Tony White is the author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber and Faber) and the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans. Tony also co-edited the fiction anthology Croatian Nights (Serpent’s Tail/VBZ). Balkanising Bloomsbury is a fiction project by White which reworks the archive of existing texts about the Balkans, from travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, using experimental literary techniques to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity.

November 9th 2007 - November 13th 2008

one year on foot - 4646km through China

unlimited beard & hair growth

thelongestway.com

musical score by the kingpins ( myspace.com/theoneandonlykingpins ) and zhu fengbo

Additional info:

- I never finished my original goal of walking to Germany. Instead, I walked for a year and roughly 4500km, passed the desert of Gobi, and then decided to stop walking for now.

- All of the distance from Beijing to Ürümqi has been completed solely on foot, straight good old walking. There are instances where you can see me in the video sitting on a plane or riding a boat, but those are during breaks I had to take from walking, either to sort out bureaucracy issues or to take care of some personal things.

- I had been planning this trip for over a year before I even started, and getting as far as I got was an experience for which I am very grateful.

- Obtaining the necessary visa for a trip like this was not very easy, hence I had to go back to Beijing a few times to resolve some issues.

- The songs I used in the video are 1) Zhu Fengbo - "Olive Tree" and 2) The Kingpins - "L'aventurier" - visit the Kingpins website if you want to know more, they are very cool I think.

- This is not a strict "1 pic a day" video, because I wanted to make it a bit more alive by adding some additional movement. Sometimes during the film you would follow me turn around, or something would happen in the background. I tried to capture these moments to make the video more interesting.

- The core of this project is in fact my website "www.thelongestway.com" where I have posted my extensive travel diary, starting from day 1 (Nov 9th 2007) and describing every single day until the end one year later.

This cocoon for weekend living is situated in a bushy coastal hamlet on the Great Ocean Road. The steepness of the site, the dramatic views and the sometimes harsh climate resulted in a object house that whilst protecting from the elements, opened one side to the landscape. In principle this is a matchbox inside an egg, a rectangle within an oval. Inside, the spaces dovetail together with the economic precision of a small boat or caravan.

The original First World War collection comprised over 1,000 items of film relating mainly to the last three years of the war. Highlights of the collection include the original 1916 record of The Battle of the Somme, home front material such as Mrs John Bull Prepared (1918), a substantial run of the French official newsreel Annales de la Guerre and the remarkable record of German U-boat operations in the Mediterranean in 1917, Der Magische Gurtel.