Tino’s Pilgrimage | Christopher Givens

To walk is to embrace simplicity, to shed the superfluous, and to confront the essence of what one is. As the noise of our lives increases, walking can be both a grounded meditation and an act of resistance against corrosive modern life.

In October of 2024, my friend Tino Park began walking from Queens, NY towards the southernmost point of the continental United States. The 2,080-mile journey would take him 108 days. His manifesto, Migrational Pilgrimage, had three simple points:

I will walk on foot.
I will disconnect from all digital devices and media inputs except for the purpose of maps.
I will sleep and stay outdoors throughout the entire trip.

Tino Park’s October 29 Migrational Pilgrimage manifesto

In these rules, he sought clarity and release from external noise. A psycho-spiritual detox. Basic movement from point A to B to C. His rhythms would be dictated by nothing but the journey. He had a sleeping bag but no tent and it was hard to sleep on nights when it froze or rained. He read Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and wrote in a journal. He moved through highway shoulders, pinewoods, empty beaches, parking lots, across ditches, encountered vivid figures in his dreams, saw numberless dead animals, met strangers of all kinds, and walked by himself all day long.

Tino chose to engage with the world at a human pace. The physical labor of walking aligns with the spiritual labor of transforming oneself via a process. Walking between worlds of exterior and interior, real and imagined, the pilgrim is a bridge across which revelations might occur. Their migration inevitably leading to the core questions of any lifetime such as what of me is actually mine, or, more simply who am i now ?

Tino walking through a luminous landscape

Layered roadside photograph from the pilgrimage

Landscape photographed along the pilgrimage

This series was first present at Overtones of Extraction, a group exhibition curated by Elliott Stokes at Front. When Elliott shared his ideas about the show, he was asking questions surrounding the consequences of climate change: How do we make sense of a future defined by instability? What does it mean to live with dignity in the midst of ecological collapse? I suggested a series of photos of my friend the artist Tino Park who had recently undertaken an epic solo pilgrimage.