17.5.15

The story continues



I went to my favorite hairdresser yesterday, one of the small luxuries I allow myself. When I left for Barcelona in February he suggested giving me my next haircut on the beach over there since he would be coming over for the Primavera music festival. I won’t be there though, so I went to see him in Amsterdam and he will be my eyes and ears at the festival.

My hair has never been so short. I hope I didn’t loose all my wild hairs. Or maybe I lost my last tame ones.

One Saturday morning in April when I woke up after one of the great GLOVE parties organised and attended by a wonderful group of people who made me feel at home in Barcelona, I looked in the mirror and noticed that the glitter somebody had sprinkled in my hair during a moment on the dance floor and my grey hairs that have come with walking around on this planet for 42 year were shiny in a similar way.




Being here again in Amsterdam I realize that my happiness comes from a fluidity I achieved in my relations. Relations with things, with the world, but most importantly: with people. I talked about it with somebody who’s name I don’t remember or maybe never asked at an event in the mountains not too far from Barcelona, 250 Burners (basing their life on the principles of Burning Man, sharing, leave no trace, radical inclusiveness a.o.) spending time together, talking, sharing, dancing, connecting. Another family I became part of.

Tomorrow I will continue the journey that started on a bus at night in Spain last Monday. I am on my way to the Nomadic Village, where I also belong. Another tribe, people who wear tails, cook tasty food, think about wandering and wondering, build homes wherever they are, make the world their home.

On my way I will meet two Nomads travelling Europa in 'Mistress Enid Abbott', their converted mini-bus and home since several years . I will reconnect with a seamstress who uses her sewing machine to make music. I will visit a permaculture friend in the middle of a big city. I will cross paths with Jodi Rose who records the sounds of bridges around the world and like me was a BridgeGuard on the Slovak-Hungarian border once. I will see a Walking Artist I only know through Facebook and I will stay with a “DirtyDesigner” in a villa just outside Münich.

I miss my Barcelona friends but I am looking forward to meet old ones and makes new ones. New connections. Fluid relations. Walk. Think. Make art. Write. Set out new lines. Connect.

And again I am thinking of Craigie Horsfield (artist, photographer), like I did many times before, trying to understand what he is saying, having the feeling I'm on my way:

“As we read each of us experiences differently, we are within this, we place ourselves towards others, so that there is the story, here on the page, the story we bring as readers, and that which is between us: this complex of relation. We attend to this between, the story and ourselves, bring our experiences, our stories of our experience, recognise and in our recognising enter into our own lives. This is our engagement as audience, these tenacious, these “sticky” connections, the things we bring with us, understanding, enquiry, compassion perhaps...This is something which happens now between us. In this action is described art, and it could be said of a picture, an event, a gesture, a shadow; but it is in the between, and if this between fails there remains only separating detritus: information, document or witness, unrealised, inert, sterile matter. But this misleading is perhaps misleading as though it were space, distance, and separation, when it is rather place, our present being. This is how the world occurs, and not in parts but entire and presently, the way we happen.”

"Art as conversation, dialogue, and negotiation is, within the generative relation of thinking together, part of an attention to the world. These are the traces of an epic, of individual lives and of a people, ourselves. Taking place in the present, we are, in our acknowledgment of self with others, together in history, realized, becoming, through our conversation, through that very being together. The present, such as it is, is in our relation. In this is the confluence of relation as becoming together and relation as "telling".

(from the Introduction in "Relation")

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