Here and there

“Just to be here and now - this is the true basis of human life.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

I finally sat down to write. First thing this morning. But I got distracted by the ants walking up and down the terrace where I am seated. Their nest is at the far left side, under a plant with yellow flowers. I tried to find it in the Guia de Plantas Medicinales but it isn’t in there so I know what it is not. Internet is down so I can’t look for it. And it isn’t that important really to name it. Not now. But I can say it looks a bit like a tiny sunflower. The same dark yellow. A wide circle in the middle and lots of single petals forming a crown all around it. Inbedded in narrow green leaves that are longer than the ones around a sunflower’s head. The flowers are not much bigger than a fingertip.
The ants conveniently follow the lines between the tiles. Their main road leads from the wall on the right side to the nest on the left. It is always impressive to see how much they can carry. I notice that some of them transport the seeds I’ve been collecting as well. My favorite ones, from the tall grasses that move softly in the wind. You can see when the seeds are ready to leave and when you take the part sticking out between your fingertips and gently pull, they let go and the feathery part comes out, the part that carries them in the air. They shine in the sunlight. They look like arrows. I can hold dozens of them in my hand and some slip away without me noticing because to me they don’t have any weight. They are much bigger than the biggest ant though and I see them struggling to keep a straight path carrying just one of them, sticking it up high in the air so they don’t stumble over it while walking.

A week has passed. I haven’t been here, in the virtual world, a lot because the world out there kept me busy doing nothing. I sat on the roof taking in the views. I followed the river. I wandered around in the forest. I discovered where the bees make their honey. I listened to the frogs, at their loudest just after the evening has fallen. I slept in an old dry stone hut at the edge of a field. I observed insects, watched birds and bats fly, sat at the bottom of the old lime stone ovens, all three of them, looking down at the bottom at the plants growing, the stones not moving, the snails sleeping. Looking up, at the sky transformed into a blue circle, clouds passing, casting shadows.

I came here with a lot of plans but the first day I let go of them. They will come back if they make sense here. In the next weeks or next year or somewhere in the far future. Like seeds carried in the wind. Landing and sprouting, growing and flowering, or simply vanishing. But even when disappearing, they still add to the world. Seeds that don’t grow still become part of the soil and nurture it.

Doing nothing isn’t as easy as it sounds. And it doesn’t really mean doing nothing. You only do nothing when you are dead. Until then, at least you breath. Your blood flows through your veins. Your hair grows. You shed your skin. You see, you hear, you smell. You dream. You empty your mind and you fill it up again. You make space. And when the space is there, things happen.

…………..
(I got distracted for a moment now by the gecko walking over the stone wall, sitting still in the sunlight for a moment, then moving back into the dark shadows again quickly, maybe because it noticed me picking up my camera which is useless somehow anyway, this eagerness to catch what you see so you can see it again afterwards but all you see then is an image, never the real thing. And in the moment of capturing you might miss what is really happening.).

Some people, or actually lots of people, refer to doing things that have no practical value as doing nothing. Reading a book. Going for a walk. Daydream. Watch a movie. Listen to music. All the things artists have to do in order to create. Creation doesn’t come from inspiration, creation is hard work. It is trial and error, it is trying and failing. Finding new ways, doing things differently, loosing control, trying to not know but at the same time know it is the right direction, even when it brings you back to where you started. It is a lot of doing nothing and to some people it sounds like heaven, spending so much time just being, being aware. And it is. Compared to what those people have to do to make a living. “You are so lucky” people tell me often when I talk about my walks, my residencies, the books I read, the movies I see, my travels. Because to them, it is what they aim for, it is what they work so hard for, to have the time to do that. They don’t know about the artist’s proverbial hell though. The hell that comes after and during this heaven, not the other way around. The self doubt, the getting lost, the struggle to make visible, audible, tangible what this period of reflection - of doing nothing - has taught you, the thing you got a glimpse of, the translation of something that refuses to be translated until it has translated you, transformed you, until you are ready to let the things you made, the things that made themselves through you, speak for them self.

After doing nothing comes collecting. Collecting objects. Stones in different shapes and sizes. One round, with a pattern of dots chisseled into it. Two small bits of flint, pink, sharp as knives on the edges. They look like wings almost. Dead branches with bright yellow mosses on them. Bamboo branches. Feathers. Strange pieces of metal. Empty snake shells, bleached by the sun. Tiny wasp nests. Wild garlic about to bloom. Oak galls. The big round still intact remains of the yellow flowers I don’t know the name of, formed by the fragile parasols that will carry the seeds in all directions.
Collecting images. Photos of flowers, favorite places (the snail graveyard!), insects, the sun reflecting in a rain puddle, light falling through leaves. Shadows. Shapes. Collecting wild edible greens and flowers. Collecting information. Names. Histories. Meaning.

And after collecting comes playing. Making ink with the oak galls, pieces of metal and water from the river. Trying out ways to store other colours. Walking shapes, squares, circles, again and again until they are visible in the landscape. Sleeping in a dry stone hut that was built by reusing the stones that were taken out of the soil to be able to grow crops there and which formed a shelter for the farmer or shepherd. Making patterns out of seeds. Frying lamb’s quarters (that’s a plant, not a part of an animal), wild garlic and the sweet purple flowers that are everywhere.

And inbetween all of that, returning to the roof to sit on the wall, take in the landscape, see the sun rise over the trees, watch the birds carry twigs to build their nests, hear the clumsy may beetle approaching (they have a tendency to fly into you), listen to the birds of prey, feel the wind gather strength, wonder if the bats can fly any closer to your feet without crashing into them, see Venus appear.

Then collecting ideas. There’s no way to say which ones are good and which ones are bad. Which ones are ridiculous and which ones are amazing. It will depend on how they are executed. And if they will be executed. Here are some of them:
1.Organise an ant contest, which ant can carry the biggest/strangest object to its nest.
2. Walk the outline of the dry stone hut in the stone quarry (or in the field the stones came from?), again and again and again and again, day after day, then fill the circle with Cosmos Daydream seeds, leaving a space open where the entrance is. Watch the Daydreams grow. Spend time in the new shelter.
3. Collect seeds from as many plants and trees here as possible. Collect clay. Collect water from the river. Make two types of seed balls. One with a mix of all the plants that grow at CACiS. One with the Cosmos Daydream seeds I brought with me (ordered from Amazon). Return home on foot after my stay here, carrying all the seed balls (in my Wheelie walking cart, also known as C.) walking, spreading the Daydream seeds all the way (4 days walking) from the silence and nature of CACiS to the Barcelona city centre. Spread the other seed balls that all carry the landscape of CACiS in them around in Barcelona and the wider world (giving them to people who travel elsewhere and send them to people who are interested in recreating a bit of the soul of CACiS in a place that could use it).
4. Keep all the packing material (plastic bags, cans, wrappers, etc.) from the food I eat during my stay here and turn them into a copy of the dry stone hut I slept in. These huts are beautiful but they also bear witness of how human beings started to clear the land in order to grow crops in bigger quantities, the opposite of the nomadic way of living that was far more sustainable. In a way the packing material of the food we buy in the supermarket represents the same: we need food to survive and the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to do that is to buy it in places where they don’t care too much about how it is produced and handed over .
5. Make natural inks, catching the colours of the landscape.
6. There are more but let’s keep something for another time.

As I am writing this, the sun has disappeared from the terrace and it is ant rush hour on the main highway to their nest. (They might lead to some more ideas as well). The swallows are flying low again and the gecko, or possibly another one, popped up two more times. When I went to get some books in the workshop to check some plant names, I saw a dozen giant snails. Bigger than human heads. And actually meant to be worn as heads, as Gigantes, giants, in a parade, the ones they have in every village here and tells the history of a place. I didn’t have any snail ideas here yet, apart from being as slow as them, but they might come up.

So. What’s next? Next are words. They are here. And from here we’ll see what happens. The ink will turn into drawings. The seeds (I’ve started collecting, there are small paper bags and white sheets with seeds drying all over my room) will turn into seed balls. The route from here to Barcelona has had a first online inspection.

And now it is time for a little walk. And if you followed my words all the way here, maybe you want to do the same. Or maybe you didn’t read any of this and you were out on a walk or already. Even better.

“Actually, I think people would be better off without words altogether.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka, Sowing Seeds in the Desert

Reminder

“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

365 daydreams

(Cosmos Bipinnatus "Daydream" seeds)

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.

new views

 

 

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.

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.

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

growing clouds, holding dreams

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

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.