Sorcha, Aina, Kristjan, Mattias and I ended up at an intimate concert in an apartment on Thursday evening. An intense man played guitar and sang in Latvian to a crowd of twenty or so students(?) who were sitting on the floor of the bare living room. Aina knew someone who had previously lived in the apartment – now the tenants (artists?) were having to leave and this was the last event. It reminded me of my life thirty or more years ago – life at Dartington, and early years in Edinburgh.
The city that night was especially full of flags. I have noticed the abundance of flags since arriving here: on public buildings, private homes, shops and businesses, on the lampposts along the roads in and out of the centre. There are billboards showing the Latvian flag and poster seeming to advertise a programme of concerts and events connected to the flag. All of this appears to be in preparation for Friday’s Liberation Day celebrations. The Latvian flag is quite beautiful, described to me as red and white it is actually a very particular shade of red – burgundy? It is a sophisticated colour that suggests a long history, it has an earthy quality … bodily … the rich dark red of blood. On my first day here, in old town with Fenu and Sorcha, Fenu told us the origin story of the flag: in ancient times the mighty warrior king was seriously wounded, possibly even killed, on the battlefield. An improvised stretcher was made of white cloth, the king’s powerful and weighty body was carried to safety and lifted from the blood-soaked cloth – a broad white stripe marking where the pressure of his imposing frame had stopped the blood from staining the fabric.
Friday was a national holiday, it was quieter on the roads when I went for my run, however I saw more other runners than I have done before – five. We did not have a holiday, we had the first day of our second workshop with another John – also from the states, and also now living in Estonia. John 1 and John 2 know each other and have previously collaborated in running an arts space. John 2 works with sound and is a professor in the new media department at Estonia’s art school. After chatting over tea and coffee in the kitchen he suggested that we go out to an area of the coast not far from the city. It is a place that he has visited before and which interests him.
We put on warm clothes – we had been watching the light snow fall from out of the kitchen window. We did not know that were were embarking on a four … five? … hour walk on a windy frozen beach and back through a seemingly endless forrest as the daylight diminished. At our point of destination where a winding river meets the Baltic Sea the forrest meets the beach. There are no dunes here – the sand and the pines meet directly. Many of the front-line trees had fallen … some bare and weathered trunks revealed a considerable period since falling, others still bore needles, bark, and intricate delicate root systems that told of more recent collapse. The angles of the fallen trees leaning against those still standing caught my attention. They made me think of the previous day’s white flag – falling and coming to rest.
Later back at the residency John invited us to listen to two of his pieces – sound works accessed through QR codes and played in mobile phones. The sound from our eight phones filled the dark project room – an amazing and inspiring experience. I have been wondering about how I might include … present … one or two text works in our show here – could QR codes be a possibility?
Yesterday I made some flags from materials found around the building. As works, or perhaps pieces of what might become an installation, they are (un)familiar to me. The flag form is something that has evolved in my thinking over the last year, and was made real with new works for Rest. Those flags were – to me at least – heavily loaded with meaning. Yesterdays flags were not. They were exercises in materiality. The single blue/green curtain is simply that – a length of material that very handily has an opening at one end of the hem which allows me to insert a metal pole that I found in a heap of scrap on the way to the basement. The curtain cloth itself was screwed up on the windowsill of the ’conference room’ on the fifth floor. I had found the cloth the day before and placed it on the floor as an addition … response … intervention to Sorcha’s arrangement of materials in the project room. Something shifted in me yesterday morning and I allowed myself to start thinking of what I am doing here as an extension and development of what I have been doing in the studio in Uppsala. I had been giving myself a hard time thinking that I should find an entirely new approach. The white curtain is the outcome of scouting for materials without a specific objective in mind. I realised that I was missing materials – physical things – to work with. So far on the residency we have been making but without materiality.
The blue/green flag was made and propped up against the wall before I found the white materials. Once assembled I leaned the white flag also against the wall next to its blue/green sibling. It looked staged and ’flat’. I went in search of more materials to make other flags returning an hour or so later to find that the white flag found its own position, it had fallen to the left and came to rest in a corner, the overly long train of fabric pooling on the floor. That chance composition was much more appealing.
Before making the flags we had a project planning meeting. In one week it is Riga’s Final Thursday event – a programme of cultural events on the last Thursday of each month. Kaspars (the project co-host, and founder of the residency) wants to know what we will do … but we do not know what we will do. This week has been a bit of a push and pull between talking about getting something together and at the same time feeling that we (participants) have not yet got any clear idea of what we are doing – either collectively or individually. Participation in Final Thursday is important for the residency – it ticks those visibility and accessibility boxes. It demands however publicity material. The meeting was a moments fruitful – we agreed on an image – and at moments it was awkward – what sort of event would it be, and what should it be called. Various words and phrases were thrown around but nothing seemed to fit – how could it when we didn’t know what we were doing. The meeting ended with us committing to return with a title later that day. In the kitchen we carried on playing with words and phrases, eventually settling on the idea of writing the most appealing on pieces of paper and then drawing them out of a hat. The six of us in the room each draw a word, Aina who had been out of the room returned and created a sentence from the six words. Together we agreed on one change, we had our title: Show the curiosity of losing content
Reflecting on the whole day now I see that losing content and playing with materials allowed me to make something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. I really enjoyed making those two flags. I don’t know what they mean … I don’t think that they ’mean’ anything, and they do not need to. It is almost like asking what do I, or anyone else, ’mean’. We don’t mean things, we simply are things.
This morning’s run took me passed the Swiss and the German ambassadors’ residencies. Every morning of the residency, except while we were away in the country, I have been for a run. The runs are about 40 minutes, I have no idea how far I run and that is not so interesting to me. I brought with me my running shoes and some warmer running wear. I wait until it is light before running – I did not bring lights or especially reflective clothings. I notice that my runs now start 20 about minutes later than they did when I first got here – daylight hours shorten. I have chosen different routes for each run: by the lake, on dirt tracks, on gravel roads, beside major traffic ways. These routes have provided me diverse glimpses in to the areas within a 5 to 6 kilometer diameter of the residency. I have run passed small industrial units, abandoned buildings, residential tower-blocks (both older and under construction), grand old houses behind electronic gates, the Jewish cemetery, the military academy and the Nato compound. I have run passed small local grocery stores, allotments, a vast complex of lock-up garages far from any housing, roadside flower stalls, the Latvian Sports Academy, tennis courts, and a car-wash. I have run over train tracks and tram-lines. I have noticed the red covers of access to the underground water pipes, the overground pipes that form arches over entrances and slip-roads, the parking signs that show exactly how to park – on the road perpendicular to the pavement, on the pavement perpendicular to the road, on the road parallel to the pavement, on the pavement parallel to the road. I have seen architecture from the soviet period, from before the soviet period and from after it, buildings that are neglected and building that are immaculate. I have seen clean pavements, bare trees, deep murky puddles, and the tiniest of snowflakes. I have raised my hand in greeting as I have passed other runners (only three to date). My glasses have become wet with the droplets of the morning mists, and my cheeks have become rosy with this weeks drier colder air. Are these runs part of the residency?
We, myself and the other artists, are fascinated that Laura (residency co-host) is a beach-tennis champion. That piece of information seems at odds with how we experience her. On the way to the countryside, in her car, we asked her more about it. In a guarded(?) response she spoke about how she sees her athleticism as an aspect of her practice. It is irrelevant to her if her opponent, or partner when playing doubles, is aware of this. I keep my athleticism – running and/or CrossFit – quite distinct from my practice. Why do I make this distinction? There are other distinctions that I also make: my employment and interest in baking for example. There are even the administrative aspects of being an artist that I see as distinct from my practice. I find myself wondering if these distinctions are necessary and/or useful. Could they perhaps stand in the way of my practice having a more certain kind of integrity … could they stand in the way of me having a sense of wholeness? Could they at once both explain my frustrations and hint at resolutions?
It is difficult to define what being here is giving me – as I write ’giving’ I wonder if I should expect that being here should give me something. I am getting something out of being here – not just ’something’ but perhaps rather ’some things’. It is interesting for me to pay attention to my feelings of things lying just beyond reach – my reach … our reach. I have the sense that something is not quite working … not quite right … not optimal. (Note: what is the etymology of ’optimal’ … does it have something to do with vision?) Or perhaps things are working and this is exactly what they they are and what they should be! Does my sense of things not quite working reveal inappropriate and irrelevant expectations? Is it perhaps more relevant to see how I can be comfortable in the moment … be non-judgemental … be in the process?
I find it easier to ’just be’ when we are doing things – tasks, activities. It is the times between the doing when I feel awkward and unsure … unsure of what is going on … if anything is going on … awkward in myself and as a part of this group. It seems that I require a sense of purpose. This might be something that would be interesting to investigate and work with … purpose and purposelessness. I like how purposelessness sounds and the way that the word feels in my mouth as I sound it out.
There is a great deal of not doing. Or perhaps I could say that there is a great deal of time and space between the doing of definite things. I have a tendency to fill time with definite things … to over-fill my time with definite things – that is certainly something that is being challenged and that I am having to think about here.
Yesterday I made my application for the artists’ working award. The one of the questions that I find most difficult and the one that is given the most space in which to answer is to say how I would use the time if I were to receive the award. Perhaps my lack of success with these applications has to do with my difficulties around time – understanding/knowing how I as an artist could (should?) use time.
One of the exercises we did while away at the weekend was a writing task. A number of steps led us each to having three words which we were to write about. I did not intentionally misunderstand the exercise but I wrote only about one of my three words: time. A few of our tasks on the residency and over the weekend have reminded me to working on what became Frozen Progress with Nic Sandiland twenty-two years ago in 2000. For this writing task I easily slipped back into the themed automatic writing exercises that Nic set us. I was not especially pleased with what I wrote until I came to read it for the group. It worked as a spoken/performed text.
It is taking time for us to work out how to work. I have no experience to compare this residency with however Sorcha said that this is like no other residency that she has been on, and she has been on several in the last two years. After a very slow morning we were tasked with identifying two outdoor spaces for installations – one large, and one small. Four of us headed out towards a large abandoned building probably less than one hundred meters from where we are staying. This particular building is simply a concrete shell, a four floor concrete shell pierced with large square windows in a strict regular grid pattern across the fasade.
Several rooms on the ground floor had curious features: two step-like blocks cast directly on/in the concrete, not far from that a pit with one sloping side. Another room bore traces that hinted that a row of four toilet stalls had been removed but perhaps the holes on the floor were something else. In one room brown paint flaked from the walls and ceiling in almost leaf-like forms. We climbed a staircase to the top floor. There was much more, and much better, grafitti on this floor. We walked the length of the building to the ’double return’ staircase near to the battered and rusted steel door where we had entered. No of stood too close to edge where it dropped to the floor below. We talked about fears of heights, fears of falling, fears of jumping. I experienced that curious tingling sensation in my groin that I always get when I approach a precipice. Walking down the stairs I realised that the fall from the floor above was of course only one floor, somehow standing on the top floor it felt as though I might fall through the whole building, all four floors, were I too fall. Was this a space for an installation?
The exercises that we are given raise questions that I cannot answer – at least I cannot answer them for the time being. I simply do not know what kind of installation space I am, or the group is, looking for. And at the moment I/we do not know how I/we will know what kind of space I/we are looking for. I could certainly imagine making something in (some of) the window apertures in the building’s fasade … but that would be my work work rather than a collaborative piece.
What is collaborative process? And how can it make work that exceeds the individual?
