This German woman has spent the last 3.5 years walking around the world. Now she's in Sask. | CBC News

Artist travelling the world on foot now crossing Saskatchewan

Germany's Katharina Kneip is merging art and movement in a multi-year voyage

Katharina Kneip hoists up her hefty pack, resting it on her thigh before swinging it onto her back. She sets off seconds later, beginning another day of exploring the top of the world.

Kneip began her multi-year project, Round:Motion, in January 2023. She walked and skied from Münster, Germany, through much of Northern Europe, and found work on sailboats that would take her to Canada. It's all part of a human-powered "northern loop" of the globe.

“Walking is the most basic thing we can do as a human, and that has structured our world as we know it today,” Kneip said. “On this edge of where the majority of people live, I want to experience the border between culture and nature, if there is such a thing.”

Kneip has documented her trip in almost daily posts to her Round:Motion social media account. In one, she describes her vision.

“I very slowly walk a connecting line until it closes again," she wrote. "A line that connects countless small experiences, man-made and non-man-made infrastructures, humans and non-humans, on which experiences are carried on and passed on.”

Kneip has been walking through Canada for nearly two years. She said she was excited to reach Saskatchewan and witness mass-scale agriculture for the first time.

“Of course it is enormous, coming from Europe, these huge fields and machines," she said. "I know now where the food industry comes from.”

Ken Kerslake lives in Winthorst, about 130 kilometres southest of Regina. He said Kneip approached him and his wife on their property, looking for a place to pitch her tent for the night.

“She was so open, so friendly, so honest," Kerslake said. "So willing to do whatever it takes to make this project work.”

The couple invited Kneip in for dinner and offered her their spare room for the night.

“It’s easy to be hospitable to nice people,” Kerslake said. “We loved her right away. We still do.”

The trip hasn't always been easy, but other than a close call with some bears in New Brunswick, Kneip said she feels quite safe.

“As long as you still have the power to be scared, it cannot be so bad,” she said.

“If it's really dangerous, all your energy goes into solving the problem or getting out of the situation, and you don't have energy left to be scared.”

Kneip said bureaucratic uncertainty is a near-constant source of stress, especially when trying to plan the logistics of her route.

“This dependence on a [visa] officer that might have had a bad day is, for me, much harder than dealing with bad weather,” she said.

Kneip acknowledged the inherent privilege in travelling the world as a white person with a German passport.

“It shouldn't be like this, but I'm aware that [ethnicity] plays a big role,” she said.

Kneip's plan was to travel north from B.C. through Alaska, paddle the Bering Straight and enter Russia from the east.

Given Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, she is now looking at other options, like hitching a ride on a cargo ship headed to Asia from Vancouver.

“I'm like a leaf [in the wind] of politics and bureaucracy,” she said. “[Round:Motion] is a very contemporary artwork in that way, because it will just represent the route that is possible today.”

Camilla Faragalli is a CBC reporter covering south-central Saskatchewan. Before starting at CBC's new bureau in Moose Jaw in June 2026, she worked as an associate producer in Toronto and as a reporter in Whitehorse. She reported previously for an independent newspaper in the Outaouais region of Quebec. You can reach her at camilla.faragalli@cbc.ca.