A room

I fell in love. Love at first sight, I never believed in it. But there it was. Just around the corner. In Marienstrasse 2.

I stepped inside the room and fell. Bottomless. I am still floating. Haven't touch the floor since. Only that floor. The room's floor. My feet freezing. There's no heating in there and it is cold outside.

I never made a secret of hating my Weimar apartment. It has three small rooms, a small kitchen and a big bathroom. Low ceilings, linoleum on the floor, central heating. I tried to make it comfortable and feel at home in there but I don't.

What is it about this room that makes me feel at home? I am not sure. A friendliness, a softness, a balance. The walls evoke memories but I don't know of what. Of drawings I have seen before. Or maybe I haven't. Maybe I have just been waiting for them. Or have seen them just now, looked away, forgot about them and remembered them when I looked again.

I wonder if this room might look like the inside of my head. In fact I would like it if the inside of my head would look like this room. Traces of past events, shapes and structures. But when I am in this room, who is in my head?

faded

some first thoughts on a small room

Jumped

Today I followed my feet. My guts. My hands. I reached for some invisible stars. Fell. Failed. But laughed. Played. Surprised myself. Embarrassed myself. Walked bare feet into a library wall. Explored some stairs. Put on a pair of different eyes. Moved. Got moved. Was moved. In different ways. Saw how the world can be big and small at the same time. Touched something new. Something old. Began at the wrong end. Ended at the beginning. Jumped.

(after a three day workshop with choreographer, filmmaker & visualnaut Daniel Belton)

The workshop made me think a lot about some first try-outs I did with a dancer & choreologist in Ireland last year.  There is a first sketch of our working process HERE

when I wasn't in Weimar

 more polaroids HERE

A new idea in a new coat

I had an idea. It was based on project I had done last summer. During the Sideways Festival I walked with a group of artists from one end of Belgium to the other end. We did projects on the road and in the festival weekends. I wore the same 3 piece walking suit every day. From the outside it got stained, worn-out, torn. It showed the traces of the trip. I used the inside as my notebook, embroidering thoughts, sketches, other peoples' words in my coat,vest and trousers.
After the festival I decided I would get myself a new suit, wear it for a longer period of time during "normal circumstances". And that is what I'm aiming for now.

I talked about this idea with a number of people and somebody commented that it was a rather shy approach and that I should think about communicating the work more. This made me think and I realized it wasn't the first time I heard this comment. In one of the first exhibitions I did outside the academy I made a work which was the biggest work in the exhibition. Some people didn't see it though because they walked over it without noticing it. I was accused of being a bad artist because I hadn't made sure the audience noticed my work. I returned the accusation by saying that I could just as well call the people not noticing my work a bad audience because they hadn't been observing very well.

I realize it is a fine line. And I know there is a lot of hiding, invisibility, researching inside-outside going on in my work. I like to think about perception, about what we see and what we don't see, challenging the audience to look at the world around them more carefully. I also know that a certain amount of intimacy can create the danger of making the work too private.

Anyway. Here are some pictures of the suit and of some earlier projects that relate to it in some sort of way. And I'll be thinking about how the inside of my new suit will relate to the outside world. I've been doing some research about wearing suits and writing travel diaries in the last decades. More about that later.

Walking along fields

      

It has been a long time since I made my favorite walk. I live on the edge of Weimar and it only takes me 5 minutes to be surrounded by empty fields, stretching out into all directions. I love to let my gaze wander around while my feet move forward, standing still from time to time.
I brought a book along because at the end of my walk, there's my favorite cafe. They have the best coffee in Weimar and serve a decent croissant.
It always takes me about an hour to get there, I guess I could be quicker but there's usually something catching my attention, or a photo has to be taken, or I get lost in a thought and my pace slows down. The fields always intrigue me, their color, the lines, the small things happening. While walking I thought about my plans for this semester. Last summer I embroidered my thoughts in a three-piece walking suit. This semester I want to develop this idea further.

In the Kaffeeladen I opened my book. John Berger, About Looking. I had actually brought it because it was lying around and I still hadn't read it. I quickly discovered it had been the right book for this day. In this book, Berger explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. One of the first essays is called "The Suit and the Photograph". Berger writes about August Sander's well-known photograph of three young peasants on the road going to a dance, as well as some other photos of men in suits. There is a reference to Goethe in the essay which was precisely what I read (in other words) in Henri Bortoft's book "The wholeness of nature. Goethe's way towards a science of conscious participation in nature." yesterday evening before I fell asleep: "There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory." But the biggest surprise of all was the last essay in the book. It is titled "Field" and if I could I would have quoted the whole essay here, but let's stick to some quotes.
"This field affords me considerable pleasure. Why then do I not sometimes walk there - it is quite near my flat - instead of relying on being stopped there by the closed level crossing? It is a question of contingencies overlapping. The events which take place in the field - two birds chasing one another, a cloud crossing the sun and changing the color of the green - acquire a special signficance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin".
He explains how any field, if perceived in a certain way, may offer this experience and then describes the ideal field, the field most likely to generate the experience. Then he goes back to describing some of the events that might happen in the field. And how they relate to the field. "You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are sitll occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events."
He then explains why he first referred to the field as a space awaiting events and later on as an event in itself. The last line in the essay is the best one.

"The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life."

(John Berger, About looking. Bloomsberry 2009, "Field", p. 199-205)