Extract from Anna Knutas Blomquist's research:
4 generations of collectors
I am thinking about my family’s, close relatives’ and my own way of collecting things. How it is actually small, spontaneous and personal archives. The impossibilty to look at an everyday object and just throw it away. It can be a package of something ordinary, a piece of fabric, a garment, objects, things found in the nature that all of sudden brings up ideas in the mind of its usefulness for other purposes. So we keep it. For a while, maybe we throw it away later or not at all. Perhaps we actually do find another way of using them. It is not really important.
I am working with my archive of random garments or textiles that I have kept. Not because I’m wearing them but because I have a special relation or a memory associated with them. A geographical place or a period of my life. Some things I give away after a while and some follow me during the years even if nobody else would understand what is so special about them. Sometimes I don’t even know myself.
Extract from Sybrig Dokter's research:
Walking Home
Walking south until we meet the see.
From may 11 until may 15 I am planning to go walking with Alva Willemark. We will walk for 3 days from Vitaby to Kåseberga or rather Ales Stones which is on the south coast of Sweden. Mostly we will walk along the coast and very close to the sea. Nadja Voorham will join our walk and film our walk.
South is the direction of my homeland and the sea at Ales Stones presents a barrier to us for going any further.
During the walk I want to focus on the layers of experience between us and between us and the landscape. The sense of walking as felt by the body, the rhythm of our steps falling in and out of time with each other, the sound of the sea always on our left and its presence guiding us south.
Every day we will take some time to work with a prepared score that will highlight aspects of walking, our relationship in the walking and the different textures that we find ourselves in.
In the context of my project I have published a website where I want to gather short video clips of people going home. Different in rhythm, textures and sound but sharing the common ‘returning home’ activity.
https://walkinghome.sybrigdokter.com/
Extract from Anita Kaya's research:
Mon 27th of April 2020 / 16:03
Concerning: Wytomyśl fruit garden archive
Dear Marta,
thanks a lot for sharing your voice notes, very joyful!
While listening to your first voice note from 15.4.20 I wrote:
“Blackbird singing. Walking and talking about listening to recordings from the past, to grandfather’s stories. I need to know how to listen to it. Thoughts popping up. Relationships - my mother to my grandfather, mine to my mother and my grandfather. The voice of my grandfather got weaker from 2015 to 2018. His voice changed so much in this years, he was almost 90 years old when he died. Bats flying. How to approach this material? Text is visible. Voice notes feel more right. Walking. Reincarnated. Memory research. Cups on the street. Transmigrating soul. Walking. Relation of kinship and time and life and death and memory. I want to learn more about this.”
Hearing you walking: the rhythm of your feet, the sound of touching the ground, rushes of wind mingle with distant engine noises, the rhythm of your breath, sometimes breathless from walking and talking. Pause. Hearing your head turning. Awake and being open for the encounters with other beings. Animals and objects fading in and out between your words. Sensing your movements in public space. Pause. Walking near by you over space and time. Alive.
One story of transmigrating soul arising: When I was at the age of eleven I started to sew like manic. The following years I earned some pocket money by sewing blouses and skirts for my aunts. In the 80-s I made experiments with returns to a previous life, where I was living in Asia, working as a sewer in a manufactory. Maybe the knowledge of previous lives is still present as “talents” in the present life. In 1992 I met Akemi Takeya, a Japanese dancer and choreographer. We made a 5 minutes video-dance work based on the sound of a sewing machine and the interconnectedness over time and space, called HOLLY, HOLLY, HOLLYLUIA. I guess, the VHS-Video is still in the pile of stuff in my sleeping room waiting to be digitalized.
Big hug
Anita
Extract from Alva Willemark's research:
Extract from Anna Knutas Blomquist's research:
Extract from Sybrig Dokter's research:
Over the last weeks Alva and I have been working with assignments for each-other taking into account our archives. But suddenly Alva found herself walking a lot and I spend most of my time at home. It seemed more interesting and relevant to switch perspective and change the nature of the assignments. Her task for me was to write down everything I touched during 1 day.
Touched for Alva 071220
Excerpt from various notes:
Extract from Alva Willemark's research:
Extract from Sybrig Dokter's research:
Quest for an archive
As I was getting a bit stuck in deciding which archive I would want to work from, I started with something that has been lying around for some years now. In the 80ties my partner and me were hiking along the Alte Via 5 in the Dolomites. Between Rifugio Bajon and Bivacco Musatti we lost the path and got ourselves on a ridge with a considerable drop underneath us, just holding on with our fingertips. We weren’t able to go up and certainly not down. We easily could have fallen, or frozen into inaction. Somehow we maneuvered ourselves to a ledge that was a bit wider and where from we had the possibility to move up again to where, in the end, we did find the marked path.
We took photos from each-other on the other side of the pass when we knew we were safe. So I took the map and the photos in an attempt to make sense of that feeling. To cut through the time that passed and look into that memory.
It didn’t lead me to choosing it as an archive but the thought of travel and displacement brought me to the action of walking and walks.
‘The walk’ as an archive.
In a project that I initiated and that took place in Minsk (www.lavadans.com) I invited people that lived in a certain neighborhood, to take me for a walk in what they considered to be their neighborhood and talk to me about their memories and thoughts while we were walking. We left traces while we were retracing their past and memories. It created a multi-layered narrative from different angles.
At this moment it is still unclear to me how to let the experience of walking spill out from my own references and have it latch on to or be taken over by other narratives.
I will start by walking.
I have thought about walking as moving from point to point: the repetitiveness; what it feels like in the body; what surroundings one walks in; various types of hikes. The long one, the everyday one, the special one that needs preparations, the one in solitude and the one with others. To leave and to return. Exertion, wounds, sore muscles. Rooting and up-rooting.
Walking as leisure or walking because you must.
Extract from Anna Jakobsson's research:
Extract from Alva Willemark’s research:
Extract from Anna Knutas Blomquist's research:
Archive of beloved garments and memories of the already worn
Dissecting, exploring and uncovering the real and symbolic insides and what we can not see
The touch and sensation of different materials in the hands and on the body
Extract from Marta Forsberg’s research:
Wytomyśl is a small village in west central Poland. It has around 500 inhabitants. Its very close to Poznań - which is the city where my mother was born, and where our family used to travel every summer to visit my grandparents, aunts and unkels and all the cousins.
My grandfather was born in Wytomyśl, and I decided to choose his childhood home as the starting point of my inquiry, more specifically the fruit garden that is connected to the house.
