day one in...

Hi all,

So here I am at the Villa, wow!

I arrived early Sunday morning following a non-sleep lofty sat-sun, into the rain of Munich airport and off the Easyjet in the safe knowledge that my hand luggage had fitted the dimension checker cage, phew.

Navigating the s bahn was rapido, it was good to know that once you’ve conquered one tube map not according to scale, Uground London, you can do any number coloured of criss-cross lines. Proud I was when I realised a grade 3 English speaking German couple pointed me in the wrong direction and I was able to hybridize my French into something somewhat foreign than Polish in a bid to make my own decision.

Sunday was a great warm welcome meeting with my fellow residencts. Hamish met me at the station and in my surreal haze it was odd to see him on the platform in Bavaria, when I had only met him a few times in Liverpool. He was a new and old familiar. I was met with borsche? Russian soup from the fantastic Sir Tomas, who is bubbling with ideas, Greek Eva and I enjoy talking about art, life and boys till early hours and Peruvian Edgar has alrady challenged me about various aspects of performance. It’s good to get the old French cogs in motion too with Olivia too, it’s amazing how much can be lost in translation to be made up with noises and mime. Good practice for conversation with Berta, cleaning lady at 8:30am Monday as she swept through my room and I hid under my German covers. The cosmopolitan house could be anywhere but it’s not, it’s here, so I want to decipher what that means.

We had a meeting with Judith, the project has come along and it is almost like I have just been landed into the final stages of an A-team plan where everything is more or less assembled but hopefully is all still open for my input reformulation. It’s a good way to get stuck in. Before I arrived, I thought I would use this time to just start making, but I think that I can’t escape my process= site/viewer, theory, retention, inversion/conversion, production, site/viewer. It works best for me and I would not feel right if I missed out any of those stages.

Is this as systematic as what I have seen of this nation so far?

Everything is extremely efficient ,clean ,tidy. None of this scruff, metro, sorting of litter, lack of street scrap, everything just doing it’s job fantastically.

The photos were deceptive, the Hansel Gretal villa is not how it seemed in the photos, and the lake not how I imagined, distance wise. But this is akin to tourist guide, all the more for me to discover. Once the rain subsides, Iam going to go through those tall graphite trees encapulated by Hamish’s snap and investigate.

Yestersday I went into Munich , looked at x amount of meat and marvelled at the oversized reliefs on architecture here. Today I am in to get batteries and materials, a few ideas concoting already, but needs must read and let brew for a while to get full froth.

Thanks for the playdoh poo left in the corner of my room, it’s great to know that remnants of Shaun and Ele are with me.

Soon x J