- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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”
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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.
