Exercise in Being Here, day 19: where did the time go?

The world is probably still there when you don’t see it but you don’t know for sure. At night, when the owls call out to each other, the fog slowly fills the valley and in the morning you wake up in the clouds. Every morning I check on the boat and we wait together until the world starts to appear again, little bits at the time, the sound of church bells reaching us before the tower appears. Underneath the green, the boat is as blue as the sky on a sunny day, but it has soaked up the colour of the field it has been waiting in and matches the blades of grass.
Where did everybody go? Manolo left but his boat is still here, how many hands touched the stones of the walls in the building around the old oven? Who baked bread in there? Who planted the apple trees, who threw the fox skull in the well? Who waited for the fog to rise, like I do every morning?

The seeds resemble arrows when they are released, a two centimetre long shaft with an arrowhead, the seed proper. They have tiny feather-like protrusions so they can be carried through the air. As soon as they hit a surface they change shape, in a whirling movement the straight line becomes a spiral, and through this movement the arrow drills itself into the surface it has landed on.

“We called them the clock when we were children” somebody told me, “and we stuck them on our sweaters to see them twirl around like the hand of a clock. ”

I’ve been catching colours. They are in glass bottles and every colour is connected to the landscape and has a story behind it. The brightest ink, a pinkish red, is made from pokeweed berries, a plant that grows everywhere and people try to eradicate in vain these days. The Spanish named it after its colour, hierba carmín, carmine red. It was traditionally used to dye fabrics but also to paint fingernails. The faint green is made from lichen that grow on the drystone walls of the ruins. The black was made in summer, oak galls found on a walk were crushed and mixed with spring water, rusty nails from one of the abandoned houses and left in the sun for a week. Greater celandine gave a beautiful yellow. The colour of the plant, flower, berry, wall scrapings, tree parts, metal items —you can experiment with anything—isn’t always the colour you will get after you’ve processed it. Some colours that are most present in the landscape are the hardest to catch: green is hard to get, especially a bright or a dark green, and blue, blue is a dream. It is in the sky, in the water, it is on the doors and window frames of the houses where people once lived.

“Exercise in being here” is an installation in 3 parts that combines the past and the present, reality and imagination. It is about leaving, about what is left behind, about longing, dreaming, creating something new with what has been around for a long time, using local materials like plants and stones, stories from the local people and the history of the place; in a way mirroring what is happening in O Castro Art Village where a new story is being written, respecting the history and archeology of the village while breathing new life in it through art, attentiveness, a sharing of minds, a bringing together of people and ideas.


1. Ruin
* Carmine red plant stalks with paper boats folded out of an old account pad that was found in one of the old houses in O Castro.
* A business suit that was worn by the artist during her journey to O Castro and working process and got transformed by drawing a dry stone wall on the fabric, similar to the walls the ruined building is made from.
* A white shirt that was worn by the artist, dyed carmine red with berries from the pokeweed plant.
* Blue bucket with a paper boat

2. Gallery space
* Forest made out of carmine red plant stalks with paper boats folded out of an old account pad that was found in one of the old houses in O Castro, supported by stones covered with mosses and little plants.
* Drawings made with natural pokeberry ink (hierba carmín)
* Seeds laid out on paper sheets resembling a mysterious language
* Glass bottle with ink and materials that were used in the creation of the installation
* Polaroid photos

3. Geodesic dome
* Video of the seeds of the erodium cicutarium, sound installation
* Lichen carpet

 

 

 

 

Exercise in Being Here, day 18: natural ink workshop and kombucha tasting

 

Exercise in Being Here, day 16: exploring spaces

 

Exercise in Being Here, Day 15: catching the flavour of O Castro in kombucha

 

I didn't come alone to O Castro, I brought scobys, symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast. In the first days here I used them to make kombucha and today I prepared the second fermentation. Kombucha is made by leaving a scoby for 10 to 14 days in a mixture of tea, sugar and starter liquid (kombucha from the former batch). A new scoby will form on top and the sweet tea will turn into kombucha. For the second fermentation the liquid is poured into airtight bottles and fruit or herbs can be added. I made one with hibiscus flowers and lemon, another with fresh turmeric and lemon and a special O Castro kombucha with ingredients that are available at the moment: apples, mint and calendula flowers. In the weekend, when I will give a kombucha workshop (and show other things you can do with a scoby) we will taste it!

Exercise in Being Here, day 14: dreaming of a pink forest

 

Exercise in Being Here, day 13: observing mythical creatures

 

Inside out

Polaroid world

Exercise in Being Here, day 10: folding boats

 I guess it was only a matter of time until I would start making boats.

Boats

The boat at O Castro used to be blue, bluer than the sea on a sunny day, bluer than the river it faces, bluer than the sky even. The green that covers it still has a hint of blue in it but resembles the colour of the grass surrounding it, as if it gradually soaked up the colour of the field it is in.
In summer, the apple trees dropped their fruits in the boat, in late autumn, today, spiders catch insects in the webs they spun between the wooden bench and the oars that are forever in the right position to take off.
I sometimes imagine it sailing off on the clouds that cover the valley and the river in the morning. I aim my polaroid camera at it every day, sometimes I take a photo, sometimes I don’t. What am I trying to catch anyway?

I folded a little white boat today and dropped some ink on it. The paper slowly soaked up the colour, pokeberry pink. What if I would put white boats outside and pour a little bit of ink in them? How long would it take for them to change colour? Rain and morning dew would speed it up. What colour would I use? Where would I put them? And why?

You have to be careful with the why. The why comes after the act. First you do something because you feel you have to do it, and if it makes sense you might find the answer to the why. It is in the relation between your action and the elements you can’t predict that meaning is being created.

I folded a big white boat and put it on the floor. I wanted a bigger boat but I already used the biggest sheet I had.

I folded smaller boats out of a 40 year old receipt booklet I found in one of the ruins. It belonged to a man who dealt in fruit and wine.

Once, on a long walk from Barcelona to the Climate Conference in Paris, I walked with the sea in my head and folded little boats out of paper trash I found on my path. Years before that, I filled the floor of a former synagogue in Slovakia with 3.000 paper boats folded out of newspapers from all around Europe, obstructing the entrance to the holiest part of the building where the Torah rolls used to be kept and where from a distance a glimpse of a video was visible, not to be known by anybody but its maker. I hadn’t really thought about this until I started folding boats today.

On a long walk from Amsterdam to the South of France somebody gave me a boat. I had slept in the forest the night before and in the morning I walked through a small village with a small bakery and I stopped to drink coffee and eat a croissant. Two men walked by and sat at the table next to me. We started a conversation. They were friends and they were walking together for a few days, they were planning to make a long walk in the future, walking from the place where one of them was born to the birthplace of the other man. While we talked, the silent one of the two was folding something. Just before they left he gave me a small boat and asked me to carry it with me until I thought it was time to let it go.
I carried the boat with me for many days. It became a temporary vessel for two dead men, a toy for a tiny girl. It was in my mind often when I found myself close to water or when I found myself at places where a boat would be completely out of place.
I thought about leaving it at a mountain top. At a nomadic village. In a fountain with paper airplanes lying on the bottom. in the hands of a new friend. In a tiny village where I worked on the land and was happy.
I thought about carrying it with me forever, I couldn’t decide what was the right moment, how do you know it is the right moment? How do you let things go? Often, after I had left a place where I hadn’t thought about the boat in my bag, I would later on think that that place would have been the perfect location to leave it. But obviously it wasn’t because I hadn’t left it there.
It was a long summer, an amazing summer. I couldn’t believe I had to go back home, go into winter, go into the city, take off my walking shoes, my walking suit.
On the last day before I returned home, November 2d, I took the boat out of my bag. I jumped on board. I threw the boat in the nearest river, the river behind the house I had been staying in. I left.

I guess at some point I have to get in the boat here. But first I’ll fold my own boats and see where they will bring me.

Exercise in Being Here, day 9: experimenting with colour

A deep pink made from pokeweed berries, found on a walk. A pale green made from lichen, scraped from a big stone in the middle of the wall of one of the ruins. A reddish orange made from red berries found in the forest. A bright yellow made from turmeric from the organic shop next to my house in Barcelona. A light brown from rusty nails, pieces of a chain and a key, found in the house at the entrance of O Castro. A purpelish brown made from black olives found in Bexàn (half an hour walk through the forest) under a tree next to some abandoned houses. A black made in summer at O Castro with oak galls, rusty bits and pieces, spring water and summer sun