Storms

We were meant to have our first official meeting today with some of the people who have been organising the project, but it got canceled at the last minute because of massive storms right across Germany - the same ones that have caused chaos at home. We haven't even left the house, and the wind seems to be getting stronger and stronger. It's been really bad very close according to the BBC website.

The whole house is surrounded by massive pine trees that look like they're about to blow over - they're bending really dramatically and all the big crows that nest in the branches are blowing around like leaves... Old houses can be pretty rattly! We've barely seen any of the other people in the house either - we got up this morning very early because someone came to sort out the wifi for all the people with apple computers, and after that everyone disappeared to baton down the hatches I think.




I'm reading 'from Studio to Situation' edited by Clare Doherty, and read in it today a fantastic essay called 'The Wrong Place' by Miwon Kwon. In it she says this:

'The more we travel for work, the more that we are called upon to provide institutions in other parts of the country and world with our presence and services, the more that we give in to the logic of nomadism, one could say, as pressured by a mobilised capitalist economy, the more we are made to feel wanted, needed, validated and relevant. It seems our very sense of self-worth is predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilisations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traversing through elsewheres. Whether we enjoy it or not, we are culturally and economically rewarded for enduring the 'wrong' place. It seems we're out of place all too often.'

I found the whole essay really interesting - not because it threw doubt on the positive aspects of being here but because it encouraged a new way of approaching the idea of the residency - because we're encouraged to think about the notion of migration, about moving from wrong place to wrong place. Kwon suggests at the end of her essay that we should strive for a new way of approaching the lack of settledness that our increasingly homogonised and globalised cultures impress on us:

'Yet it is not a matter of choosing sides - between models of nomadism and sedentariness, between space and place, between digital interfaces and the handshake, between the 'wrong' and 'right' places. Rather, we need to be able to think the range of these seeming contradictions and our contradictory desires for them together, at once.'

So I'm thinking about settledness; temporality; birds migrating, as Hamish said. Still thinking a lot about birds.

J + H - looking forward to hearing from you! I sent emails so you can join and post - what do you think?