Guido hunts wild boar and deer:
Continuing with my work as it was developing in the UK (i.e. the preparation of fresh game in the kitchen) has been a slow journey with many dead ends, in part due to my limited grasp of German. The difficulty of tracing food chains back to their source though in itself has reflected something of what inspired the work in the first place: a sense that we have very much disconnected from the actual origins of the things that we eat – especially meat – and replaced this with a marketing image of happy cows in green fields.
Finally though, last Thurs I went to meet Guido, a hunter, butcher and chef working out east of Berlin. He arranged to meet me at the last stop on the line out NE out of the City – I thought we were just meeting to introduce ourselves and so was in my 'city civvies'.
It turned out that he was going hunting that night so I went along, in my practical nylon flares and PVC coat. Luckily I had brought my camera. And we sat watching a darkening field from a hide in a tree for four hours – saw some deer mating, a fox and a rabbit – nothing came close enough to shoot (though I was fairly eaten alive by mosquitoes…).
Despite me turning up looking like I might be going to a restaurant or the theatre, he has agreed to take me out again. Hopefully I will be able to go out until he gets a kill (he shoots deer or wild boar about 4 or 5 times a year though he is out several times a week after completing his days work in restaurant or butchers shop). I find the process that he engages in – long periods, week after week spent sitting, watching, waiting – quite fascinating and wonder how I might capture this quality in video (or some other way perhaps?).
As I said before in this blog, I was previously a committed vegetarian for 15 years and this work really is a head on confrontation with my choice to once again eat meat – to bring consciousness to this decision – and I have yet to see where this process will lead me. I was grateful though to my guide Guido, and thankful that as we whispered in the hide, he revealed a sense of both knowledge, love and respect for the environment within which he works.
He learnt his trade from his mother who also used to hunt.
There seems so much potential in this chance meeting (on one of the many (unsuccessful) occasions when I enquired in restaurants in Berlin that served game as to whether they could put me in touch with their supplier, Guido happened to telephone the chef I was speaking to in the middle of our conversation so he passed the phone to me…)
I will post some images soon.
