimes, the shape of a fence or the shadows of the road makes us remember far away memories of our life. In his videos, Don Gill offers us the record of that experience in which the journey of a landscape, as well as a thought, proceed in parallel with a persistent and continuous image. As in the city walks, in which the travelers talk and solely unite their words with small cross-points with the landscape, subtle cross-points as the bird's flight when we talk about the encounter with metaphysical realities or the account of a magician when we see a puppy dog walking amongst museum's visitors; we confront ourselves before a verbal structure, with an image that establishes a parallel visual essay that amplifies the meaning. Don Gill is also interested in the breaking-point between the reality which comes out to meet us in the way and that which we would like to talk about. All of a sudden, for those of us to whom walking is a festive and unusual activity, the path of our conversations intertwines itself with the strange coincidences of the landscape that, for a moment, seem to be a strange translation of our own thoughts. As in one of its melodramas, I think thought is like a centipede that walks diligently on the edge of something and turns erratically and decidedly, until at a certain point it has to make a stop, explore and go back to its path, while it doesn't find a way to stop itself, walking while the impulse guides us. I remember that to memorize school's history lessons, I walked around a table in which I worked, repeating dates and names until they fixated in my memory. Don Gill walks and makes us learn things; traffic in the essay, a voyage amongst ideas. -- Salvador Alanis, Mexico city. May, 2004. -- Jessie Lacayo, Curator