“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics,
conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally
satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring
out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with
the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day
and the stars of heaven by night.”
- Walt Whitman
29/05/2019
On time
“Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space …. Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. It mows and ploughs.”
- The poetics of space, Gaston Bachelard
Time hasn’t slipped away. That is a false idea. It isn’t like a snake, moving away once you set eyes on it, or rainwater falling on a roof and making its way into the earth once it has hit the ground, forming puddles here and there, reflecting the sky and the clouds, as if remembering where they came from. It has been almost three days since I arrived here and as always in a new place, they feel like at least double the amount of time. Everything is new, everything asks for attention and since I am extra attentive, it seems as if the days are endless and filled with new events every minute of them. Small ones mainly. A giant beetle trying to climb the threshold separating my room from the outside world. The light changing over the mountains. The sound of frogs in the night. The scent of wild fennel. New flowers every time I bend over to collect seeds from the ones I was looking for. Long walks. Short walks. Looking up, looking down. And again and again, sitting on the roof of the building that is embracing the old limestone ovens, with my legs dangling over the edge and taking in the scenery. Tasting the purslane, picking gooseworth for dinner, eating the small purple flowers of the plant I don’t know the name of while exploring the hidden corners of the premises. Touching walls, admiring yellow lichen, observing a hoopoo bird, watching a shrimp move through the river. Finding out where the bees make their honey, seeing trees full of figs and feeling sad because they are not ripe yet but realising that if they would be, there wouldn’t be that many flowers around and the sun would be ruthless. May is a kind month. It is the start of things. A promise I believe in.
Ideas are growing. And some are withering. Some are parked for later. But today, after three days of observing, wandering and wondering, is a day for action. Let's see what happens.
- The poetics of space, Gaston Bachelard
Time hasn’t slipped away. That is a false idea. It isn’t like a snake, moving away once you set eyes on it, or rainwater falling on a roof and making its way into the earth once it has hit the ground, forming puddles here and there, reflecting the sky and the clouds, as if remembering where they came from. It has been almost three days since I arrived here and as always in a new place, they feel like at least double the amount of time. Everything is new, everything asks for attention and since I am extra attentive, it seems as if the days are endless and filled with new events every minute of them. Small ones mainly. A giant beetle trying to climb the threshold separating my room from the outside world. The light changing over the mountains. The sound of frogs in the night. The scent of wild fennel. New flowers every time I bend over to collect seeds from the ones I was looking for. Long walks. Short walks. Looking up, looking down. And again and again, sitting on the roof of the building that is embracing the old limestone ovens, with my legs dangling over the edge and taking in the scenery. Tasting the purslane, picking gooseworth for dinner, eating the small purple flowers of the plant I don’t know the name of while exploring the hidden corners of the premises. Touching walls, admiring yellow lichen, observing a hoopoo bird, watching a shrimp move through the river. Finding out where the bees make their honey, seeing trees full of figs and feeling sad because they are not ripe yet but realising that if they would be, there wouldn’t be that many flowers around and the sun would be ruthless. May is a kind month. It is the start of things. A promise I believe in.
Ideas are growing. And some are withering. Some are parked for later. But today, after three days of observing, wandering and wondering, is a day for action. Let's see what happens.
27/05/2019
24/05/2019
Slowly leaving
You wake up at 3 in the dead of the night. You don’t even wonder why it is called “dead of the night” until you write down those words 1,5 hour later. You sit on your balcony in the heart of the city, inbetween the baby plants that are growing slowly, cucumber, courgette, rocket, basil, avocado, sunflower, the weeds that get free range because they take care of themselves and provide more flowers than the ones that were planned. You are more worried about leaving them behind than not seeing your friends for a while. A police car is driving through the street and you notice how the blue lights on top of the car have a heart shape. It is quiet but only relatively. It is quiet compared to day time in the city. There are still some people out and about. Cars are passing.
There is still some time left to role up city life before moving into silence. A relative silence as well. Nature is never silent. But the sounds are different, more soothing, most nighttime city sounds still speak of speed and distraction. Fast cars, drunk tourists. But around 4 the first birds start to sing. They do during the day as well but then their song drowns in the other noise. The first one is always a robin.
What should I take into the Middle of Nothing? What do you need? It is tempting not to take anything and see what will grow, take shape, come into existence if I go unprepared, with empty hands. What I will find, what will find me. No books, no cameras, no computer, no extra clothes. The Middle of Nothing will provide.
The Middle of Nothing isn’t a place though. The Middle of Nothing is here. I named it. Or borrowed the words. The Middle of Nothing, my Middle of Nothing, doesn’t really exist until I describe it. So I will pack my computer. My small solar panel. My sleeping bag, even though I will have a room and a kitchen and a bed and electricity, because I’ll escape it from time to time to sleep in stone huts, under trees, on soft grass or dry leaves. I will bring the slow cameras, the Sx-70 and the Polaroid Land Camera. The Daydream seeds. The oldest clothes. The magic fluids to make ink. The sturdy shoes to walk endless circles. And books. Too many books. I will try not to but I will.
I’ll miss the sea. Or maybe I’ll pack it as well. My suitcase is too small for it but it fits in my head.
There is still some time left to role up city life before moving into silence. A relative silence as well. Nature is never silent. But the sounds are different, more soothing, most nighttime city sounds still speak of speed and distraction. Fast cars, drunk tourists. But around 4 the first birds start to sing. They do during the day as well but then their song drowns in the other noise. The first one is always a robin.
What should I take into the Middle of Nothing? What do you need? It is tempting not to take anything and see what will grow, take shape, come into existence if I go unprepared, with empty hands. What I will find, what will find me. No books, no cameras, no computer, no extra clothes. The Middle of Nothing will provide.
The Middle of Nothing isn’t a place though. The Middle of Nothing is here. I named it. Or borrowed the words. The Middle of Nothing, my Middle of Nothing, doesn’t really exist until I describe it. So I will pack my computer. My small solar panel. My sleeping bag, even though I will have a room and a kitchen and a bed and electricity, because I’ll escape it from time to time to sleep in stone huts, under trees, on soft grass or dry leaves. I will bring the slow cameras, the Sx-70 and the Polaroid Land Camera. The Daydream seeds. The oldest clothes. The magic fluids to make ink. The sturdy shoes to walk endless circles. And books. Too many books. I will try not to but I will.
I’ll miss the sea. Or maybe I’ll pack it as well. My suitcase is too small for it but it fits in my head.
23/05/2019
6000 daydreams
"The best planning is no planning"
- Masanobu Fukuoka
How do you do that?
I started by buying 6.000 cosmos daydream seeds. And having no idea what I will do with them.
- Masanobu Fukuoka
How do you do that?
I started by buying 6.000 cosmos daydream seeds. And having no idea what I will do with them.
21/05/2019
In the middle of something
The middle of nothing
Doesn’t exist
Unless you know where the borders are
But you don’t
When you are in the middle of it
Doesn’t exist
Unless you know where the borders are
But you don’t
When you are in the middle of it
First step: understand nature
“Perhaps the people who most easily perceive that nature is sacred are a few religious people, artists of great sensitivity, and children. With their compassion they often perceive, at the very least, that nature is something beyond human intervention and that it should be revered. The poets who write about nature, the painters who turn it into works of art, the people who compose music, the sculptors ….. I would like to believe that they are the ones drawn to what is truly meaningful. But if an artist’s understanding of nature is unclear, no matter how keen his sensitivity, no matter how refined his technique, he will eventually find himself lost.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka, Sowing seeds in the desert
- Masanobu Fukuoka, Sowing seeds in the desert
Somewhere
“I’ve always believed that reality doesn’t exist, that it’s visible only in those moments when interferences are produced.”
- Jordi Fulla
In the spring of 2002 I built a hut and I lived in it for a week. It was the week before or after Easter, a holiday, I didn’t have to go to school (I was studying at the Rietveld Academy at that time). I had been thinking about it for a while and it didn’t seem to make sense but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head so I just did it. I knew that sometimes you make sense of things by doing them, by making a start and see where it goes from there.
It took me a full day to build it. I had asked my partner, with whome I was living, if he wouldn’t mind. He didn’t. He asked how long it would take and I told him I didn’t know, a few days probably.
I used the small cabinets, a few chairs and the metal frame of the sofa for walls. I emptied the bookcases and constructed the roof out of them. The books were handy to level different parts of the structure, like bricks. The wooden Buddha formed a pillar in one of the corners. The tv was part of the southern wall. I balanced some plants on top, filled up some holes with fruit from the fruit basket, bananas and oranges and apples. I left some space underneath a chair that functioned as the entrance. One pillow from the sofa formed the key stone. Two others were inside so I could sit in there comfortably. When I was finished, I had used every object in the living room. Not only the big furniture but every single object. The photos from the wall, the tea pot that was on the coffee table, the candles from the window sills, everything was used to become part of the hut.
I spend my days doing the things I normally do. Reading the newspaper, reading books, working on my computer, drinking coffee, thinking, dreaming, writing, taking a nap. I filmed myself doing these things in my hut. I forgot about finding a meaning for what I was doing. I just lived in my hut. It felt safe and cozy. After a week I dismantled the structure, moved everything back to its original location, ate dinner at the dinner table with my partner as usual and watched a movie with him afterwards, sitting on the sofa on one side of the room, watching the tv that was on the opposite side, inbetween the bookcases filled with hundreds of books.
I returned to school, I didn’t discuss what I had been doing with my teachers or fellow students. I don’t know why. Maybe it needed to stay inside my head. And there it evolved into some new ideas that didn’t materialise but were kept safe in there as well. I thought about doing something similar in other peoples’ houses. I thought about moving all the things from my livingroom, or maybe even my whole apartment, into a gallery space and build a hut in there. I thought about doing it in public space. I still think that is a good idea.
Of course it wasn’t the first time I built a hut. Most of them I don’t remember though. I wonder if there is anybody who never built a hut as a child. Or just used a present situation, a table with a table cloth reaching to the ground, although probably technically that is called a shelter.
I built them in the forest, in the garden, in the living room, in the attic. A house within a house. A hiding place. A small space to be alone in, and once inside it grows to become as big as the whole world.
——————-
The first time I visited CACiS, in 2017, one of the things I was intrigued by were the dry stone huts in the area. Small round structures with an entrance that was just a low opening to enable entrance, to let a little bit of light in. No windows. Just big enough to offer shelter to a single person.
They seemed to be old, I had no idea what their function was. I kind of forgot about them. When I wrote a proposal for a residency period at CACiS I didn’t think about them. I wrote about natural farming, planning without planning, seed bombs and ideas as seeds. I wrote about making paper out of vegetable waste, using oak galls to make ink and use it for drawing, walk the surroundings (or maybe just the same path, or maybe even just a circle around a tree) again and again and again and again, backwards, forwards, with eyes closed, at daytime, at nighttime, alone, with others. And I wrote about building huts “that are really altars, although I don’t know for what yet”.
The second time I visited, a few weeks ago, I remembered the dry stone huts and when I came home I did a little research. Those huts, still existing everywhere in the Catalan countryside, where built when people started clearing the land in order to use it to grow crops. The big stones in the soil were turned into these mysterious structures. They were used by farmers and sheepherds. These days they aren’t in use anymore, they are only a reminder of life in past centuries. I wondered how it would feel to sleep inside. To spend the night under the same stone roof, enclosed, embraced by the same old stones as those farmers and shepherds were kept safe and dry by.
————————
One of the exercises I ask my art students to do from time to time is to build a hut in the big studio space where they all have their own table. There is enough room for them all to find a private corner or a smaller room where they won’t be able to see anybody else. After they have constructed a small comfortable hiding place with materials that are around - furniture, easels, cardboard, old sheets, umbrellas, etc. - I ask them to spend some time in there without phones, music, notebooks, food, anything that can distract them. 99 minutes. or 66 if we have limited time. I ask them to be silent, to do nothing, to think or not think. I give them one blank A4 paper for emergency situations. They all start at the same time. Afterwards I ask them to tell the story of the journey they made. Where they went, what they saw, what happened and what didn’t happen.
———————
When I’m too sad to face the world I hide under a blanket with my bluetooth speaker and disappear in the music until I’m a different person.
———————-
“Yes, for me this sort of four walls, construction, or container, is vital, I understand it as the closest thing to what would be our skin. I don’t think our body has a frontier in our own skin; the atmosphere that surrounds us is charged with everything we give off, and everything that configures us. The construction of this personal cabin, as far as I understand it, is necessary not to protect us so much as to mark out a space of reflection, because it’s impossible to understand the universe from the outside …. we’re just too insignificant.”
- Jordi Fulla
The Can Framis Museum in Barcelona had been on my list of places to visit for a while. They have a big collection of mainly paintings by Catalan artists. When I checked their website I saw there was a special exhibition by an artist I had never heard of. Jordi Fulla. The website showed an image of a white shining hole in a drawing or painting.The exhibition was titled “Llindar i celístia”. Treshold and starlight.
I went. I was impressed. What I first thought were huge black and white photos of stone huts were paintings. Fulla painted them the way a hut is build. Stone by stone, brushstroke by brushstroke. With care and attention and a lot of patience. Slowly slowly seeing it become a building. A painting.
The white hole I had seen on my computer wasn’t a hole. My computer wasn’t to blame. There were more paintings and drawings that looked like they had holes in them but upon closer inspection they were painted in a way to make it look as if they were holes. There were sculptures that were actually 3 dimensional paintings, depicting the empty inside of different dry stone huts. There were shiny surfaces and reflections and there were more stones, real ones and their shadows and reflections and stones painted on paper with amazing detail, almost looking more real than the real stones. There was poetry, not only in the poem on the wall but in all the work and the space inbetween it. In one corner there were three paintings on the walls, huge paintings showing the almost finished roof of a stone hut from the inside from three different angles, the circular structure almost finished, just the big keystone missing. In the paintings, light was flooding in from outside, from the daytime sky. In the middle of the room, on the floor, inbetween the paintings, the real stone was lying. The central keystone that was still missing in all three paintings. On the floor thousands of grains of wheat formed long lines. A video a bit further away showed different people spending hours forming the lines on the floor. Friends of the artist I later read.
I spent a long time there. Looking. Reading the catalogue.
“Containers for memories of the landscape and the human activity deployed over centuries, the huts spoke to me softly of time, and the relation of man with his surroundings.”
“I’ve not been able to resist seeing, beyond their function, the hut as a metaphor for an ideal space for reflection and thought. It’s that safe and distant place where the anchorite settles down to observe the world, against the light, as if it was a stone womb.”
“…. it is my task to inhabit this nothingness, this very fine space between what is (in appearance) tangible and what is intelligible ….”
“I see everything we can come to understand through this exercise of approximation to the void, by way of an oblique gaze, as more feasible, without either time or space, strongly bearing in mind the wait, in silence.”
And it gave me goose bumps when I was reading what he said about himself:
“At a certain point in one’s work, it dawns on you which threads are intertwined, and which aren’t, in everything that has gone on during these years of process. For a while now I’ve found myself in this position. I have to say it’s a very intense moment because I’m tying all these threads together and I have the feeling of being able to walk in a much more conscious manner.”
“…. I endeavour for myself, to become of a certain state of absence, of emptiness, of no-place. This perhaps explains my fascination for these sorts of constructions ….. ”
It wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the exhibition or on the Can Framis website but in my quick research before I visited, I found some newspaper articles from last month, shortly after the exhibition opened, saying that Jordi Fulla had unexpectedly died, 51 years young.
——————-
fragments from “The Rock”, Wallace Stevens
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near ….
The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined
There is also “The poem that took the place of a mountain” in the collection which I bought because I like Stevens’ poetry and because it was a bilingual edition, English and Spanish. I once made a photo of the book standing on its edges, it looked like a simple tent. I called it “The poetry that took the shape of a shelter”
———————
There is more to say about huts. And I will. First thing I need to do though is spend a night in a dry-stone hut. In the middle of nowhere.
- Jordi Fulla
In the spring of 2002 I built a hut and I lived in it for a week. It was the week before or after Easter, a holiday, I didn’t have to go to school (I was studying at the Rietveld Academy at that time). I had been thinking about it for a while and it didn’t seem to make sense but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head so I just did it. I knew that sometimes you make sense of things by doing them, by making a start and see where it goes from there.
It took me a full day to build it. I had asked my partner, with whome I was living, if he wouldn’t mind. He didn’t. He asked how long it would take and I told him I didn’t know, a few days probably.
I used the small cabinets, a few chairs and the metal frame of the sofa for walls. I emptied the bookcases and constructed the roof out of them. The books were handy to level different parts of the structure, like bricks. The wooden Buddha formed a pillar in one of the corners. The tv was part of the southern wall. I balanced some plants on top, filled up some holes with fruit from the fruit basket, bananas and oranges and apples. I left some space underneath a chair that functioned as the entrance. One pillow from the sofa formed the key stone. Two others were inside so I could sit in there comfortably. When I was finished, I had used every object in the living room. Not only the big furniture but every single object. The photos from the wall, the tea pot that was on the coffee table, the candles from the window sills, everything was used to become part of the hut.
I spend my days doing the things I normally do. Reading the newspaper, reading books, working on my computer, drinking coffee, thinking, dreaming, writing, taking a nap. I filmed myself doing these things in my hut. I forgot about finding a meaning for what I was doing. I just lived in my hut. It felt safe and cozy. After a week I dismantled the structure, moved everything back to its original location, ate dinner at the dinner table with my partner as usual and watched a movie with him afterwards, sitting on the sofa on one side of the room, watching the tv that was on the opposite side, inbetween the bookcases filled with hundreds of books.
I returned to school, I didn’t discuss what I had been doing with my teachers or fellow students. I don’t know why. Maybe it needed to stay inside my head. And there it evolved into some new ideas that didn’t materialise but were kept safe in there as well. I thought about doing something similar in other peoples’ houses. I thought about moving all the things from my livingroom, or maybe even my whole apartment, into a gallery space and build a hut in there. I thought about doing it in public space. I still think that is a good idea.
Of course it wasn’t the first time I built a hut. Most of them I don’t remember though. I wonder if there is anybody who never built a hut as a child. Or just used a present situation, a table with a table cloth reaching to the ground, although probably technically that is called a shelter.
I built them in the forest, in the garden, in the living room, in the attic. A house within a house. A hiding place. A small space to be alone in, and once inside it grows to become as big as the whole world.
——————-
The first time I visited CACiS, in 2017, one of the things I was intrigued by were the dry stone huts in the area. Small round structures with an entrance that was just a low opening to enable entrance, to let a little bit of light in. No windows. Just big enough to offer shelter to a single person.
They seemed to be old, I had no idea what their function was. I kind of forgot about them. When I wrote a proposal for a residency period at CACiS I didn’t think about them. I wrote about natural farming, planning without planning, seed bombs and ideas as seeds. I wrote about making paper out of vegetable waste, using oak galls to make ink and use it for drawing, walk the surroundings (or maybe just the same path, or maybe even just a circle around a tree) again and again and again and again, backwards, forwards, with eyes closed, at daytime, at nighttime, alone, with others. And I wrote about building huts “that are really altars, although I don’t know for what yet”.
The second time I visited, a few weeks ago, I remembered the dry stone huts and when I came home I did a little research. Those huts, still existing everywhere in the Catalan countryside, where built when people started clearing the land in order to use it to grow crops. The big stones in the soil were turned into these mysterious structures. They were used by farmers and sheepherds. These days they aren’t in use anymore, they are only a reminder of life in past centuries. I wondered how it would feel to sleep inside. To spend the night under the same stone roof, enclosed, embraced by the same old stones as those farmers and shepherds were kept safe and dry by.
————————
One of the exercises I ask my art students to do from time to time is to build a hut in the big studio space where they all have their own table. There is enough room for them all to find a private corner or a smaller room where they won’t be able to see anybody else. After they have constructed a small comfortable hiding place with materials that are around - furniture, easels, cardboard, old sheets, umbrellas, etc. - I ask them to spend some time in there without phones, music, notebooks, food, anything that can distract them. 99 minutes. or 66 if we have limited time. I ask them to be silent, to do nothing, to think or not think. I give them one blank A4 paper for emergency situations. They all start at the same time. Afterwards I ask them to tell the story of the journey they made. Where they went, what they saw, what happened and what didn’t happen.
———————
When I’m too sad to face the world I hide under a blanket with my bluetooth speaker and disappear in the music until I’m a different person.
———————-
“Yes, for me this sort of four walls, construction, or container, is vital, I understand it as the closest thing to what would be our skin. I don’t think our body has a frontier in our own skin; the atmosphere that surrounds us is charged with everything we give off, and everything that configures us. The construction of this personal cabin, as far as I understand it, is necessary not to protect us so much as to mark out a space of reflection, because it’s impossible to understand the universe from the outside …. we’re just too insignificant.”
- Jordi Fulla
The Can Framis Museum in Barcelona had been on my list of places to visit for a while. They have a big collection of mainly paintings by Catalan artists. When I checked their website I saw there was a special exhibition by an artist I had never heard of. Jordi Fulla. The website showed an image of a white shining hole in a drawing or painting.The exhibition was titled “Llindar i celístia”. Treshold and starlight.
I went. I was impressed. What I first thought were huge black and white photos of stone huts were paintings. Fulla painted them the way a hut is build. Stone by stone, brushstroke by brushstroke. With care and attention and a lot of patience. Slowly slowly seeing it become a building. A painting.
The white hole I had seen on my computer wasn’t a hole. My computer wasn’t to blame. There were more paintings and drawings that looked like they had holes in them but upon closer inspection they were painted in a way to make it look as if they were holes. There were sculptures that were actually 3 dimensional paintings, depicting the empty inside of different dry stone huts. There were shiny surfaces and reflections and there were more stones, real ones and their shadows and reflections and stones painted on paper with amazing detail, almost looking more real than the real stones. There was poetry, not only in the poem on the wall but in all the work and the space inbetween it. In one corner there were three paintings on the walls, huge paintings showing the almost finished roof of a stone hut from the inside from three different angles, the circular structure almost finished, just the big keystone missing. In the paintings, light was flooding in from outside, from the daytime sky. In the middle of the room, on the floor, inbetween the paintings, the real stone was lying. The central keystone that was still missing in all three paintings. On the floor thousands of grains of wheat formed long lines. A video a bit further away showed different people spending hours forming the lines on the floor. Friends of the artist I later read.
I spent a long time there. Looking. Reading the catalogue.
“Containers for memories of the landscape and the human activity deployed over centuries, the huts spoke to me softly of time, and the relation of man with his surroundings.”
“I’ve not been able to resist seeing, beyond their function, the hut as a metaphor for an ideal space for reflection and thought. It’s that safe and distant place where the anchorite settles down to observe the world, against the light, as if it was a stone womb.”
“…. it is my task to inhabit this nothingness, this very fine space between what is (in appearance) tangible and what is intelligible ….”
“I see everything we can come to understand through this exercise of approximation to the void, by way of an oblique gaze, as more feasible, without either time or space, strongly bearing in mind the wait, in silence.”
And it gave me goose bumps when I was reading what he said about himself:
“At a certain point in one’s work, it dawns on you which threads are intertwined, and which aren’t, in everything that has gone on during these years of process. For a while now I’ve found myself in this position. I have to say it’s a very intense moment because I’m tying all these threads together and I have the feeling of being able to walk in a much more conscious manner.”
“…. I endeavour for myself, to become of a certain state of absence, of emptiness, of no-place. This perhaps explains my fascination for these sorts of constructions ….. ”
It wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the exhibition or on the Can Framis website but in my quick research before I visited, I found some newspaper articles from last month, shortly after the exhibition opened, saying that Jordi Fulla had unexpectedly died, 51 years young.
——————-
fragments from “The Rock”, Wallace Stevens
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near ….
The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined
There is also “The poem that took the place of a mountain” in the collection which I bought because I like Stevens’ poetry and because it was a bilingual edition, English and Spanish. I once made a photo of the book standing on its edges, it looked like a simple tent. I called it “The poetry that took the shape of a shelter”
———————
There is more to say about huts. And I will. First thing I need to do though is spend a night in a dry-stone hut. In the middle of nowhere.
19/05/2019
Yellow thoughts
The Edge
- Robert Creeley
Place it,
make the space
of it. Yellow,
that was a time.
He saw the stain of love
was upon the world,
a selvage, a faint
after edge of color, fading
at the edge of the world,
the edge beyond that edge.
- Robert Creeley
Place it,
make the space
of it. Yellow,
that was a time.
He saw the stain of love
was upon the world,
a selvage, a faint
after edge of color, fading
at the edge of the world,
the edge beyond that edge.
Last week, at Estudio Nomada where I am teaching art & ways of being, we made ink from natural and foraged ingredients. Oak galls, blueberries, charcoal made from vines, rusty nails. And a bright yellow from turmeric. I hope to do some foraging at CACiS and preserve the colours from the place to be used in drawings, on paper or on fabrics. On skin maybe. Or maybe just return it to nature, displace it, replace it, pour it over rocks, colour the sand, let the river take it.
01/05/2019
How it all started
In 2017 I was commissioned to do a project
for the Grand Tour (Nou Côclea) and I carried oak saplings, grown out
of acorns from the forest in the Netherlands where I was born, from the
French-Spanish border to the Montserrat mountains, planting them on the
way. It was a group walk, organised well and towards the end of our 3 week walk we spent a
night and a morning at CACiS, a centre for Contemporary Art and Sustainability in the Catalan countryside, housed in and around former limestone ovens. I regretted we couldn’t stay longer, feeling the magic and
sincerity of the place. When I saw they had an Open Call for a residency period I wrote them this:
“Perhaps the people who most easily perceive that nature is sacred are a few religious people, artists of great sensitivity, and children. With their compassion they often perceive, at the very least, that nature is something beyond human intervention and that it should be revered. The poets who write about nature, the painters who turn it into works of art, the people who compose music, the sculptors ….. I would like to believe that they are the ones drawn to what is truly meaningful. But if an artist’s understanding of nature is unclear, no matter how keen his sensitivity, no matter how refined his technique, he will eventually find himself lost.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka, Sowing seeds in the desert
Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He advocated no-till, no-herbicide farming methods traditional to many indigenous cultures, from which he created a particular method of farming, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming”.
His book “The One-Straw Revolution” became a bestseller and is one of the founding documents of the alternative food movement. His philosophy has become integrated in Permaculture Design thinking and his ideas to use seed balls for desertification and achieve global food security by using natural farming are still revolutionary. At the basis of all of this was a wish to provide a deep and renewed understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature.
Natural farming isn’t about farming in the first place. Mr. Fukuoka says: “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” What strikes me in that line is that I always thought about my artistic practice in a similar way. It is not about making art. It is about creating meaning, becoming a better human being, cultivate understanding about the world and accepting the mystery of it.
Throughout the years, my art practise has developed into a way of being that embraces activism, ecology, slowness, sustainability. Everything I do I call art but it is most of all about being in the world in the best way possible. Being close to the world, close to nature, making connections, researching and writing, observing, growing ideas.
My work is usually site-specific and although I often work from a clear starting point or plan, I work best when I make detours and when place and time show me the way. In the last 6 years my focus has been on long distance performative walks, moving through the world in a 3 piece walking suit (or business suit), carrying all I need on my back, sleeping in the forest, surviving in nature, talking to people on the road and embroidering their stories on my suit but also communicating them online straight away with the help of mobile internet and a small solar panel to power my devices. I incorporate small projects on the road and make exhibitions and give lectures and workshops afterwards.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to spend some time researching the similarities between Fukuoka’s farming and my way of making art. I can only imagine doing that the way he worked. “The best planning is no planning” he said which doesn’t mean starting from nothing but leaving as much room open for what can happen by trying different things in an intuitive way, listening to and looking at nature, supporting the process by becoming of a place and listening to it instead of trying to put your stamp on it. I can only imagine doing it by using seed balls like he did. Mixing different seeds and adding nutrients to stimulate them and clay to protect them. When you spread them around randomly, the seeds that “work best” in the environment where they find themselves will grow.
My seeds are the media I use, the skills I’ve got and some ideas I’ve always wanted to work on. Photography, video, drawing, performance, writing, walking, cooking, collecting wild edible greens, gardening, constructing, connecting, observing, sensing. Making paper out of vegetable waste, using oak galls to make ink and use it for drawing, walk the surroundings (or maybe just the same path, or maybe even just a circle around a tree) again and again and again and again, backwards, forwards, with eyes closed, at daytime, at nighttime, alone, with others, building huts that are really altars (although I don’t know for what yet), making murals with moss, or completely different things. The history of the site, the nature and available resources will be the main inspiration sources, keeping Fukuoka’s ideas in the back of my mind at all times.
What I want to propose is an open research process where I will document the process and some parts of the research might develop into bigger “projects”. I’ve got no idea what it will look like. I know there will be a lot of small results, beautiful failures, unexpected outcomes and knowing from experience: in the end everything will fall in place and be connected. There might be a big installation or a performance or a collection of small works or something that looks like a laboratory set-up. There will be a lot of writing and hopefully I’ve come a bit closer to connecting natural farming and art (or seeing how they have always been connected).
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This is how it started. They said yes. And I got a little nervous about my plans. Stupid. The nerves I mean, not my plans. Or maybe I should say unplans. Let's see what will happen. May 26 - June 26 on location. And here, before that and during, where we will meet in words and images.
“Perhaps the people who most easily perceive that nature is sacred are a few religious people, artists of great sensitivity, and children. With their compassion they often perceive, at the very least, that nature is something beyond human intervention and that it should be revered. The poets who write about nature, the painters who turn it into works of art, the people who compose music, the sculptors ….. I would like to believe that they are the ones drawn to what is truly meaningful. But if an artist’s understanding of nature is unclear, no matter how keen his sensitivity, no matter how refined his technique, he will eventually find himself lost.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka, Sowing seeds in the desert
Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He advocated no-till, no-herbicide farming methods traditional to many indigenous cultures, from which he created a particular method of farming, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming”.
His book “The One-Straw Revolution” became a bestseller and is one of the founding documents of the alternative food movement. His philosophy has become integrated in Permaculture Design thinking and his ideas to use seed balls for desertification and achieve global food security by using natural farming are still revolutionary. At the basis of all of this was a wish to provide a deep and renewed understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature.
Natural farming isn’t about farming in the first place. Mr. Fukuoka says: “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” What strikes me in that line is that I always thought about my artistic practice in a similar way. It is not about making art. It is about creating meaning, becoming a better human being, cultivate understanding about the world and accepting the mystery of it.
Throughout the years, my art practise has developed into a way of being that embraces activism, ecology, slowness, sustainability. Everything I do I call art but it is most of all about being in the world in the best way possible. Being close to the world, close to nature, making connections, researching and writing, observing, growing ideas.
My work is usually site-specific and although I often work from a clear starting point or plan, I work best when I make detours and when place and time show me the way. In the last 6 years my focus has been on long distance performative walks, moving through the world in a 3 piece walking suit (or business suit), carrying all I need on my back, sleeping in the forest, surviving in nature, talking to people on the road and embroidering their stories on my suit but also communicating them online straight away with the help of mobile internet and a small solar panel to power my devices. I incorporate small projects on the road and make exhibitions and give lectures and workshops afterwards.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to spend some time researching the similarities between Fukuoka’s farming and my way of making art. I can only imagine doing that the way he worked. “The best planning is no planning” he said which doesn’t mean starting from nothing but leaving as much room open for what can happen by trying different things in an intuitive way, listening to and looking at nature, supporting the process by becoming of a place and listening to it instead of trying to put your stamp on it. I can only imagine doing it by using seed balls like he did. Mixing different seeds and adding nutrients to stimulate them and clay to protect them. When you spread them around randomly, the seeds that “work best” in the environment where they find themselves will grow.
My seeds are the media I use, the skills I’ve got and some ideas I’ve always wanted to work on. Photography, video, drawing, performance, writing, walking, cooking, collecting wild edible greens, gardening, constructing, connecting, observing, sensing. Making paper out of vegetable waste, using oak galls to make ink and use it for drawing, walk the surroundings (or maybe just the same path, or maybe even just a circle around a tree) again and again and again and again, backwards, forwards, with eyes closed, at daytime, at nighttime, alone, with others, building huts that are really altars (although I don’t know for what yet), making murals with moss, or completely different things. The history of the site, the nature and available resources will be the main inspiration sources, keeping Fukuoka’s ideas in the back of my mind at all times.
What I want to propose is an open research process where I will document the process and some parts of the research might develop into bigger “projects”. I’ve got no idea what it will look like. I know there will be a lot of small results, beautiful failures, unexpected outcomes and knowing from experience: in the end everything will fall in place and be connected. There might be a big installation or a performance or a collection of small works or something that looks like a laboratory set-up. There will be a lot of writing and hopefully I’ve come a bit closer to connecting natural farming and art (or seeing how they have always been connected).
-------------
This is how it started. They said yes. And I got a little nervous about my plans. Stupid. The nerves I mean, not my plans. Or maybe I should say unplans. Let's see what will happen. May 26 - June 26 on location. And here, before that and during, where we will meet in words and images.
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(scroll down for English text) Een plattegrond van een huis. Mijn thuis. Ik droomde er van toen ik niet terug kon. Hoe ik de voordeur ope... -
Yes, there are deadlines but they are soft ones. Like harvesting some seeds before they have naturally spread. Or exploring the old limes...