Ghent, 23 October 2007
Dear Anouk,
After completing the requisite preparatory rituals and peripheral manoeuvres, I have finally
landed in a chair with a view of a computer screen. The drainpipe is installed, my workroom
organized and the week planned. I am finally writing to you. I wonder if you also have that—
the need to put everything in its proper place before you turn on the computer, to start building
your digital ‘homes for the soul’ and unfolding your ‘mental landscapes’. In one of the texts
you sent me about your work, I read a description of the space where you work: ‘The second
floor, where she works, is barely furnished. The white walls remain untouched, virginal. A table
and four chairs, a kitchenette with a kettle to boil water for tea. The ambience is more than
monastic, it is absolute Zen. But the indispensable tool for her work crowns the table: the
portable computer, serving as library, archive and photo album, the tool for all things.’
It sounds as though, in your sober studio, everything is in a perpetual state of departure, your
laptop and suitcase packed, ready to travel to other places. When I looked at your videos last
week, I noticed that they often bear the names of (virtual) places, such as Kernwasser Wunderland,
Horizon, Typospace, or simply Building, Portal or Petit Palais.
One of the things which fascinated me, that you mentioned in a conversation, was: “By entering
this other space, I hope to understand this world better.” I wonder what ‘departing’ means
for you, what those other places do with, and to, you and also what it is, then, to come back
home. I have collected three possible descriptions and am curious in which of them you most
recognize yourself.
1.
In Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Alice lands in “the forest
where things have no name.” Although she is frightened about what is going to happen when
she loses her name, she still finds it just a bit exciting. “This must be the wood,” she said
thoughtfully to herself, “where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name
when I go in. I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it
would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be trying to find the creature
that had got my old name!” After she has crossed through the wood, Alice is relieved to
discover that she once again knows her name. “However, I know my name now,” she said.
“That’s some comfort. Alice—Alice—I won’t forget it again.”
Alice is Alice once again and everything seems to be the way it used to be. Still, something
seems to have happened during this little journey ‘through the looking glass’. Very briefly, the
self-evidence of being together with oneself has been broken. By discovering that she can lose
her name and identity, the experience of getting them back are a relief.
Have you already been in ‘the wood down there where they’ve got no names’? Were you as
delighted as Alice when you were once again able to see the forest despite the trees?”
2.
Now that we find ourselves through the looking glass, I do not want to deny you a second
interesting option for ‘other places’, attributed to the mirror by the French philosopher Michel
Foucault. In Des espaces autres, he developed the concept of ‘heterotopias’. He describes
these ‘other spaces’ as places where different cultural atmospheres are represented and incorporated
into a single concept. Whereas utopias refer to an ideal, heterotopias are also found in
reality. Sacred or forbidden places are good examples. For Foucault, the mirror straddles the
boundary between utopia and heterotopia. The reflection shows us ourselves in a nonexistent
place, where we are in fact absent, which is utopian. But a mirror is equally a heterotopia,
because the imaginary space on the other side of the mirror enables us to take on form, thereby
reinforcing this reality.
Do you sometimes see yourself in places where you are not? When you unexpectedly look into
a mirror, do you sometimes think that you are someone else?
3.
A third way of describing ‘going away’ comes from the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, in
this lovely poem:
On the eve of never departing
On the eve of never departing
At least there are no suitcases to pack
Or lists to draw up with things to do
(Some of which are always forgotten)
The following day, before leaving.
Nothing needs to be done
On the eve of never departing
How relaxing not to have anything at all
To be relaxed about!
What peace of mind when there’s no more reason to shrug,
Tedium (poor tedium!) having been left behind
To arrive deliberately at nothing!
What happiness it is not to need to be happy
Like an opportunity turned inside out.
For some months now I’ve been living
The vegetative life of thought,
Day after day sine linea …
Yes, how relaxing …
Peace of mind …
What a relief after so many journeys—physical and mental—
To be able to look at closed suitcases as at nothing!
Doze off, soul, doze off!
Doze while you can!
Doze!
You don’t have much time! Doze,
For it’s the eve of never departing!
Dear Anouk, do you sometimes long to come home forever, never to leave again? Is that the
same thing as leaving everything behind and going away forever?
with very best regards,
Frederik De Preester
—-
Brussels, 1 November 2007
Hello Frederik,
Your questions have been haunting me for a whole week. Although we have never met, they hit
the mark. I have taken Les Lieux by Marguerite Duras and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space
down off the shelf, to serve as touchstones, my own Sancho Panza, a foothold and company
while I write this letter.
I glance quickly back through the bookshelves and suddenly notice a book that I had been
looking for, for a long time: Achter de spiegel (behind the mirror), a collection of essays on film,
particularly about ‘imitating, creating and making real’ (namaken, maken, and waarmaken),
about the reality behind the ‘dark mirror’ that film will always remain. I set that book—with its
references to Athanasius Kircher, Jules Verne and Lewis Carrol—alongside the other two.
It is true, I like to travel. I like to find myself in a state of wonderment, alert, so that I don’t miss
any coins caught between the paving stones. If I am in a strange environment—not at home—
then everything sparkles, for everything is unfamiliar: people, landscapes, sometimes language.
At the same time, I like to experience that strange environment from a single spot: a
well-chosen table on the terrace of the same café, where I let the world revolve around me and
become ever less strange. And then I leave again.
1.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are the two books closest to me. A nice
difference between the two is that in the first, Alice accidentally finds herself in Wonderland
by foolishly falling into it, and in the second book, she consciously decides to pass through the
mirror in order to go and discover so strange a place.
When I start up my 3D programme, there is little to start with: a computer screen reflecting
light, and behind it, an empty space asking to be filled in, a misty destination. When I begin the
journey of a new work, I never know exactly where it will take me (It’s not the destination but
the journey…, and so on). I do take along a kind of map: a storyboard with sketches and annotations,
so that I won’t lose my way completely, going outside the parameters of the programme.
Also, I never set out alone, but always with companions. Here is Sancho Panza again,
the realistic companion of the dreaming, rambling Don Quixote, who helps me form images and
sounds.
In that empty space, that mental landscape in which I build my ‘homes for the soul’, I can allow
things to come into being again. Everything—the visual elements, the forms, and so on—they
all seek out their own origins. Everything searches for a name (a hill, a flower, a light, a wall, a
line, a circle, a dot). When everything has acquired a name, I name the work and give it a title.
Then I can see the forest for the trees again.
2.
I have always felt attracted to ‘in-between spaces’ and feel very much at home there: a train
station, an airport, a lift, a carpet, a sauna, a theater, a cinema, a library, a museum. They are
places that seem to fall into a different reality, outside of time, where things often seem to be
present in an intensified state. That concentrated presence of very little is something I also
look for in my work. Each work is a secret garden—an in-between, a transitional space—that
comes into being from the unexpected combinations, those small conjunctions, the minimal
fusions that are possible in those spaces between image and music, text and image, between
music and architecture…
“One must cultivate his garden,” as the old man tells Candide. That garden does not exist. Each
of us has to build it and fill it with our own hands. Everything comes down to how man relates
to his environment, figure and background. I recognize myself in the landscapes I build, in the
abstract forms that move within them. They are echoes of myself. But what is just as important
as finding that secret garden, is opening it up, seeing how an audience, the public—the
other—moves inside it. When I show my work, I look at the faces of the people looking at my
images and listen to their interpretations. There too: small conjunctions and minimal fusions.
Alice asked: “How do I know what I think, till I see what I say?” Edmund Carpenter expanded
on that by asking, “And how do I know who I am, until I see myself as others see me?” Here,
this is what it is all about.
3.
I think I can best reply to your question from the perspective of hereisthere (2006/7), three
words in one, like the artists who worked on the project: Heidi Voet, Anton Aeki and myself.
hereisthere is a place on the Internet. The place where you are, where you are looking and listening,
is the place where it, the work, life, is happening.
On the website, there are traces of people found in the real world, snippets from encounters
and fragments of images, plus texts from our trips. Together, they create a completely new
reality, an everywhere-land. It is the place that we can never forget, the place where we are at
ease—or indeed, where we are uncomfortable. hereisthere is the unrelenting fusion that we
carry with us wherever we go.
www.hereisthere.org is the address, the site, the intersection where everything always comes
together: all the bits and pieces that we pick up here and there—no, let me rephrase that, not
here and there, but ‘here there’. They are snippets of known and unknown languages, from
here and from there, people, objects, stones, buildings, rubble, languages, photographs, texts,
tin cans, sounds that help us communicate, that help make clear who we are, where we are:
small sensations that determine how we look at the world and how the world looks at us.
Here there I am at home.
Anouk
While writing, I listened to Sigur Ròs and to Mùm’s We Have a Map of the Piano, in repeat.
—-
Ghent, 12 November 2007
Hello Anouk,
Thank you for your lovely and inspiring letter. To it, I have everything, yet nothing to add. Perhaps
just this: After being very busy over the last few weeks, I spent some time at the seaside.
I returned home with a fresh and open mind, filled with faraway things. In the wake of visions
of the sea, I reread your letter and saw the theme of ‘the view’ running through it all. Both your
‘computer screen, and behind it an empty space asking to be filled in’, and the ‘in-between
spaces’ of which you write seem to me to be views, prospects of landscapes. Your computer
screen, the train station and airport are spaces that reflect destinations in advance—usually
vaguely—and theatre, cinema and museums are places with views framed by theatre curtains,
projection screens and the literal frames of paintings.
I am reminded of a work that we exhibited at the Dr. Guislain Museum, which had a strong
effect on me. It was a drawing by a certain Gustav Sievers (1865–1941), a man who had been
incarcerated for years in a psychiatric institution in Göttingen. Every day, he drew the same
exact view from the window in his room. The conservator of the Prinzhorn collection, from
which we had borrowed the work, wrote, “In their cramped, multiple repetitiveness, his visual
narratives tried to control his fears and aggression.” But I think that this work also, and perhaps
primarily, shows that life without a view is simply unbearable.
In your letter, you twice refer to the tale of Don Quixote. It is odd that we write about each
other’s favourite books without knowing one another. I love the old Don Quixote, who gets lost
in the stories of knights’ exploits in his library, then goes out into the wide world to challenge
imaginary enemies and rescue damsels from potential dangers. It appears to me that this
‘knight of the doleful countenance’, as he calls himself, is trying to impose his view onto the
world in which he wanders.
Gustav Sievers and Don Quixote seem to me to have adopted opposite approaches to that
‘somewhere else’ that we see through the window. Sievers recorded the unreachable village
over and over again in his drawing and ‘cultivated’ the view from a distance. Don Quixote left
behind the ‘in-between space’ of his library and disappeared into the distance of his knights’
tales.
Dear Anouk, to which of these two do you feel closer, or, which of these two views do you like
the best?
With best regards,
Frederik
—-
Between Brussels and Los Angeles, 17 November 2007
Hello Frederik,
I am replying to you from a height of 10.367 kilometres, in an airplane with a view of ever-shifting
fields of clouds. In the airline magazine, I just read that the first space flight was in a hotair
balloon. So that balloon went higher than the airplane in which I am sitting. A balloon—so
much more humane a way to move from place to place. Suddenly I picture a fire-spitting balloon
traveller, taking himself higher and higher. But I digress.
Disconnected: that’s how I feel here in this airplane. Body movement is restricted, there is no
mobile phone, no e-mail. The earphones in my seat do not work, so there are no films, no music.
Everyone is asleep, lulled by the drone of the engines. I write, read and draw, for nine long
hours. If that sea of clouds below me had been a film, I could have watched it for a long time.
Looking at the world from a single vantage point and daydreaming: Gaston Bachelard said, “As
soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere,” and, “The exterior spectacle helps intimate
grandeur unfold.” What I think he meant is that space invites us to come out of ourselves, so
that it is no longer just about a physical changing of place in a landscape, but about a mental
move, that ‘theatre of the mind’. These exchanges from inside and outside, from this side and
beyond all touch me.
You ask which view I enjoy the most. Along with fields of clouds and the empty, expansive
landscapes in which infinity seems to take form, I am very fond of forests. A forest is closed,
yet at the same time, open on every side. We do not have to be in the woods very long to experience
what is always a rather anxious impression of going deeper and deeper into a limitless
world. “These trees are magnificent,” said Rilke, “but even more magnificent is the sublime and
moving space between them.”
I love both the poetic fury of Don Quixote and the concentration and fragility of Gustav Sievers,
but I do not have any fear of my environment. I simply try to map out a course whose primary
task is probably making inside concrete and outside vast, a strange and wondrous story
of ‘intimate immensity’.
with pleasure,
Anouk
The body of the mountain hesitates before my window:
‘How can one enter if one is the mountain,
If one is tall, with boulders and stones,
A piece of earth, altered by sky?’
Jules Supervielle, Les amis inconnus (The Unknown Friends)