Home Scar

By Rosie Sherwood:

Limpets can be found affixed to rocks on beaches up and down the country. When covered by the sea each limpet moves around in search of food, returning to their favourite spot when the tide goes out. Eventually, they wear away a patch of rock that fits the shape of their shells. This patch keeps the limpet alive: letting in oxygen while trapping seawater to keep the limpet from drying out. It is known as a home scar.

BIGBURY, DEVON (2020)

For over a year we’ve been bound more tightly to our homes than ever before. Covid-19 has kept us indoors. We’ve gone to work and to school in our homes. When we’ve left the confines of our walls we haven’t strayed far from the front door. Family and friends have been off limit; restaurants and shops closed; sporting stadiums and galleries empty. Through all this, home has been our one constant. 

When I first heard the phrase home scar, it struck a chord somewhere deep inside. My homes are etched into the very fibre of my being. Like the limpet, my home scars are my foundation, my safety net. They are the places from which I grew, perfectly fitted to allow in all I needed, and to keep me safe.

LAURIER RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 1

LAURIER RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 2

I grew up in London, living in the same house for the first 24 years of my life: No. 20 Laurier Rd. Two floors, 6 rooms, a garden. I was almost born in this building, who I am was born in this building. In my mind I can walk through this place with ease, a lifetime of personal history all visible at once. The stairs carpeted and uncarpeted. The room in which I had my first kiss. This room a bedroom, then a living room, then a different bedroom. The small kitchen in which I learnt to cook. Walls where doors used to be, doors where walls used to be. Games of fancy dress played across every room. Through it all the bannister at the top of the stairs is held together with blue wire and red string. 

We moved out years ago, but I still have the key. 

It is not only the buildings in which we live that create our home scars. The streets that surround them and all they contain are also part of our homes. I could take you to them now – I could walk you to George’s Shop, the local grocers with its delicious Cypriot poppy seed bread and loving owner, though the shop isn’t there anymore; I could walk you to Camden Market, though my Camden Market is long gone, transformed into a sanitised tourist trap; I could walk you across The Heath to the Hollow Tree, to my valley, to where I stayed out all night with friends. 

No. 20 Laurier Road, its orbiting streets and pockets of ancient woodland framed my early development, my teenage self, and the start of adulthood. It lies at the core of who I am, a perfectly fitted home scar. When we left, I didn’t leave entirely.

LODDISWELL WOOD, DEVON (2020)

From Laurier Rd my mother relocated to Devon and to No. 5 Veales Rd, Kingsbridge. In the 10 years she lived there I have come and gone, to Australia and back, to London and back. I was drawn in, pulled by the sea. A new home scar developed, carved by double fronted bay windows and an elegant porch, by my sister’s hen party and my mother’s 50th, by the family kitchen perfectly designed for every kind of cooking, by Christmases and birthdays, by woods and rivers and beaches, by a thousand everyday actions and the creation of art. I did not expect this place to impact me the way it did, for it to form a home scar. 

VEALES RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 1

VEALES RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 2

Last March, with the pandemic taking grip of the country, and an inevitable lockdown looming, I boarded a train from Paddington Station loaded down with fears, suitcases, bags and a backpack. I was meant to be spending six months in London doing a Fellowship in the foundry at Chelsea College of Art, but the college had closed it doors. I decided I would rather ride out the pandemic in Devon. Paddington Station was virtually empty and there was no one in my train carriage. I felt like I was fleeing from something, running from the danger posed by the densely populated city I had called home for the better part of my life. The eerie emptiness and silence felt like something out of a post-apocalyptic story. But when I stepped through the front door at Veales Rd I felt safe.  

PUBLIC FOOTPATH (2020)

In the months that followed I walked the public footpaths and lanes that span out from the front door. I fell more deeply in love with the land around Kingsbridge, with the estuary and the coastline. And I fell more deeply in love with the house itself. Like much of the nation, I baked, I read, I found ways to stay entertained and connected from the sofa. I became embedded within the walls and footpaths of home. New routines cut paths through the house, new walks took me to familiar destinations I had only driven to before, the steps and breaths taken becoming part of my body. Time was the only thing I had in abundance, so I used it to explore, deepening my home scar.

This March, after just over a decade, we moved out of Veales Rd and out of Devon. In the final weeks, I walked through the house gently touching the walls, memorising their contours and corners. I followed well-loved public footpaths capturing them with my camera. I said farewell to views and fallen trees I had come to treasure: the estuary bed that somehow captures heat from even the cold February sun; the blackened branches of trees that drop low over the water at high tide; lime kilns nestled seamlessly into the land around the water’s edge; the far-reaching views of gently curving hills and patchwork fields; the red earth turned over by a plough; the dappled light on the river slipping through the trees of Loddiswell Woods. I marked this home scar, tracing its edges.

RIVER AVON (2020)

KINGSBRIDGE ESTUARY (2020)

OUTSIDE WEST CHARLETON (2020)

I am lucky. To me home means something warm and safe and full of potential. Lockdown was painful, sad, and complicated, but it was contained by the refuge of my home. For many across the country, and across the world, home means something else entirely, it isn’t a refuge, it isn’t safe. For some it doesn’t exist at all; it’s been lost or taken away, all that remains an object, or a memory, or a hope. Covid-19 has thrown these stark realities into sharp relief. There are those for whom job losses or furlough made rent or mortgages impossible to pay, the future of their homes uncertain. For others being in lockdown within the walls of their home was a danger, emotionally and physically. 

Home should be a human right. Every person deserves a home scar shaped by happy memories, deserves the haven of walls and roof, of streets and land they know within their bones. No home scar should be misshapen or lost to abuse and violence, to bombs and wars, to evictions, job loss and disease. And yet so many are, too many people are left to walk through the world without a home, and without the knowledge of safety it brings. 

I have been blessed with two home scars so well defined that they keep me anchored within the world. As lockdown eases, as we step out of our homes ready to face a changed world, I am reminded that we need these perfectly fitted spaces into which we slot, the spaces from which we grew, and to which we can return, safe. We need them and we deserve them. Perhaps at this precipice of a new normal, this moment with such potential for change, we could come together to take the first steps in ensuring no one has to grow up or live without a home scar.

ESTUARY SKY (2020)

***

Rosie Sherwood is an artist, writer, curator and scholar. Her interdisciplinary practise incorporates photography, sculpture, book art and text. Sherwood founded As Yet Untitled in 2012, specialising in limited edition book art and events. From 2017-2020 she was Creative Director of turn the page Artists Book Fair and Symposium. In 2018 Sherwood was a finalist in the National Sculpture Prize, for which her sculpture, Akin, was installed at Broomhill Sculpture Gardens. Sherwood has been published on a range of subjects and has work in national and international collections including Tate, The British Library and the National Libraries of Victoria and Queensland, Australia.

Sherwood’s current creative research, An Ever Moving Now, is an exploration of wildness, rewilding, and our relationship with nature. The project addresses experiences and sensations of being embedded in nature, and connects these to the broader concepts of environmental conservation. To create the work, Sherwood moves between immersive, multi-day hikes, to developing ideas in her studio, an interplay that enables conversation between the work and the land. To date the project has been supported by numerous sponsors and organisations including the Marine Institute at Plymouth University.

Before Covid-19 Sherwood had begun a Fellowship at the Chelsea College of Art Foundry. This position will resume when it is safe to do so.

Five Questions for... Tiina Törmänen

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

By Sara Bellini

During the polar night, the sun sets and doesn’t reappear on the horizon for days at end. At the poles this means complete darkness, but in subarctic regions closer to the polar circles it looks more like twilight. In northern Lapland the polar night lasts for almost two months, while in southern Lapland winter days can be as short as 3 hours. In these very short days the light changes fast and it’s quite magical to see the sky reflected in the snow in shades of pink, peach, powder blue, cotton candy, lilac, turquoise, apricot, amaranth, mauve, gold, lavender, cerulean, salmon, seashell... It’s these dreamy landscapes and snowy forests that drew attention to Tiina Törmänen’s photography.

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

Tiina first picked up a camera over twenty years ago, when she was working as a chef in Helsinki, instinctively attracted to documentary and street photography. She eventually went back to her native Lapland, in the north of Finland, and dedicated her artistic practice to the landscapes she had grown up with. Tiina’s creativity brought her to brave the weather conditions in order to capture the natural beauty that exists because them. In the past couple of years her attention has moved towards a different Nordic environment through underwater photography, exploring the abundance of lakes and ponds Finland is famous for and even diving into the Norwegian Sea.

We caught up with Tiina in between two group exhibitions, getting ready for the underwater season: “I got my camera gear updated from Canon 5D Mark IV to the new Canon R5 with Nauticam underwater housing [...] Of course it is always about the eye, not the gear, but at a certain point your skill level gets limited with limited gear. I had Olympus TG-5 and Sony A6500 with me on my underwater exploration so far, so it feels inspiring to have a pro camera with pro housing for my upcoming adventures!” 

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

What does home mean to you? 

It is where your heart is. For me, well... I feel at home almost everywhere if I have a safe and nice place to stay. I travel a lot, so I am used to just being in the moment. But of course, true home is a totally safe place to relax and reload batteries. I would say I have two homes. Our flat with my husband is like an everyday, normal home. Then my true home is our family place with all the land we own. That is a place where I can always return, a place in the middle of nowhere but surrounded with pure nature in the heart of Lapland.  

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I have a special connection to the north, where our home is. I love the nature, woods and waters. My main focus now is exploring northern waters: We have thousands of lakes, ponds and a lot of springs. There are so many underwater gems and I love being able to explore this unseen world. Most of us have seen coral reefs and the beauty of the oceans, but not many have seen the beauty of harsh arctic fresh waters.  

What is beyond your front door?

Forest. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’d really like to dive into the Arctic Ocean in Greenland. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now? 

Things have escalated and I started investing into crypto currencies. I’m spending all my spare time reading and watching trading videos to learn how to become a good trader. I’ve also been learning about the NFT* space and minting my first NFT items.

Tiina Törmänen's Website
Tiina Törmänen's Instagram
Tiina Törmänen's Cryptoart

*Non-fungible tokens are unique digital assets that can be bought, sold and traded like other crypto currencies, but unlike those, they cannot be exchanged like-for-like. NFTs can be anything digital, including drawings, music and other art forms.

Nesting

By Alex Mullarky

***

Have you seen the wild wall

climb the fellside,

border to the clouds

where only the sky-giants' flocks

compete for grazing -

it is a nest, stone by stone

from the riverbed, the quarry

we built it, this is our home.

We do not trespass here

but tread, as we always have

on mossy turf beside sheep.

Shielded by great mountains

above dark hollow lakes,

great cliffs swelling out to the sea -

here we have carved our homes

from the trees, the earth

beneath a grey sky like the birds.

***

Alex Mullarky is a writer from Cumbria, living in Edinburgh by way of Melbourne. She likes to tell stories about adventures with animals and trees, mountains and magic.

On the verb 'to be'

By Ciarán O'Rourke:

After they died, I experienced a slow longing to see my grandparents again, but also for Rossinver itself. Their now-permanent absence seemed increasingly entangled with my yearning for that small corner of north Leitrim where they were from: the acre of mown grass at the back of their bungalow, within earshot of the Ballagh river, and haunted in summer months by quick-darting swallows, skirting close to ground whenever skies were changing, blue to grey. 

The poems I wrote for my grandparents – deathbed portraits, reaching through loss – were also tributes to this place that had shaped not just my siblings and myself, but several generations of my Dad’s family: a weathery place, rich with rain, that for me, visiting in summer months from the Dublin suburbs, had always been both recognisable and strange, a home away. 

I felt a similar sensation last autumn when I moved to Carrick-on-Shannon, with my bicycle and a bagful of books in tow. There was a quiet happiness in arriving not only in this town – with its wide, surging river and cautiously bustling streets – but at being able to call Leitrim my home county. By choosing Carrick, I imagined that I was somehow mending a gap, bridging the long aftermath of my grandparents’ lives.

The first time I decided to read the elegies for my Grandad in public, I had forced myself, beforehand, to practice the lines aloud, like an actor, until I knew their sound by heart. Regardless of what I consciously felt while reading, my voice and body could complete the performance, by reflex if necessary. This is now one of my preparatory rituals for any live event: I read (noisily) to myself, the very repetition of the words gradually providing a protective shelter against whatever gusts of panic or self-consciousness may arrive in the actual moment.

In decamping to Leitrim, of course, I was entering the demesne of a number of literary figures, past and present. On my daily walks, I pass a mural celebrating Carrick’s writers, including John McGahern, whose stories and often mordant essays my Grandad used to quote with admiring precision. “It takes some skill”, I recall him saying, definitively, “to finish a sentence with the verb ‘to be’”: a feat the Leitrim author had managed to do, with his adage that “all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is.” 

Another of McGahern’s creative credos concerned “the quality of feeling that’s brought to a landscape”, and his belief that this “is actually much more important” in the making of literature “than the landscape itself”. The question of “whether it contains rushes or lemon trees”, he said, is less vital than “the light of passion” that an author brings to the view. I agree with him. But I also suspect that he made these remarks partly in resistance to a culture accustomed to placing (perhaps even pigeon-holing) its writers: as if by re-affirming his fidelity to literature’s universality, he were also implicitly raising a question mark over its so-called “Irish” variety, or the applicability of this brand to his own origins and literary practice.

In fact, Leitrim, specifically, rooted and nourished McGahern: filtering that “light of passion” he so sought and valued, and helping to sustain the restraint and fierce clarity of his writing, with its breathing fields and hedgerows, its turning seasons. It was here that his revolving cast of reticent, perceptive characters became real, where his skill in rendering their flinty, sidling conversation was honed. His stories of endurance and return (both human and natural) were invariably drawn from Leitrim’s rushy hills, sodden with darkness and light – without a lemon tree in sight.

McGahern’s was a particular kind of attachment to a particular part of the world, his work lit through by a clear-eyed attentiveness to his own locale – an observational intimacy, allowing both vividness and depth. What I find in McGahern’s fiction is close, I think, to what led me back to Leitrim in life: the desire to stand on the fringes of a single place, only partly my own, with its hidden history and visible dailiness, looking in, hoping at last to belong.

***

Ciarán O'Rourke lives in Leitrim, Ireland. He has won the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was published by Irish Pages Press in 2018. His second collection is due to be released in 2021.

Five Questions for... Alison Pouliot

By Sara Bellini

I first came across Alison Pouliot in the pages of Mervin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, published just a few months ago. Sheldrake introduces us to the world of fungi and their complexity: They can digest plastic and crude oil, they give us bread and medicines, and they connect plants in an underworld network. They are much more underrated than plants and animals, and yet they are extremely fascinating, if only we give them a chance to shine. 

This is exactly what Alison Pouliot has been doing in her photography. With a scientific background as an ecology historian, Alison focuses on the more mysterious woodland creatures, like fungi, as well as on abandoned places bearing the traces of human disregard. 

While admiring her photo essays, it occurs to me that we don’t simply occupy the planet, we are part of it, and yet there is so much we don’t know about it. I think about how, in order to build a more sustainable relationship with nature, it’s necessary to slow down and look closely at the other part in this equation. How deeply do we understand how the environment works, what it needs, which human behaviours are helpful and which ones are destructive? It’s this attentive and caring gaze that allows Alison to capture the diversity of fungi: soft-textured geometric patterns, ghostly shapes that could be the stunning guardians of the Underworld and alien-looking mushrooms with a glam aesthetic. 

Her photography is now moving from a documentaristic to a more artistic approach: “I am striving to produce work that might just touch someone somewhere and make them feel differently about the world. It’s a time of such radical change and also a time of opportunity to test the waters and do things differently. I guess it’s often times of adversity that bring out the most innovative or creative or inspirational aspects of one’s work.”

Alison’s plans for the new year start with the publication in March of Wild Mushrooming, a book she had been working on for the past five years with mycologist Tom May. The book approaches foraging from the point of view of conservation and ecosystem balance. Alison lives between Australia and Switzerland and we caught up with her after she had just completed a series of six short videos on fungi and was back in Europe for the cold season. 

What does home mean to you?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever really worked that out. It’s certainly not a physical place. I’ve straddled both hemispheres for the last two decades (so that I can have two autumns a year and get myself a double dose of fungi) so I don’t really have a sense of a particular ‘place’ called home. In a sense I feel like I’ve been on the move all my life as we moved around a good bit in my childhood as well. I have few material possessions and find it easy to make a nest and feel comfortable pretty much anywhere, so long as there’s clean air, natural surrounds and little concrete or noise. When people talk about ‘settling’ or ‘settling down’ or getting ‘tenure’ in a job, it makes me shudder.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

Oh wow, that’s a big question. I have a short list of several hundred... Anywhere in the field really, the more remote and less inhabited the better. Of course, as an Australian and having spent many years exploring that continent, I feel incredibly connected to it, especially to the remote and wide open spaces of the interior. The blank spaces on the map, those often ungraspable, indeterminate, shimmering places that can feel so old, so solid, yet like a dream. I can’t get enough of them!

But as I’m writing these words, I’m actually wondering if one can ever really feel ‘connected’ to a place, or do we just feel comfortable or familiar? I mean, of course it’s more palpable than that. Sure we can feel a powerful inexplicable affinity, or something bigger more visceral, a physical bodily sensation, an intensity that we feel in one particular place and not another, an attachment of sorts that can be profound, but is that really ‘connection’? I know when I return to my grandmother’s home in Tasmania, now occupied by new residents, that I feel an overwhelming and inextricably entwined sense of emotion and memory solely linked to that place, but I’m not sure that I’d call it connection.I’ll have to give that some more thought. 

One of the things I love about Australia is its unpredictability, its extremes and its resistance to being controlled and regulated (as one sees, for example, in Europe) although we’re trying out hardest to do so. I love that it’s not ‘comfortable’, that it resists, that it’s so highly changeable. That it’s elusive and often incomprehensible. For me it begs one not to linger too long. It’s unsettling. It’s dis-placing. Perhaps I’m just more comfortable on the move.

What is beyond your front door?

Do you mean the flap of my tent? Wow, a wonderland of textures. A bruising storm front and ever changing light. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’m not sure that it’s ‘a’ place, a geographically defined place. A particular location. It’s anywhere that sparks my imagination and reverberates in such a way that excites or inspires or makes me feel vertiginous. Or perhaps where there’s something I feel or experience or taste that I’ve not done before. Or likewise, where a sense of intense familiarity can be just as compelling. While going back to loved places can be powerfully nostalgic or reassuring, I also think ‘going back’ can be hard. The world is changing so fast and it’s easy to become attached to the idea of how a place once was, and hence, once can quickly feel disappointed or disenchanted. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now? 

I’ve got several books on the go but am utterly engrossed in As we have always done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. An incredible piece of writing. I’m also re-reading some of the work of that amazing Alaskan anthropologist Richard “Nels” Nelson who died just over a year ago.

I’ve always got the radio or a podcast on and have just been listening to Nahlah Ayed’s program called Ideas on CBC (Canada) Radio. Am now listening to Far and Wide on RRR (Melbourne independent radio station). Otherwise everything from Anouar Brahem to Khruangbin to Carbon Based Lifeforms...  As for viewing I’ve been watching some short docos on AeonVideos.

Alison Pouliot's website
Alison's video The Kingdom Fungi

Here, Under the Eaves

By Rebecca Smith:

Our house martins are back. They are rebuilding their nest, having already scraped last years’ mud and feathers away. Repairing and strengthening seems like good practise. I watch them as they swoop and tumble with complete control in the strip of sky between the houses. I live on a young street, only five years old. I count at least twenty houses, here from my front window. There is more brick than branch. More road than grass. But, I remind myself, the street is still in its infancy. We have a lot of growing to do.

I have planted a rowan tree and a red acer on the front lawn, a birch, an apple and a pear tree in the back garden. Every day, I study their progress, note the extra space they take up, expanding their green leaves. For so long nothing seemed to happen, but of course it did. Winter can feel like an age. 

There is no chorus in the morning here yet - the trees are too small, their branches too flimsy for the birds to settle on. I remember, last year, hearing the chirps of the newly hatched house martins in their nest under the eaves and how they chimed with the cooing of my own baby girl. The birds are back, the baby ones now fully grown, and my daughter is saying whole words. 

One day the trees will be big and if I stand here and look out of the window, I’ll see green. Not the rust coloured brick of the mirror image house opposite, or my neighbour silhouetted in the window as he walks from room to room. I look at the rowan tree and wonder what is happening beneath. What is it like down there this time of year? Is there a fuss, a rush, a ‘let’s get on with this’ kind of attitude? I hope we have not made it too hard for things to flourish up here. I plant more lavender and sow bean seeds.

The woods that line the edge of the estate are full of creatures. Woodpeckers skip round trunks of trees (my daughter shows her Dad at home, nod nod nodding her head). We find tadpoles that are high and dry, small clumps of them with only the smallest wiggle left in their tails. A robin, who I swear I knew in a previous life, follows our step through the trees. I want them to follow me home, like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. A trail of birds, insects, mammals hoping and jumping up the curb.

Among the houses, nature knows there are different rules. Maybe the house martins are the pioneers. They are showing the rest that it is possible to make a home here. The trees are growing, I promise. I’ll plant more lavender for the bees and make beds for the snap dragons. I’ll leave a gap in the foot of the fence for the hedgehogs. It’s the least I can do.

***

Rebecca Smith is a writer, podcast maker and teacher based in central Scotland. Find out more on her website.

Online Event: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

Join Elsewhere editors and contributors on 14 December for an online reading and discussion on wanderlust and memories of elsewhere, the places we’re longing for and those we are separated from, whether by time or distance. 

The starting point for the discussion are a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year (see links below) and we are really looking forward to bringing together Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton to talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year.

To register: For Zoom login details, please send an email to paul@elsewhere-journal.com and he’ll send you the info you need to join the event.

Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere
14 December 2020
6pm in Dublin & Cambridge / 7pm in Berlin 

For updates, please also follow the Facebook event page if you are on the platform, or follow us on Twitter. 

Read the essays by our panel from the Memories of Elsewhere series....

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

About the Panel...

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Marcel Krueger is the books editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books, including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the forthcoming novella In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021).

Five Questions for... Malte Brandenburg

Photo: Malte Brandenburg

By Sara Bellini

Malte Brandenburg is a photographer based in Copenhagen. In his creative practice he looks for simplicity and symmetry and in the past he has often found them in Berlin buildings. Housing spaces are explored both in their aesthetics as well as their urbanistic context and social value. After the pandemic changed his travelling plans, Malte is now finalising some projects while exploring the familiar streets of Copenhagen with his camera. 

What does home mean to you?

That is a tricky question for me as I left my home town Berlin almost thirteen years ago and moved to Copenhagen. I still feel attached to Berlin, but at the same time the city becomes more and more foreign to me. And vice versa Copenhagen was for a number of years just a city I lived in, without the feeling that this is my home. It was somewhat in between, which was strange. However, after a while I found the right corner here for me and finally clicked with Copenhagen. Strangely though, I also feel more independent from where I am, as long as I'm with my family, it's difficult to describe. I guess they are my own little biotope :-).

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I have a very special connection to a place in Berlin called Gropiusstadt, a settlement of various tower blocks designed by Walter Gropius in the south of Berlin. I grew up nearby and had a couple of friends there and also had to pass through to get to the local swimming pool, which is why I spent quite a bit of time between these tower blocks. It always felt like a very surreal place to me, because of the sheer amount of concrete reaching into the sky.

Photo: Malte Brandenburg

I could not fathom that almost 50 000 people lived there. Also from a sociological point of view it's a quite interesting place and how it has changed within a relatively short period of time. This place was one of the first topics I was drawn to when I started to focus my photography more and more on urban architecture. I still return to Gropiusstadt on a regular basis.

What is beyond your front door?

Beyond my front door there are friends, a nice park and the beach, which I appreciate a lot. About 40 meters away there is also one of the best bakeries in town with shelves of sourdough bread!

What place would you most like to visit?

I would like to travel through Eastern Europe, all the way to Russia. I am fascinated by the culture and especially the food.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

I am currently reading Agent to the Stars, a novel by John Scalzi about an alien race on earth that hires a PR agent in order to manage the revelation of their presence to humanity - it's hilarious! I also just finished The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary. One of the best documentaries I have seen. I might be biased though, as he was a bit of a childhood idol. In terms of music, I listen a lot to Moi Caprice these days, a Danish band I discovered by accident, because the lead singer's daughter goes into the same class as my son.  

*

Find out more about Malte Brandenburg on his website and Instagram.