On Travel and Reading

Travelling, too, is something you have to learn.  It is a constant transaction with others in the course of which you are simultaneously alone.  And therein lies the paradox: you journey alone in a world which is controlled by others.

Cees Nooteboom, extract Nomad's Hotel, Travels in Time and Space.

This morning I was that woman engrossed in her book as my trams crossed the city.  Those first chapters in Cees Nooteboom's Nomad's Hotel were electrifying. 

I love revisiting the books on my shelves next to my desk.  This one is dated 2008, in my handwriting.  I've been to Venice in years since.  Cees has some truly divine descriptions of that city I didn't fall in love with. 

Zinc light, the painter does not yet know what he is going to do with this day, leave it as it is, add some more copper, a greenish sheen, accentuate the grey, or alternatively flood everything with more light.

This morning, as I read, I realised that I read to travel.  When I can't 'leave', I climb into a book and go anyway.  But when I travel, in actuality, I read too.  I become a devourer of books, on buses, planes and trains, enjoying those quiet alone-spaces and the freedom to read without a long list of must-do things queuing up there in front of me, and people I must give my attention to.

And then, when alone and out traveling, I read myself to sleep.

Returning from the weekend that took me 'home', back to people I understood, shared a humour with, people who reminded me of who I am at my core ... re-entry has been interesting.  There is always so much more to understand about the self.

Life as the journey.  Perhaps that's it.  There always something new.

And my latest 'new' thing was photographing the Hangi, from beginning to end.  Here is the magnificent fire that heated the stones that were later buried with the food and cooked it all.

Lenn

I met Lenn at the Peace Village, out on Flanders Fields, yesterday and asked if I might document the story of a New Zealand Hangi.

He said yes.

And what I didn't know was that it's as much about cooking the food as it is about the people involved ... and those drawn in when it comes time to share the food.

In the end I felt extraordinarily fortunate to be there for those hours and I felt my little Kiwi soul fill up and overflow with joy.

It was extraordinary.

Thank you, Lenn, for putting up with my camera and I.

The Tino Rangatiratanga Flag

It’s been over 20 years since the birth of the Tino Rangatiratanga flag with Rangitaane Marsden citing its launch date as the 6th of February 1990.  Now it has been adopted by many and flies in places of significance across the nation.

Rangitaane Marsden says “the flag in a sense reflects the creation story but if you take it to another level black reflects the potential, red reflects the realities and white reflects the wisdom and illumination that come with a persons own individual being”.

Source: Māori News, the Origins of the Māori Flag.

I spent most of yesterday outside in a field near the Peace Village, photographically documenting a Hangi.

The image below was taken while they were still heating up to tiles used in the hangi pit.  It was a stunning fire ... one that burned so hard and so long.  I was fascinated.

Thank you, so much, to Lenn Krosschell and those helping him for allowing me to hang round and take photographs.

And there in the background, the Tino Rangatiratanga Flag blowing strong in that Flanders Fields breeze.

 

Ngāti Rānana, on Flanders Fields, Belgium

 

Ngāti Rānana London Māori Club aims to provide New Zealanders residing in the United Kingdom and others interested in Māori culture an environment to teach, learn and participate in Māori culture.

The three guiding principles of Ngāti Rānana are whanaungatanga (togetherness), manaakitanga (looking after one another/hospitality) and kōtahitanga (unity).

Source: the Ngāti Rānana website.

These guys were in Mesen/Messines this weekend and they touched the hearts of everyone who saw them perform.

 

Ralph Hotere, New Zealand Artist

He was very gentle but held strong views and was extremely inquisitive and interested in many things.

Jeanne Macaskill, artist, describing Ralph Hotere

I think, sometimes, we can grow lacking appropriate role models.  We assume we fit the world wrong and that we carry the burden to change.  But it's untrue.  I think it is more that the institutions that define and model 'correct' behaviour often have it all wrong.

Rather than exploring the full range of what it is to be human, we are shaped so as to fit the structure already in place.

I wish someone had told that it was possible to be gentle and hold strong views.  That one didn't cancel out all possibility of the other.  Strong views do not a monster make. 

The word most used in describing Ralph is the word generous.  That is how friends and colleagues remembered him and yet, he was a man of strong political views ... a man who believed 'art and politics are not separate things, because life does not allow them to be.'

He was described as a warrior artist.  His greatest works embraced great causes.  He used elegance, power, and beauty.  He was a builder of bridges between people.  These are just a handful of the things I've read about Ralph Hotere.

Source: Mirata Mita's documentary series at the end of this post

New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen, one of Hotere's 3 wives wrote 3 beautiful fragments on the Listener magazine's memorial page to Ralph after his death in 2013.  She wrote of time spent in Avignon as a family, 'We knew these were precious days, of dappled sunlight, warm earth, lavender, grapes, melons, rosé wine. I wrote because a camera was not enough.'

He was a talented artist, a stunningly generous man who gave away more then half of his art - gifts to friends, a silent man who believed that 'there are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing', a man who understood 'precious days' ... a man I don't want to forget because he shows that it's okay to be everything, to own that character that makes us so uniquely ourselves.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, Brussels

Last night was one of those extraordinary nights spent with good people while doing marvelous things.

I had wandered over to Brussels in time to meet Lynette after work.  We met up with New Zealand artist, Wendy Leach and together we walked to Irma's house, where New Zealand photographer, Jacque Gilbert, was arriving fresh from her Amsterdam world.

I cannot begin to describe how lovely it was to find myself sitting there with these women, glasses of wine in hand, food on the table ... just talking.  It was one of those magical moments you experience sometimes, one of those ones where you think about pinching yourself to see if it's real.

But that was only the beginning.  We had come together because we were attending a literary event at the bookshop called Passa Porta.  I had never heard of it before last night but their event was impossible to resist.  Lynette had written, telling us all that she had booked tickets to an event with Eleanor Catton.  The writer who convincingly won the Man Booker Prize in 2013 with her book The Luminaries.  Annelies Verbeke, a Flemish writer, was to interview Eleanor.

We arrived at the shop and the room was already quite full.  I'm sure there were more than 100 people there. And then it began and honestly, sometimes I was close to the point of tears.  Before photography, writing was my great big passion.  I still write but somehow it slipped into the background as photography strode to the forefront in my life.

Last night, there I was, listening to Eleanor and Annelies talk while delighting in the way she was willing to kind of crack open her novel ... revealing her motivations, ideas, goals, and more.

I loved her 832 page novel, The Luminaries, for so many reasons.  It was set in New Zealand but more than that, on the west coast of the South Island in a town I've loved since I was a teenager.  My cousins came from Hokitika. It was a small town with a wild savage beauty back then.  The Tasman Sea still comes roaring across from Australia crashing in on the shore there.  And a few miles inland you can see the powerful outline of the Southern Alps rising up, appearing to trap you between the wild coast and the mountains.

I returned to Hokitika in 2012 and it had changed, so much.  So little, and so much.  The road through the alps to the east coast is a highway these days ... a rugged New Zealand highway but still, simpler to cross than it was back in 1866.  The year Eleanor Catton's novel opens ... goldrush days in that wild place.

She read the opening scene to us before Annelies began with her questions.  The audience became completely silent.  The room was still as she read.  Annelies asked some superb questions and Eleanor answered them, fully, completely.  To the point where I will reread the book because I understand how she intended we use the astrological information.  And while she was clear on the fact that it's not important to understanding the story, it does add another layer or ten to the complexity of the story.

There was a question time and an invitation to stay for the book signing.  New Zealand wine was handed out, courtesy of the New Zealand Embassy.

I'm not really a creature who wants my books signed by authors.  BUT I did want to talk with Eleanor, to tell her how much I had enjoyed both the book and the evening.

I started my university degree in 1998 because I needed to earn two papers before I could apply for Bill Manhire's creative writing course ... way back then.  I lost my way, stayed on at university and never did apply for the course.

Listening to Eleanor brought everything back.  Those days on Stewart Island, a writing workshop with Patricia Grace.  The Otago University's summer writing schools.  Those days of writing.  And so I bought a second copy of the book and waited my turn in the queue.  Somehow, despite the intensity of the interview she had just come through, Eleanor made time to really talk with every person who approached her. 

It turned out that we were wearing the same greenstone necklace.  The same hook.  I explained I had needed some of 'home' to bring back to Europe, to wear close to me, and that it came from a place just along the road from Hokitika. 

Today I wrote, over on Facebook,  that I found Eleanor Catton to be intelligent, gracious, patient, humble ... and you know, everything good.  I didn't exaggerate. If you get the chance to hear her speak, I recommend you do it.

Lynette (on the left in the photograph below), the woman who made it all possible because I would have missed this without her, gave me her camera and I took a series of photographs. 

But you see ...?


Christine Mason Miller - The Conscious Booksmith.

I'm teaching this course because I need it.

Christine Mason Miller,  talking of her e-course, The Conscious Booksmith.

I've signed up to do another workshop in the months ahead.  Like the marketing workshop, this one is absolutely vital for me to move forward into a world I know nothing about. 

And so when a woman I have been 'following' online for years, a woman whose work I love, and whose way of putting herself out into the world fills me with respect, offers a workshop on how to make my book real while fitting it into the flow of my own chaotic life ... then obviously I'm going to sign up.

It helps that it is affordable otherwise I might have been left at the window looking in like a kid longing to join but unable to.  But that's something else about Christine.  Her self-confessed mission is about 'Creating spaces, gatherings, businesses, communities, brands and containers that inspire healing, transformation, and stepping more fully into the truth of the world's relentless need for our unique voice in the world.'

In the months ahead, as I step into the flow with my photography workshops, I will also be hard at work on this book I've been dreaming about for years.  And while it has changed from 'all about me and that city I love' to being 'all about that city', it's an idea that has never disappeared.  Only altered and bloomed into something much more than I expected.  And I love what it is set on becoming.

If you are creating any kind of book, take a look at Christine's introduction to her course ...

The Conscious Booksmith: A Mindful Approach to Creating Your Book // with Christine Mason Miller from Animyst on Vimeo.

 

I Do Not Want ...

I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made half a century ago. Minimalism does not need to hear from me. I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made yesterday. Contemporary art is making enough noise without me. I do not want to be filmed in my studio pretending to be working. I do not want to participate in staged conversations about art—either mine or others past or present–which are labored and disguised performances. I do not want to be interviewed by curators, critics, art directors, theorists, aestheticians, professors, collectors, gallerists, culture mavens, journalists or art historians about my influences, favorite artists, despised artists, past artists, current artists, future artists.  A long time ago I got in the habit, never since broken, of writing down things instead of speaking. It is possible that I was led into art making because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. I do not want to be asked my reasons for not having worked in just one style, or reasons for any of the art that got made (the reason being that there are no reasons in art). I do not want to answer questions about why I used plywood, felt, steam, dirt, grease, lead, wax, money, trees, photographs, electroencephalograms, hot and cold, lawyers, explosions, nudity, sound, language, or drew with my eyes closed. I do not want to tell anecdotes about my past, or stories about the people I have been close to. I refuse to speak of my dead. The people to whom I owe so much either knew it or never will because it is too late now. I do not want to document my turning points, high points, low points, good points, bad points, lucky breaks, bad breaks, breaking points, dead ends, breakthroughs or breakdowns. I do not want to talk about my methods, processes, near misses, flukes, mistakes, disappointments, setbacks, disasters, obsessions, lucky accidents, unlucky accidents, scars, insecurities, disabilities, phobias, fixations, or insomnias over posters I should never have made. I do not want my portrait taken. Everybody uses everybody else for their own purposes, and I am happy to be just material for somebody else so long as I can exercise my right to remain silent, immobile, possibly armed, and at a distance of several miles.

Robert Morris, Artist

This amused me so much that I had to share.  Morris was replying to Robert Knafo's request a studio interview and he is very clear on precisely why he won't give an interview.  

You can read more on the story over on the Slow Muse blog.

 

Magazines from Home

Mana from Heaven ... or that's how the 3 New Zealand magazines I was given have seemed on this lazy Sunday afternoon.

Not that I was lazy.  I have a bin full of paper on the floor next to my desk and my desk is less littered with papers and notes and ... stuff.

Each time I reached a 'clearing/organising' milestone I would allow myself to read another of those 3 magazines. 

North & South was probably my favourite.  Then again, it always was.

I'm aching with flu.  It's been all around me but I had no plans for it myself.  I thought it might have been a food allergy.  I slept yesterday afternoon and then all night too.  A rare feat for me to do both.  I woke feeling better but by lunchtime I was aching and ready to sleep all over again.   I guess it's the season so I'll just concentrate on the fact that I am so glad to see Spring.

I was lucky, I had the book At Least You're in Tuscany for company, so I powered through it these last 24 hours.  Jennifer Criswell offers another take on giving up your career and moving to Italy.

Last night I dreamed I flew home to New Zealand.  It was a long and difficult journey.  A complicated dream.  And so it was incredibly disappointing to wake and find myself still here in Belgium.

There was a red rowboat, parked up on the beach, last time I was home ...

Habas con Jamon, by Yaiza

My parents grew Broad Beans out in the garden of my childhood but never did we make anything as interesting as Habas con Jamon with those beans ...

Today Yaiza had to use water for the final part of the preparation.  That would be instead of beer or white wine but still ... it was delicious.

Thank you to Yaiza who patiently taught me these recipes, and put up with my camera, and with my constant note-taking too.  Details were recorded and my big hope is that I can recreate tonight's dishes next week.

Learning to Cook Spanish Food

Today I learned how to cook 3 different Spanish dishes ...

Yaiza came over, armed with the ingredients I didn't have, and showed me how to create a delicious Tortilla.  And an Aioli sauce that is so divine I'm not sure how it won't be on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Or that's what everyone was saying as they handed the pot of it round the table. 

Then there was the Habas con Jamon ... and I was left wondering how it was that New Zealanders could have failed to create that dish with their Broad Beans and ham???  Then, as the final touch, Picaillo.  A divine salad, small pieces of boiled potato and eggs, cherry tomatoes, green beans, and tuna.

And oil.

So much oil but it was truly divine.

Tonight I'm realising how much I missed in life due to my mother not knowing to send us out into the world - to the beach, the forest, or simply 'out', with a package of cold Tortilla to save us from hunger and associated horrors.  Ithink my childhood might have been that much happier if my mother had copied the Spanish mothers and done this simple thing.

Oh my ...it was all so good.  Here is a close-up of the two Tortilla's created here in my kitchen.  More of this Spanish cooking is planned.

Impulse and Whimsy ...

I can rarely rely on myself not to need to take actions that would test my dignity were I not constantly wearing trousers of some kind however ... today I was tempted to buy a skirt.  It's the first in years. 

It was all about the colours.

Tim Heatherington, War Photographer

Really my works are narratives, I am really interested in stories. I find different visual ways to talk about narratives, political narratives. My work is about conflicts and politics, but it links in very kind of intimacy like soldier sleeping. I am interested in getting very close to my subjects, and I live how they live, or share things with them.

Tim Heatherington, extracted from an interview on Periscope.

I have read war photographer Robert Capa's book and more than a few books about him.  Over the years I have collected and read the stories of war journalists John Simpson, Christina Lamb, Frank Gardener, Kevin Sites, Kate Adie ... and more.  I have the dvd titled War Photographer, about the work of James Nachtwey too.

There is something I have been trying to understand. 

Tonight I watched 'Which Way to the Frontline - The Life and Time of Tim Heatherington'.  It is a documentary created by Sebastian Junger ('The Perfect Storm', 'War') and in it he seems to take the whole 'conversation' about motivations and understanding war to a level I've never really found before.

In tracing Tim's career back through the years, Junger's intention seemed to be about honouring, remembering, and revealing the truly fascinating man who was a war photographer. 

Tim Hetherington was killed while covering the front lines in the besieged city of Misrata, Libya, during the 2011 Libyan civil war.

 

I Had Mail ...

Sebastian Junger's documentary about Tim Heatherington arrived in the post today ... Which Way Is The Front Line from Here?  It joins my collection of dvds and books about war photographers and journalists, mountaineers too.  People who fascinate, or who have fascinated, me.

Director Sebastian Junger gracefully weaves together footage of Hetherington at work and moving interviews with his family, friends, and colleagues to capture his compatriot and friend’s unique perspective, compassion, and intense curiosity about the human spirit.   The Sundance Institute.

Also in the package, randomly selected from my Amazon wishlist by Gert as a surprise, was Bright Star.  Jane Campion directed this one and it looks rather marvelous, an antidote to that time spent studying Keats work in dusty old university rooms back in New Zealand.

And the final delight came in the form of Dani Shapiro's book, Still Writing - The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life.  This one appeared on my radar via Terri Windling's blog, Myth & Moor.  She wrote a series of posts about this book over days ...

It's another deliciously warm April day here in Antwerp, we're up over 20 celsius and my clothes-line is heavy with laundry drying.  Winter seems to have been so much less painful this time, perhaps to make up for the one before ... the one which traumatised everyone here. 

And now, to work.