Arrowhead

By Katherine Peters:

Arrowhead, named for the lake which lies at the heart of a nameless pinewood, was, for the first decade I lived there, a wilderness. We’d moved from the prairies, driving east until our endless views were obscured by a dark spray of pine. Within days my siblings and I had laid giddy claim. Though the wood was once leased by the Diamond Match Company and slated for development, no evidence existed to disrupt our explorations except the cant marks we came across now and then, a diamond-enclosed D burnt into bark. Cities a remote apparition, this wild tract uninterrupted except for a few hunting camps and peopled by eagle, moose, bear—the center of my world was, for most, the end of the world. 

My parents built our home just about from the ground up. Durable post-and-beam raised out of sixty-foot pines from our acreage; later, profusions of phlox, hydrangea, rose given their concentrated hue by acidic forest soil. From the safety of our cultivated lot, books in hand, woodfire blazing in an old stove, we listened to the loons sounding the dark. 

Over the next years the woods were measured, divided, clear-cut, cheap housing raised at regular intervals to accommodate Portland’s low-income surfeit. A different wilderness emerged, generated by reduced constructions: the effects of economic hardship and limited access to education compounded over generations, and the pain of societal indifference. Social illness could be read in the band-aid consumption and accumulating refuse that seemed to barricade many of the occupants in and the rest of the world out: foreclosures, empty swimming pools, plastic playhouses embrittled by the sun, cars run into the ground, rusty skidoos, powerless powerboats. In school, stories littered the daily periphery, whispered in lunch-lines and recess queues: abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction. My guerilla war with loggers and excavators converted to elaborate daydreams in which, by reconstructing each house I could transform the lives of its inhabitants. Darker moments found me lighting a Diamond match in mind’s-eye, rebuilding from the ground up. Even my daydreams of opulent elsewheres corroded under the glaring realities we encountered in wealthy coastal villages, where facades concealed the same spectrum of human health. 

I returned home last year after a long stint abroad, with an accumulated disarray of remembered objects collected over a decade of travel and curated within me by no order I could name. After years of remote horizons, I was confined suddenly to the network of unpaved paths that, labyrinth-like, encircle the lake through the thickest stands of remaining trees—roads for which no map exists, with street signs that echo and intersect each other in their attempt to bear witness to what they have displaced. Getting lost is a given. I walked the tracks relentlessly for months, in all weather. 

At the same time, my mother was sorting through the objects my grandmother had left behind after her death, reading the tags affixed to each on which she had written, in her close hand, a detailed account of the object’s history, care and storage instructions. The narratives of these travelling objects—paths extending over decades and thousands of miles—intersected largescale events with their keepers’ unseen emotional lives. Garden tools, well-used, in pristine condition; a level in sound working order; a passport for “no country”; a feather blanket filled with prewar down and carried through combat zones. They spoke the private register of political violence: lost homes, wartime flight, immigration, work camps, death camps, mass graves. If they spoke of being marked and hunted, they also spoke the hope of being free. Textually inscribed, each object posed a question. How—now, today—do we take symbols in hand: till an unspeakable past to cultivate our rocky lots. We understood, finally, that familiar stories, told and retold, had formed a set of care instructions for life: collect knowledge because it is priceless and weightless; live sparingly; love richly; conserve resources. The narrative instrumentality that moved compass needle cast its shadow, pointing us uncompromisingly onward, and also to invisible sites of trauma. Inherited texts marked us “From Away” in a community with their own sets of cultural blueprints. They also generated resonances I discovered on returning.  

On my walks, I travelled deeper into the cultural landscape. Unexpected encounters destabilized long-held notions. I met a pastor-turned-carpenter with nine children, the oldest of which had won an opera scholarship. A woman who lives in what she calls the “Keebler House” and edits the local Gazette, for whom Arrowhead is the center of the world in the way it is epicenter of the earthquakes that shake the state. There is the young boy who leapt, rope-swing in hand, from a giant pine by the lake, only to get tangled in the cable and plunged headfirst, arms bound, into the water. And there is the man, referred to distrustfully by many Arrowhead folk as “The Big Indian,” a six-foot-tall crippled war veteran, who dived in and cut him loose, then returned that night with an axe to cut down the pine and himself free of the stereotype. A pack of boys that had transformed the old tennis-court in the woods into a skate park with cement blocks and sheet-wood, for the sheer joy of movement. A little girl who fishes at dusk most evenings from the shore, catching sunfish mostly, scales glittering lilac and silver in the dying light, and kisses them each as they gape speechlessly at her before tossing them back. 

In quieter moments, flashes of returning wildness pierce: the sharp long calls of geese in storm darkness; an eagle diving from a great height over the lake to face me up-close, dark eye casting out his challenge; a hawk in hunt, lifting laboriously toward her shrieking nest, a squirrel dangling in her talons like a paraglider gone wrong; a cyclone of swallowtails drunk on magnesium; water-made diamonds—wind-cut, cloud-sieved. Permeating all, like insight, the clear scent of pine. Nature I had considered lost re-emerged on these walks, relocating me though I travelled the same paths. A world I thought gone—one unowned, fiercely free, writ with love and connection—I discovered displaced within. 

***

Katherine Peters recently completed a dissertation on landscape and literature called “Disruptive Geographies” and teaches at University of Southern Maine. She is currently at work on a series of essays about her travels, as well as a book project. Her work is forthcoming in Canary.

At Grunewald station: Memory and the danger of forgetting

By Paul Scraton

The S-Bahn train stops at a station on the edge of the forest. On one side of the tracks, a trail leads into the woods. On the other side, the leafy streets of one of Berlin’s most well-to-do neighbourhoods. I come here a lot, especially in the summer. I go for walks or a run through the forest. I climb the Drachenberg for views across the city or go swimming in the cool waters of the Teufelsee. Every time I am reminded of what Berlin holds within its boundaries. These places of peace, places where it is possible to find solitude. Places where it is possible to feel a thousand miles from the city, and yet it’s just a short train ride away. What a privilege it is...  

For around 50,000 of Berlin’s Jews, Grunewald station on the edge of the forest was the last place their feet touched the ground of their home city. From here, train after train after train took them away. Took them to the camps, to the very worst places of the human imagination. For a long time, there was no acknowledgement on the ground of this suburban station’s role in the crimes of the Holocaust. No recognition. It was only later, much later, that Platform 17 was turned into what it is today.

Along the platform on each side of the railway track, destinations are listed – Auschwitz, Riga, Theresienstadt – along with the date and the number of Jews who were deported in each transport. On this train, 17 Berliners were taken from their city. On this train, it was 51. On this train; 100. People leave stones on the edge, marking the trains that carried their loved ones away. Flowers rest and candles burn beside a memorial plaque. In this city of memorials, Platform 17 at Grunewald station is quietly one of the most powerful, and one that I feel all Berliners should take the time to visit at least once. 

Now, perhaps, more than ever. It is 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We continue to remember the crimes of National Socialism, but we are slowly, sadly coming to the point where the last of those who can tell us what they saw and felt in those dark times will no longer be with us. It feels like a dangerous time. There are those that will say we need to draw a line beneath it. There are those that will say that we need to move on. And yet we must remember. Now, more than ever. 

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German President, stands at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we Germans remember. But sometimes it seems as though we understand the past better than the present.’ He stands there and reminds us that Jewish schoolchildren in Germany have been spat on in the schoolyard. Not then, but now. He reminds us that it was only a thick wooden door that prevented a massacre in a synagogue in Halle. Not then, but now. 

‘That is why,’ he continues, ‘there cannot be an end to remembrance.’ 

At Grunewald station I walk slowly along the platform and read the dates and places, the destinations of those trains that will forever symbolise the very worst of what we have done to each other. Birds sing in the trees. Nie wieder, was the response to the crimes of the Holocaust. Never again. For 75 years the survivors have carried and shared their memories. They have made sure we’ve not allowed ourselves to forget. But the responsibility belongs to all of us. Nie wieder. If that is to mean anything, we must continue to remember. We must confront the past and we must understand the present. We don’t get to draw a line. We cannot allow ourselves to forget.

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place

The Other Side? – Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art

Kathy Prendergast, BLACK MAP SERIES (Bulgaria), 2010, ink on printed map, 94.4 x 131.7 cm (Detail)

By Anne Mager:

Anne Mager is a curator and arts manager living in Ireland and Germany, and the curator of "The Other Side - Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art", which runs at the Dortmunder U until March 2020. We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to publish her introductory speech from the exhibition opening in December:

Until recently, I felt that I was able to count myself among a lucky generation that in childhood and adolescence saw the disappearance of more and more borders: not only the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, but also fewer and fewer border controls that were interrupting vacation trips by family car to Belgium, France, Spain and other countries in the eighties and early nineties. In retrospect, and from the perspective of December 2019, it seems almost naive that, like many others, I naturally assumed that this was the direction in which Europe will continue to steer; that the removal of borders, customs duties and the further dissolution of the internal barriers of the EU is something positive and that newly opened borders should remain open. How sobering, no, how shocking it is to finally understand, a week after the disastrous UK elections, that many people do not share the same sentiment.

I moved to Ireland a little over three years ago, to the small town of Dundalk located exactly halfway between Belfast and Dublin, two capitals in two countries on the small island of Ireland and only two hours by car or train from each other. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland runs exactly halfway across this route, just a few kilometers north of Dundalk. Anyone crossing this border today is often surprised by what cannot be seen: there are no border guards, no security checks or large warning signs and no passport controls on the train either.

In many places one is not really sure where the border runs at all. The head of the regional Arts Council once told me that he crosses the border around seven times when he drives his daughter to her weekly ballet class. Of course, this was not always the case and until the nineties this section of the border, idyllically situated in the Cooley Mountains and in the middle of a fjord, the Carlingford Lough, was under strict military surveillance. Numerous attacks took place here and anyone who's car broke down in the border strip in the 1980s was at risk of having it being blown up by British security forces, according to the official security rules in place back then.

The Irish border opened with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The de facto arrangement to date: the border is still legally there, but in fact it does not hinder any traffic in both directions. It is not there and yet it exists. And even three years after the first Brexit negotiations, there is still no way of knowing exactly what will happen to what exists de jure and which is de facto hardly noticeable. But it is also a fact that a new EU external border will soon run here.

This will mean much more than inconvenience due to passport controls and more complicated customs regulations – which may also affect the transportation of this exhibition back to Dublin, London and Newry.

The conflict and also the peace in Northern Ireland are not only a complex but also a very shaky affair, and the shadows of the past have buried themselves deeply in cities like Derry and Belfast. As co-director of a Belfast exhibition space and as an somewhat outsider, I am always amazed at the contradiction between this "not there and yet existing": of course there is peace and it doesn't really matter in everyday life whether you are Protestant or Catholic. And still, the so-called Peace Walls, which are higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, are still standing, separating Catholic and Protestant districts and neighbourhoods. Finding my way around the city when I started working here, it was not uncommon for Google Maps to guide me through streets at night where I suddenly found myself in front of the locked gates of these walls that had been open all day. On official forms, funding applications and surveys, you are always asked to which community and confession you yourself or e.g. the exhibition visitors belong, just to make sure that this sensitive balance can be maintained. It is a fragile peace, in many places the conflict is still bubbling to the surface and the violent past has confusing and often contradictory social consequences, which I – like many others – still try to understand.

But what other form of expression is better suited to deal with complexity and contradictions than art? In my curatorial work and in this exhibition in particular, it is very important to me to use artistic positions not as an illustration of a topic or concept, but rather as an opportunity to approach the complex, the confusing, the unseen and overlooked, and at best to change perspectives.

The first position you will encounter in the exhibition is that of Enda Bowe. In Love’s Fire Song, he photographed young people on both sides of the Peace Walls before and during the symbolic, politically charged annual bonfires. The artist deliberately refrained from depicting political symbols or overly clear classification criteria. Rather, his work is about the ordinary and everyday, about what connects us, but also about how we shape future generations.

The question of how to deal with conflict and terror across generations also plays a major role in Willie Doherty's works. As in many of his other works, the setting for the video installation “Remains” shown here is his hometown Derry, also a border town, which has gained a sad reputation as the site of the Blood Sunday massacre 1972. Willie investigates the relationship between landscape and memory across generations and, unfortunately based on true facts, tells the story of a father who is supposed to bring his son and nephew to a site where both are to undergo kneekapping, a punishment method of the Provisional IRA, which is still in use today and which the narrator, the father, had already suffered before.

Sean Hillen brings together the horrors of the so-called Troubles, different levels of time and reality, Irish landscape and pop culture motifs in a completely different narrative and with a completely different, very analogue technique. In his delicate collages, he combines his own documentary images of the conflict with utopian imagery, often in a bizarre and yet irritatingly humorous way.

Kathy Prendergast's cartographic works are also miraculously utopian and poetic. Something wondrous happens when she paints over every-day street maps with black ink for her Black Maps series: she shows in a very reduced but all the more vivid way what happens when we overcome borders. Through artistic elimination and transformation, she succeeds in overcoming power structures and clarifying the subjectivity of maps and subtly questions topics such as identity and location.

This exhibition takes the Irish border as a starting point to reflect on political conflicts and social separation. It was therefore all the more important to open up the view beyond national borders. And that is exactly what Jesse Jones does in her video work "The Other North" from 2013, in which she connects the traumas of Northern Irish and South Koreans in an haunting way. It is a very special honour for me to show this work which connects two divided countries here in Germany, in the thirtieth year of reunification.

Dragana Jurisic’s book and photo project YU: The Lost Country also takes us beyond national borders. The Serbian-Croatian photographer, who lives in Dublin, went on a photographic search for traces of her homeland, a country that no longer exists, and reminds us of how fragile European peace can be.

It is precisely this change of perspective, this view of the supposedly "other" that the exhibition "The Other Side" would like to invite you to. To show that there are more similarities than differences both on a political and on an individual, personal level. I would like to end with a quote from John Hume, who received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the Irish peace process. Enda Bowe kindly brought the opening sentence of the following quote to the exhibition:

“Difference is the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth, and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity.”

Exhibition website

It chimes in your chest like a bell

By Emma Venables:

It’s November 2013 and I’m on a plane, scared. I’m not scared because of all the things that could go wrong with the plane. I’m scared because we’re circling, preparing to land in the city that has occupied my mind for the past four years: Berlin. What if the Berlin I’m about to land upon isn’t the Berlin that’s consumed my thoughts, my research, my writing all this time? I’ve been so focused on the Berlin of the twenties, thirties and forties, what if this Berlin shows no traces of its past? What if I can’t compute 2013 Berlin with my version of Berlin?  What if we just don’t get on? 

Oh, Berlin. Beatrice Colin’s novel The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, starts with this sentence: ‘Berlin, a word that chimes in your chest like a bell.’ And oh, it does. My chest aches with the chiming of Berlin. Let’s sit in this feeling for a bit longer, think of the Berlin I’ve read about – of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, of Hans Fallada’s Berlin – and my own picture of Berlin. 

Eva Braun first brought my imagination to Berlin, down into its claggy depths with little time to explore its surface. I followed her around the Führerbunker, watched her apply her lipstick, marry the Führer, crack the capsule between her teeth. Magda Goebbels caught my eye, we backtracked, went out into the open, into the bombed-out wreck of a city and my attention turned to the women beyond Hitler’s inner circle, to the Frau Müllers and Frau Schmidts, to the women living and dying in the ruins – what were their lives like before and after National Socialism, before and after war? 

My curiosity about these women transferred into a Creative Writing PhD project and this is why I’m now on a plane, gliding down through the Berliner Luft, staring hard at the clouds, trying to get my first glimpse of real Berlin. It’s a grey day, a cold day, not the kind of day for first meetings, but it’s all we’ve got. Hallo, Berlin. I see you. I see your apartment blocks and courtyards, your lakes and open spaces, your roads and your railway lines. I see your runways, feel the bump of your tarmac meeting the aircraft wheels. 

Once off the plane, my fiancé and I go to buy travel cards to get into the city. We’re asked where we’re from. ‘Near Liverpool,’ my fiancé replies. ‘Liverpool? Ah, Sonia.’ SONIA. My childhood heart. I’m transported back to the early nineties. I’m wearing a pink and black party dress from Woolworths and Polly Pocket clip-on earrings and it’s my birthday party. Sonia’s album is the soundtrack to Musical Statues and Pass the Parcel. She’s currently the soundtrack to the writing of this piece. That boy was sent for me, that boy was meant for me…

Berlin, I feel at home already and I’ve not even left the airport, caught a bendy bus, experienced that special smell of the U-bahn (which I refuse to try and break down into its components for fear of undermining its magical effect), checked into my hotel room which has a Marilyn Monroe-shaped mirror in the bathroom and a photographic portrait of Andy Warhol above the bed. 

Over the next few days, notebook crumpling more and more as I retrieve and return it to my pocket, I wander around, researching, thinking, experiencing. The Brandenburg Gate. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Topography of Terrors. The German Resistance Memorial Centre. The Jewish Museum. The German History Museum. A Third Reich walking tour. On one particularly bleak day we catch a regional train out to Fürstenberg/Havel, walking the same path through the quiet residential streets as the thousands of women destined for Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. I stand in the vast open space that was once crammed with barracks and bodies, living and dead, and wonder how I’ll ever manage to stitch history into fiction, how I’ll ever manage to communicate how such ugliness occurred in an area of such beauty. 

But my first experience of Berlin is not all research-related. On our way back to the train station from Ravensbrück we stop in a café and I get my first ever taste of German apple cake. We go in search of Christopher Isherwood’s residence on Nollendorfstrasse and when casually looking down, I spot a window and through that window: the office of Boner magazine. I smile to myself. Christopher would have loved that, wouldn’t he? We go to the zoo and I learn I’m more scared of a mouse rummaging through the straw than the rhinoceros it rummages around. I walk through the Tiergarten and experience the special shade of auburn that the tree leaves turn in autumn. I sit in restaurants by the Spree and discover I’m rather partial to a Berliner Weisse mit Himbeeren. 

I have been back to Berlin many times since that first foray in November 2013, and one thing remains: Berlin does not separate itself from its past, its neighbours, its visitors. Berlin is inclusive, reflective. Her streets have been shattered and separated by war and politics. You can still put your fingers in the World War Two bullet-holes in her facades, tread the path of the Berlin Wall. You can marvel at the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, and then turn right around and find yourself faced with the concrete blocks of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the stark reminder of what happens when humanity attacks humanity, when we conveniently forget out similarities and propagandise our differences. Berlin’s history is our history. We share wars. We share peace. We share Sonia and Christopher. Wir sind Berlin. Berlin ist uns.

I’m no longer scared when hovering over Berlin Tegel on a plane, ready to land. In fact, I’m scared to leave and return to a divided United Kingdom, one that is all too ready to scratch out inclusivity, to erase its shared history, to pretend, like a petulant child, that it doesn’t need help from anyone, least of all its European siblings.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

What's On: Nature Unwrapped, Kings Place, London

Chris Watson, recording Orcas, Ross Sea, Antarctica (c) Jason Roberts

By Sara Bellini

This month, London’s own King’s Place launched Nature Unwrapped, twelve months of events revolving around the topic of nature and our interaction with it. The first evening saw artist-in-residence Chris Watson and activist George Monbiot comparing the soundscapes of healthy and suffering ecosystems, featuring music by Ewan McLennan.

The programme encompasses contemporary, classical and folk music, as well as storytelling, screenings and illustrated talks. Some musicians previously featured on Elsewhere will be there, namely Cosmo Sheldrake in February as well as Kitty Macfarlane during the Wild Singing weekend in March, in collaboration with the podcast Folk on Foot. A few events are already sold out, so you might want to book your tickets soon!

King’s Place is a multi-arts venue in King’s Cross dedicated to music, comedy and talks. They host various festivals, such as the London Podcast Festival and The Politics Festival, and their year-long flagship series Unwrapped, which last year was dedicated to women and music.

Website

Diwali in the House of Shio Mgvime

Photo of Shio Mghvime by George Melashvili, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0

By Gurmeet Singh:

Above Mtskheta the air is hot. 

It is not thin. 

Our taxi driver, tells us Batumi—Batumi is really hot. 

At least this is what I think he’s saying. We—my partner and I—do not speak Georgian, and he does not speak English. Many Georgians also speak Russian, and we don’t speak that either. Only the younger people tend to know English. This is what abstract political events look like in real-life: the Soviet-Union falls, so the young people learn English, while their parents speak Russian. 

“Horrorshow” I say, Nadsat being in part, Russian-inspired: “good”.  

“Batumi”, he nods. 

We’re heading to the the Shio Mgvime Monastery, which we’re told is on the left bank of the Mtkvari river, on the southern slope of the Sarkine ridge, but there is no sign of water. 

Shio is honoured as one of the 13 Assyrian “fathers” who came to Georgia in the 6th Century to strengthen Christianity. Under the guidance of John of Zedazel (‘Saint John’), the group lived in Mtskheta, and then on Zedazeni mountain, where they founded a monastery. 

Shio left after four years, and then inhabited a cave on Mount Sarkin. The monastery was founded literally above this cave, and grew over the next several centuries, evolving into six or seven buildings, experiencing growth and decline as the country was invaded, at peace, taken over by Christian powers, Islamic powers, the Soviets, and now after all that, offered as a tourist destination.

Shio is buried in the monastery complex. 

Pathetically, I am feeling nauseous. The roads through the low mountains rise and fall. They are winding, winding. My partner tells me: “you look green”. I close my eyes. My brown skin, so beautifully evened out and darkened by the late Summer heat here, looks green. How pathetic, can’t even take a few winding roads—even a few good winding roads. 

“Batumi”, he says again. “My brother, in Batumi. My brother.” 

“Horrorshow”, I say.

He nods. 

I press my hands against my stomach and close my eyes. Pathetic. 

Motion sickness occurs — they say — when there is a discontinuity between visual and proprioceptive information. Your body expects one kind of motion and experiences another. Your eyes expect gentle slopes, your body experiences long, harsh ones. Your inner-ear and eyes argue. Your brain asks your stomach to regurgitate. 

The advice is to keep your eyes closed. I try to do this but it’s hard to not look out the window. A dry, orange, almost Australian landscape passes by. Australia with hills, and where mountains shimmer in the distance. The outback where greenery occasionally blooms. 

By the side of the road, there are the bones of a cow or buffalo, mostly intact. It gives the place an atmosphere. 

I should not have eaten those jellied peanuts in Mtsketa.  

“Batumi”, he says. “Batumi khorosho”. 

I close my eyes. 

*

What does the world look like to a person like Shio? To someone who believes in God so much that they are willing to leave society and try their luck on a mountain? 

The mountain is dry and seething and the air hot.  

The footprints of animals. The sound of breaking twigs. There is no wind. 

The limestone cliffs surrounding the monastery are bright and pitted with large holes which could have been the caves of other ascetics. Is it hot or cool in them? Stuffy or fresh? Do you sleep in one, bitten by insects, barely able to breathe, and in the morning, emerge into the hot sun and say ‘thank you God’?

TV sound buzzes: taxi drivers are assembled outside the gates of the complex, just waiting, watching Youtube on their phones. 

You walk up a dry, brown path to the buildings. 

Some of them are ruined, their interiors broken, their walls dark and the images of Jesus are faded and fragmented. Some of the buildings do not allow cameras inside. Their frescoes are daunting and huge; God and Jesus together looking down onto the sinful world, the super-ego itself enthroned in red and gold and aquamarine. 

The stones are hard underfoot. There is no matted grass. Dark shrubs, blue sky. 

Does someone like Shio not see ‘mountain’, or ‘cave’, but ‘creation’?

What would make someone spend two years in a cave? 

*

Inside the Church, a few people pray loudly. 

Some touch the glass containing holy relics. 

For at least the third time in Georgia we find a relic which claims to be from the shroud Jesus was wrapped in. 

My partner makes the ‘can you believe it?’ face. She rolls her eyes. 

It just so happens that today is Diwali, the Hindu and Sikh festival. Hindus celebrate the festival to mark Rama and Sita’s homecoming to Ayodhya, after their banishment to the forest. That’s not the whole story of course, there’s a war, a monkey God, a ten-headed demon, a giant who sleeps for years, magic herbs. There’s loads more. 

Sikhs celebrate Diwali, or as it’s known, Bandi Chhor Divas, to mark the release of the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind from prison in the mid-Seventeenth Century. There’s more here too: the Guru helped secure the release of several dozen other political prisoners. 

Both Sikhs and Hindus light divas or candles in celebration. 

The Church in the monastery of Shio Mgvime offers candles to light. 

Having left the Sikh religion some years before, I do not celebrate the festival. But I also do not participate in the kitsch or sentimental renewal or display of faith by lighting a candle ‘just for fun’. I especially do not confuse the various traditions by lighting a candle in the Church to mark an Indian festival. 

And yet, the world offers these possibilities, with traditions overlapping, with meanings reaching over one another, pulling each other inside out, so that if I wanted to, I could join the schoolchildren and pilgrims in lighting a candle in the dark incense-filled Church to honour Shio, and also Rama, or the Guru’s release. 

This is what abstract events look like in real-life: 

A discontinuity between what you see and what you experience. 

*

Outside, large sheets of shade cast by the brick buildings are occupied by Russian tourists. A family, it seems, and they sip water from plastic bottles and sketch the dry, intensely bright landscape around them. 

The limestone cliffs resound with the hum of sunshine. Dark birds fly overhead. 

My What’sapp buzzes: photos mum sends of her lighting candles in the Gurudwara. 

We walk back down the hard stone path to our taxi.

My partner tells me some monks were back there working with power tools. 

Small, violet-tinged pigeons pick up the bread the taxi driver crumbles for them. 

He wipes sweat from his face with a cloth. 

***

Gurmeet Singh is a British writer living and working in Berlin. He writes non-fiction about art, politics and culture, and is also currently working on a novel. He tweets @therealgurmeet.

What's On: Navigating Berlin – Perspectives on Cartography

Copyright: CLB Berlin. Photo by Vietze & Fels.

By Sara Bellini

Tonight at 7pm at CLB Berlin sees the start of the second chapter of Navigating Berlin: Perspectives on Cartography. This is an exhibition in three parts about historical maps in dialogue with contemporary art to narrate how the representations of the city over time mirror the society that made them. Part I closed last week and focused on the maps from the private collection of Michael Müller and featured works by Olaf Kühnemann and DISSS. Lisa Gordon curated the exhibition in collaboration with CLB, an interdisciplinary space for the intersection of urbanism, art and cultural studies. 

Navigating Berlin II: Design and Cognition considers the maps as artefacts and symbol systems. The works by Berlin based artists Elizabeth McTernan and Simon Faithfull explore Berlin orbital journeys and water representation in maps respectively. It will be open until the 2nd of February and will be followed by Representation and Absence, with the participation of artists Birgit Szepanski and Hadas Tapouchi. 

The third part of the exhibition confronts the socio-political background of the maps and how it influenced, and even distorted, the reproduction of the city on paper. Because a map, exactly like a book, a movie or any other art form, is only a partial portrait, filtered by the cultural lens of the author and aimed at manipulating the perception of the viewer.

Navigating Berlin I: 30.11.19 - 05.01.20
Navigating Berlin II: 10.01 - 02.02.20
Navigating Berlin III: 07.02 - 01.03.20

CLB Berlin
Aufbau Haus am Moritzplatz
Website

Usedom: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

We have travelled north to the Baltic in the lowest of low seasons, to reflect on the passing of another year and another decade at a place that has meant so much to us over the recent and not-so-recent past. It feels like we are the only ones here, in our thatched house divided into apartments, and we move quietly up the stairs despite knowing there is no-one around to disturb. We arrive after dark, so we know our location only from the little blue spot on the map, but the morning will come and we will step out onto the village’s quiet streets, to walk from one side of the island to the other.

The next morning, when we reach the harbour the view across the inland sea is obscured by the mist that has rolled in off the Baltic and covered the island. Is there any point to this? We ask ourselves the question, but still we press on, following a farmer’s track across the field to the lookout point. It is a gesture more of hope than expectation, for visibility is down to less than fifty metres, but we are rewarded. First we hear the call, loud and distinctive, sounding through the mist. And then we spot it, standing tall in the misty field. A white-tailed eagle, its distinctive beak visible even in this strange half-light. After a moment it takes flight, and we catch a momentary glimpse of its impressive silhouette, before it disappears into the mist and the clouds, soaring high and out of sight. Perhaps it manages to get high enough for a glimpse of the sun. We can only imagine. 

It will be a day of shadowy apparitions, of figures emerging and retreating as we make the short walk that will lead us across the island from the lagoon to the sea. We leave the last of the village houses and enter a low landscape of fields, drained by ditches and surrounded by dykes, home to bulls, sheep and horses. In the distance, we spy a couple striding along a dyke-top path that my map tells me is a dead end. In the other direction, two cars meet at the end of a bumpy track beside a collection of tumbledown wooden buildings. I imagine a conversation through open windows and something in the boot, to be transferred from one car to the other.

You cannot help but summon scenes and images when the mist obscures almost everything that would normally be in sight. The footpath enters a forest, rising and falling between dense evergreen trees before we come across a brick house behind a high wall and metal gates. There are empty flagpoles in the garden, three of them, and they suggest a story, a history, that is unavailable to us in the mist. Unhappy is the land in need of heroes, and insecure is the land with too many flagpoles. But those poles were erected in a country that no longer exists, and however insecure we might be, not all of us are waving flags.  

Across the main road and the railway tracks, we enter the resort, where the houses sit on low cliffs above the beach and dunes, with a view across the stilled waters of the Baltic Sea. The kiosks and beer gardens are shuttered and closed, but smoke rises from the chimneys of holiday homes and light shines behind net curtains in some of the windows. In the distance the mist curls around the white towers of a grand hotel, that seems less grand the closer we get. The walls are water-stained and the terrace canopies tattered, with grass poking through cracks in the paving stones and a handwritten note posted in a smudged window to tell us the bar is closed for the season. 

In the 1920s this was the preserve of silent film stars, who travelled north from the studios of Berlin to take the water and the sea air. Now, at the start of the 2020s, the town was quiet, the posters outside the hotel advertising karaoke nights and tribute acts, and evenings with members of GDR-rock bands, the skeleton staff stalking the echoing halls in service of the handful of guests. 

We walk through the dunes, past an old fishing boat long out of service, and for the first time we see the waters of the Baltic. At the beach, the sand, sea and sky blend almost into one as ghostly figures walk the sands. In the mist it has been a kind of half-light all day, and now even that is fading. It is as if the town, the hotels, and the island itself is just waiting. The new year has begun. A new decade. But not here. Not yet. Only when the mist lifts, and the sun starts to shine once more.

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Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).