Postcard from... Rocquetas

When they came here it felt like their big chance. The house in that small town in the Midlands that they had called home for over two decades had increased in value, beyond anything they could have imagined. People urged them not to sell. “The house prices will keep going up,” they said, and for a while they were right. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to make the escape. And so they landed here, a town in Spain that is not quite Spain, with its branch of the British Legion, a German doctors office, and a Belgian driving school.

They found the shop in a small arcade, a block back from the beach. The real estate agent was Swedish, and had lived in the area for years. Good foot traffic, she promised. An international crowd. She showed the spreadsheets, with numbers of hotel rooms and average occupancy rates. Reassurance that when the tide of tourists retreated, the locals - both Spanish and northern European (mostly retired) - would pick up the slack. And so they signed the contract. They would sell environmentally-friendly, cruelty-free cosmetic products. The shop opened. It did okay. Not great, but okay. After a while they realised they were never made to be shopkeepers. They had to open seven days a week in the summer, but never earned enough to hire staff. In the winter, things were slower than they had been led to believe.

And so, after three years, they were heading home. Was it all a mistake? It was too soon to say.

See/Listen: Cities and Memory

One of our recent discoveries of place-related projects is Cities and Memory, a global soundmap that presents both the reality of a location through field recordings, but also presents its “imagined, alternative counterpart”. Each recording that is uploaded to the sound map is accompanied by a reworking or interpretation that imagines the place somewhere else, somewhere new, and which incorporates the original recording in some form. Some reimaginings/remixes use only sounds from the original sample, others are musical/tonal compositions that contain the original sound in some form.

It is a fascinating project with over 400 sounds on the map located in 23 countries and uploaded by numerous contributors. For those of you within striking distance of Oxford, UK, in the next week you can also experience Cities and Memory as part of an exhibition Kymmata, taking place at the O3 Gallery. The exhibition as a whole brings together installation, artwork and live performances, for which the soundtrack and one of the exhibits will be a three-hour mix of Cities and Memory sounds:

“Taking a trip across the world from west to east, we’ll begin in San Francisco and end in South Korea, taking in 25 countries along the way, as each field recording blends into the reimagined version of itself, and then into the next location. The soundscape has been created specifically to fit the theme of the exhibition and to work within the space, and will form the sound element of this multidisciplinary five-day showcase.”

The exhibition runs from Wednesday 28 January to Friday 30 January (12 noon to 5pm each day). And if you want to get an idea of what the Cities and Memory project is all about, have a listen below:

Postcard from... Montague

It was near the end of the first semester that he discovered the Book Mill. He cannot remember what drew him there, what force motivated him to climb into his grandfather’s old Ford, the one handed down “before I am gone” so that he would have a means to get around at college. It was cold that day, a light dusting of snow on the fields north of Amherst as the road heads towards the hills rising up from the Pioneer Valley. The roads were quiet that day, the sky overcast and sullen. Flags flew limp on the their front yard poles, gardens closed for the coming winter.

There were only a couple of cars lined up in the gravel lot next to the old wooden mill. He parked alongside them, the next in a neat row. Across a wooden footbridge he pushes at the door. On the other side a room, one of many, lined with books. A place of creaking floorboards and hidden corners, of people working on laptops and sympathetic smiles, a coffee or a beer and a view down to the rapids. Until he opened that door he did not realise how much he needed this place. The college and everything he had already experienced, a few miles down the road, was already becoming bearable. Because he knew he could always drive north in his grandfather’s car to this safe harbour, on the banks of the Saw Mill river.

Books you don’t need
In a place you can’t find

But he did. He found it.

Picture: Katrin Schönig

Postcard from... Koh Kret

The house was abandoned, with objects strewn across the dusty wooden floors, but they offered clues as to those who once lived there. This island, Koh Kret, was once a bend in the Chao Phraya River before a canal was built as a shortcut for boats in 1722, separating it from the mainland. Mon people settled here and today Koh Kret is still known for the Mon style pottery produced there as well as  several temples, including one next door to the house. Had this been the home of monks? It seemed that way, based on the things we found as we picked our way over the open terrace in the middle of this traditional Thai style house.

One object in particular caught our eye; a mountain scene, the peak high and snowy, looking down on a lake. Rocky paths, leading from the shore up towards the summit. Where was it? Certainly not Thailand… We tried to imagine the person that once looked upon this painting. Where had he got the painting from? How did it make him feel? Why hadn’t he taken it with him when he left? But we had no access to him, or any of them who had once called these ruins home. Any stories we could pull from the wooden walls were only those of the imagination, pieced together with what had been left behind. The next time we came to the island we resolved to find out more, but the house had gone. It had been cleared away, and all the objects in it.

Watch: The Places of Austerlitz

Read special 'Literature' issue of Source at www.source.ie/app Win books at www.facebook.com/SOURCEphoto WG Sebald's last novel, like its predecessors, is illustrated with mysterious photographs. Sebald scholar Jonathan Long visits locations featured in the book and explores how the photographs correspond to (or conceal) reality.

On a gloomy December Friday I sat down in the kitchen and began to read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. About five hours later I finished the book. Apart from to make a couple of cups of coffee, I did not move from my chair with a view to the courtyard of our Berlin apartment until the book was finished. It is a powerful piece of work, a novel that brings elements of memoir and travelogue to create a book that is about place, about memory and imagination, and about the stories to be found both within and without.

One thing that strikes the reader of Austerlitz are the images, black and white photographs very deliberately placed at specific moments within the text that, by their very existence, help to blur the line between fact and fiction. The film from SOURCE Photographic Review above follows scholar Jonathan Long as he explores the locations of the images, as well as speaking to those who helped Sebald source, select and layout the images.

SOURCE Photographic Review is a quarterly print and digital magazine published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Austerlitz film was written and directed by Richard West. Full film credits are on the Youtube page.

Postcard from... Berlin

The first morning of the year in Berlin never feels like the start of something. In the aftermath of the party, the remains of a million and more fireworks strewn across the pavements and parks, the empty bottles and the piles of fag ends, the resolute joggers picking their way through the wreckage, it feels more like the final staggering steps of the previous twelve months than a new dawn. The streets, so full of noise and smoke and people in the early hours are now deserted, so much so that those joggers get polite greetings from strollers and dog walkers, a conspiracy of friendliness between the early risers that is usually absent in the anonymity of the city.

Slowly the rest of Berlin wakes, checking the weather through the curtains or from apartment balconies. It doesn’t matter what the reality is, New Year’s Day always feels in the memory as if it was grey, no wind or weather to speak of, as if that too is taking a few hours off. In this city where brunch is routinely served until 4pm the breakfast period stretches on into the evening. The shops are shut. Some restaurants too.

“Our cafe is closed today on account of yesterday…” reads a sign in the window. New Year’s Day? Nah… the city agrees: it can start tomorrow.