notes from the 
journey eastwards

I’ve wanted to write this piece for some time now. I’ve stopped myself. The excuse, I’m too busy. I can’t sit and re think through it all. I don’t have the time.

Space to sit and time to think. Time to reflect, to meander and to journey through all the bits and pieces, flyers, photographs, thoughts and scribbles from my time away.
But it’s been a year. And I find myself moving through each date like it’s some parallel time on a calendar, marking where I was, what I was doing and thoughts that are bubbling to the surface.

It’s like Art – all the little parts of the whole need to come together before anything makes sense. The art of writing on paper and in space. There’s a nice irony in this.

Space/s to make art, space/s to perform, space/s of similarity and space/s of renewal. There has been space of a year, a gap, between the activities below and now. A Space for objectivity and reflection. 

From May to August 2008 I went on a journey through Europe. I was awarded a scholarship to study site-specific arts practise. My journey took me to the bustling tourist meccas of Venice, Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague, to the non bustling post soviet cities of Warsaw, Zagreb, Bialystock and Kovno and to the old coastal port towns of Dubrovnik, Riga and Trieste. I travelled on busses, planes and trains watching the blur of movement over three months.

I flew from London to Venice and stayed two days in the city of the Biennale, of canals and prossecco and salami on bridges in the afternoon sun. On my second day I noticed this poster. 

Art playing with what surrounds us. But art doesn’t just happen, people frame it. They choose for art to happen. Either they take a photograph of an existing landscape, or they configure the landscape for us to view it in a certain way. Or they respond to the landscape. Whatever they do, it’s a choice. And this choice is what becomes interesting.

Some of the work I saw was in the landscape outside -  plastered on walls of the city’s laneways or abandoned lots. While other works were in the form of performances outside on beaches or sand dunes, with fields of cows and full moons and instruments interacting with the sounds of nature.

Each offer sat as a response to the everyday goings on of that place; the layers of history, the massacres which took place on the soil, the quirky, the loud, the sad, the angry, the hopeful and the new. The art forms were inspiring, overwhelming, energy-making and fascinating because they were a living part of the everyday. Art seemed to have a currency and a value.

It’s Saturday morning and Opvoempe have positioned themselves outside the busiest market in Central Zagreb. Each woman holds a moving door with a small peephole. They wheel the doors through a parking lot and ask locals what they regret...

Opovoempe Performance group have been invited from Sao Paulo to attend Urban Festival, a site-specific art festival exploring the local milieu through visiting artists research. It’s an ambitious way of attempting to reframe the city objectively; through art, through interpretation and through an outside perspective. Opvoempe’s work demands interaction. The people shrug, look down and walk past. Some are amused and take part. Others are outraged at the provocation that disrupts their mid morning market shop.

The answers on bits of paper stuck to the doors along with silences of those who choose not to speak, tell us a lot about what this city has gone through, what it chooses to think about and what it chooses to forget. History is a complex process and in a country like Croatia, with its new EU status, the focus is on progress for the future. But it’s the past and its impact on the present that also needs to be explored.

I sit with Sonja Soldo, 2008 Urban Festival co-director who feels the festival can act as a mechanism enabling thoughts and responses from those whose voices may not otherwise have a platform. A previous year’s Casino game allowed many homeless to speak up on their thoughts on capitalism. Whilst this year’s Opovoempe group was able to "post secret wishes, hidden social facts and misplaced feelings on the outside of the travelling doors".

This process reminds me of an installation I see near the end of my trip in Krakow. As part of the annual Jewish heritage festival, a group of American artists collaborated on an interactive response to the festival. They asked people to write on bits of pieces of paper that were then translated from Russian, Polish and English and stuck onto an evolving wall in a central cafe.

 

On one of the notes I noticed this message:

“ My mother finally admitted to me that she is Jewish but wishes me
not to tell my children until she has passed.”

It is these kinds of secrets, the hidden, the forbidden and the unknown that
make these artists work so important. For this woman, being given the opportunity to
anonymously share in the weight of her secret, offered her a moment of relief.

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And it is these secrets that sit underfoot, on walls and in fields that
layer the landscape, affecting all those who move across it, be they conscious or not.