NEWSLETTER #2

Stories walk, like animals and men.
John Berger

I have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into the distance
so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is travelling.
Rebecca Solnit

I'd like to share a poem. A couple of months ago I was introduced to the work of British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil. I was especially drawn to 1947: Spell to Reverse A Line, in which she makes a journey mapping the border and memories of the partition between India and Pakistan in 1947. "If the line is a border and a border is a boundary award." she writes*, deploying the poem as a spell, "This is a spell to stop the loop. To regain one’s wholeness as a human being". She creates the poem to stop the loop of everpresent trauma in her family, and the word "line" does not only refer to a border but also to a sentence. This made me think of another line made by Francis Alÿs, where a gesture becomes a poetic sentence. "Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.", Alÿs says about his work, The Green Line.

For some years now, I have been using short stories in my work. Fiction is deployed as a method to speak out, but also taking in lines. Reading these stories out loud, I feel, touches on something that art can be, among many other things. For a long time, I was at a loss to describe this. This letter is an attempt to do so.

In his amazing book, Lines, Tim Ingold describes how in Medieval times, reading a text was considered an act of remembering and conceived as a performance: reading was a spoken act within the community, a "reading out". And the sounds that were generated were known as voces paginarum, the voices of the pages. It was a “journey made rather than an object found. And although with each journey one may cover the same ground, each is nevertheless an original movement.” There is no viewpoint from which you can see the whole, but “in reading, one remembers as one goes along”. Readers back then used the term ductus for traveling trough a text, which “insists upon movement, the conduct of a thinking mind on its way through a composition.” Prose, storytelling, music score and so on can be seen as landscapes to be traveled. And if writing (lines) speaks, to read is to listen.

I like to connect my work to this Medieval point of view: a work of art is remembering. Kobe on the beach 
We allow ourselves to be guided by fiction that bring about concrete changes. With this starting point Erika Sprey and I created To Care as Caress** in the form of reading, exchange and research. Who cares for whom? Who cares for what? we asked ourselves. In this conversational performance, we read a short story out loud with participants interested in or working as carers. A short story can be perceived as a prism which refracts (white) light and brings out various colours. As such, each text we had chosen, brought out different aspects of care. After each reading session, we used our bodies as source of information and brought different elements (characters, concepts, objects) of the story into space, and by doing so creating a choreography, an "image" or just lines. By placing ourselves on the "map", we moved when elements from the story were added or when they changed positions. In this way new perspectives and relations could appear that we might not have seen before. John Berger wrote in ‘Stories’, that when we connect the stars at night, we create lines, ghost lines. For Berger, only by doing so, we can tell stories about them. I believe To Care as Caress, in this way, is a work of writing and reading. We create ghost lines.

Last week, contemplating a map of Montavoix in the Jura, France, artist Wim Cuyvers and I were discussing the territory of the mountain we were on. The map was made in Napoleontic times, and we were wondering how the cartographers managed to be so incredibly precise, with no aerial views to rely on, whether created by satellite or airplane. Cuyvers emphasised that to get to know this land you have to work it. Which we did, during the following days, on a steep hill, taking down dead buxus trees and laying bare old trails, where others, animals and humans, had walked decades before us. Walking “lines” that were walked by others, and by walking creating the line. We were remembering by walking.

Reading stories is remembering lines.
Peter

* boundary award refers to the partition (for further reading click here)
** To Care as Caress was conceived some years ago in Ostend, a weekend long exchange between artists, texts, philosophy and performance. I decided to use the same title this summer to think about "care", at the request of Schouwburg Kortrijk and Afzender Boulevard. We selected four short stories by Lucia Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin, and Kate Clanchy and, each session, put one of them in our midst.