The thermometer pushes past 30 in the shade. The earth is cracked open like a desert, and the gravel road stretches ahead through marshland with no cover. Katharina Kneip walks. A man on an ATV appears, hands her cold water and a Pepsi, tells her where the cabin key is hidden. She nods, swings her pack, continues. The fire ban means no wilderness, no trails, no wild camping — just road. But there are always people.
Katharina grew up in Trier, a small German city of classical music and no television. Her father was a church musician; she spent afternoons in the forest and knew from childhood she was an artist. After an apprenticeship as a stonemason, she studied fine arts, building installations that interrupted daily life, giving people new perspectives. But the work began to repeat itself. So she combined it with travel — first a walk from Vienna to Münster, knocking on farmhouse doors during a thunderstorm, invited in to a stranger’s birthday party. The people she met had never set foot in a museum. That changed everything.
Today she is two and a half years into Round:Motion, a human-powered circumnavigation on a northern route around the Earth. She walks in summer, skis in winter, and hitchhikes on sailing boats across the sea passages. She has crossed Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Svalbard, Greenland, Iceland and Newfoundland. Right now she is in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia — a quiet town with a Scottish saltire in its coat of arms, where everything closes at five — preparing to walk a thousand kilometres to Ottawa before the winter arrives.
The edge between culture and wild.
Round:Motion follows the border where people live up to a point and nature takes over — a line especially visible in the north. Katharina is interested in how different cultures meet that edge, and how the dualistic German idea that humans can conquer nature breaks down in places where the weather is extreme, the polar night lasts months, and survival depends on respect rather than control. After walking from Münster to northern Norway — roughly 4,000 kilometres — she spent a winter in Kirkenes during the polar night, then skied west towards Tromsø. She worked as a guide at the Snow Hotel, showing German tourists around a place where life continues calmly through the dark, with ice fishing and fiddle music in the pubs.
Sailing through ice.
She hitchhiked north to Svalbard on a sailing boat with twelve people, stopping at Bjørnøya in good weather, then worked on another boat when someone got sick and she said yes without hesitation. Svalbard felt like another planet — 24-hour daylight, polar bears, hiking for 48 hours without tiredness. But it also felt wrong. There is no indigenous history there, only whaling, coal and politics. The Russian settlement at Barentsburg is now a ghost town. From Longyearbyen she sailed west with a French skipper whose partner had pulled out at the last moment. The crossing to Newfoundland was the most adventurous sail of all: just the two of them, more than 50 knots of wind off southern Greenland, sea ice and glacier ice, things breaking on the boat, nobody on the VHF, nowhere to go if they tipped. She thought about the risk she had agreed to. The boat was in good shape. It was just something that happened.
I always try to take the most northern route possible.
— Katharina Kneip
Iceland, fermented skate and the speed of walking.
In Iceland she walked 500 kilometres from Ísafjörður to Akureyri, then stayed on a small farm where an older couple still milked by hand and smoked their own mutton with sheep dung. She crossed the highlands on skis with a friend, both of them a little sick but lucky with the weather. She tried sheep’s eyes, reindeer parts, sour meat — most of it fine once she freed herself from cultural conditioning. But the fermented skate, buried for half a year then cooked for hours, was next level. She walked onward to Reykjavík to meet a sailing boat, only to receive an email saying it had broken down. A French boat appeared in the harbour the same day, looking for crew to Newfoundland. She still had a hundred kilometres to walk. She made it.
In this conversation.
We hear how Katharina grew up knowing she was an artist, how she trained as a stonemason before studying fine arts, and how her first long walk from Vienna to Münster opened her practice to people outside museums. We follow her from Germany through Scandinavia to the polar night in Kirkenes, across the highlands of Iceland, and onto sailing boats through 50-knot winds and sea ice to Newfoundland. We learn why she chose the north — to walk the edge between culture and wild nature — and how Round:Motion refuses the heroic, romantic storytelling common in adventure media. We discuss the risks she agrees to, the fire bans forcing her onto roads in Nova Scotia, the kindness of strangers who give her water and Pepsi and homemade gingerbread, and the privilege she carries in being received warmly when others might not be. And we hear why she walks rather than cycles: because walking is always at the speed of people, with no tool between her and the Earth.
Call to adventure.
Start at your front door. Walk or hike — it is simple, you need only shoes. In Europe the pilgrimage paths go through every town, so stages can be short and accommodation easy. Even walking around your own town for a week and returning home can give a new perspective on where you live and how your society is built. There is nothing like the feeling of having started at the front door and returning there by foot. And you will notice, very quickly, how many cities are not built for people walking — how hiking trails start at parking lots, how pedestrian zones end as soon as you leave the centre. It is an interesting perspective on what is important in our societies.
Pay it forward.
Support your local hiking and mountaineering clubs. In Germany there is the Alpine Club, in Norway the DNT, in other countries the Scouts. These organisations maintain trails, run educational programmes for children and youth, and organise group hikes for people who do not feel comfortable hiking alone. Many are facing financial cuts from governments and lack volunteers and members. You can donate money if you do not have time, or volunteer practically — removing fallen trees, maintaining benches, keeping access to nature open. When there are well-kept trails, the rest of nature is a little more protected, with people not walking everywhere. This work is often taken for granted, but it is people who make it possible.
About Katharina.
Katharina Kneip is a German artist born in 1990 in Trier. She trained as a stonemason and studied fine arts at the Academy in Münster, where she worked with professor Mariana Castillo Deball. Her practice combines performative art with long-distance human-powered travel. In January 2022 she began Round:Motion, a circumnavigation of the Earth on a northern route, walking and skiing on land and hitchhiking on sailing boats across sea passages. She has crossed Germany, Scandinavia, Svalbard, Greenland, Iceland and Newfoundland, and is currently walking across Canada towards Ottawa. She documents the journey through Instagram, a homepage and a free newsletter, and invites people to meet her along the way for a coffee or to walk together. Round:Motion is not about kilometres or records, but about finding another way to think about adventure — slow, honest, at the speed of people.
The earth is still cracked open. The fire ban will last until October. But by then she will be gone, a thousand kilometres closer to Ottawa, carrying homemade gingerbread and the memory of strangers who opened their doors. There are always people.
