Joshua Sofaer

Farewell Party

2010-06-29T16:57:00.013-03:00

For the past days Porto has been preparing for the annual festivities of their patron saint, Saint John, or São João.

Funfairs, giant screens, and temporary stages with mammoth sound systems occupy the centre of the city. Balconies are decorated.

At street corners impromptu markets shift giant bundles of scented plants: mint, tarragon, lavender.

Pots of ‘manjerico’ or basil bush abound. The tradition goes that boyfriends give these to their sweethearts with love poems. St John is apparently the patron saint of lovers (though when I recount such research details to my hosts they look at me blankly).

Manjerico is one of the icons of São João, with paper decorations of pots of basil strung up in shop windows and between lamp posts everywhere. In the picture above you will notice that a paper basil pot has been stuck into the plant itself, in a kind of absurd repetition of referent and representation. To me this basil looked and smelt exactly like the culinary ingredient you would get in any well-stocked UK supermarket but when I suggested making a salad with these leaves of manjerico I was laughed off as a quaint foreigner. Subsequent internet trawling hasn’t provided any firm corroboration one way or the other. Can anyone tell me: is manjerico edible or not and if not, why not?

Garlic is everywhere.

…and part of this is to do with a rite that nobody is entirely sure about in which you ward off evil spirits.

Flowering garlic is particularly popular, the white bulbs and long green stems ending in a sphere of purple petals.

The smell off these stalls is pretty heady.

Historically, flowering garlic has been used for the Porto São João tradition of gently hitting fellow citizens on the head. Although its original significance is lost and nobody seems to care anyway, some surmise that it is a ‘good luck’ ritual (warding away evil spirits again) that dates back pre-Christianity to pagan ceremonial. At some stage in the history of the São João festivities, someone randomly decided that garlic was too smelly and that it would be better to use plastic hammers instead. Again it is impossible to find anyone that can remember the switch over. Surely it must be in living memory? Plastics aren’t that old.

So alongside the traditional herb sellers are people selling plastic hammers.

I was notified that this was a festivity must-have (“Now, have you bought a plastic hammer yet?”) and so made sure at the supermarket, while stocking up on other essentials, that a plastic hammer was in my shopping basket. (I thought I was being clever opting for this half-flute-half-hammer but the flute sang not one note.)

Mobile kiosks selling beer, popcorn, and farturas suddenly sprang up.

In my toilet-humour way, I couldn’t help but read this sign for farturas as ‘fart-your-ass’, which is how it read to me trying to spell out the pronunciation. This schoolboy viewpoint was compounded when I saw them.

Actually these are churros, not ‘fart-your-ass’. Churros are basically the same as ‘fart-your-ass’ only they have fillings and ‘fart-your-ass’ are plain. Either way, they both look like things that you would, erm, fart out of your ass. (Sorry.)

No, I didn’t try one.

The real celebrations don’t start until the evening and run all through the night until the morning of the Thursday of São João. I met up with NEC Artistic Director Joclécio Azevedo and he took me to a street party of some friend of his. The doors of all the houses in the street were open and people were coming and going carrying various bowls of different foods and drinks. The delicious but impenetrable corn bread, ‘broa’ was almost impossible to cut.

It is thick, dense, chewy and delicious. Amongst the nicest bread I have tasted. Alongside the broa are served barbecued sardines. These are extremely popular and you see these tiny stoves all along the streets. Joclécio told me that he went that afternoon to ‘Media Markt’ (a technology store in central Porto) and there, next to the new televisions and computers inside the shop, someone was grilling sardines on a camping stove. We all laughed nervously imagining the lingering smell on DVD players for months to come.

As the sun sets, one of the nicest activities of São João takes place. People start to send paper ‘hot air’ balloons into the sky. The process is quite fiddly because you (obviously) don’t want to burn the paper. Friends and neighbours gather round to hold out the balloon itself, as someone ignites the flammable resin at its base. You then kind of puff out the balloon waiting until the air inside warms and the balloon inflates. It then rises, magically – alright not magically but rather scientifically – into the night sky.

These balloons have officially been banned by the municipal authorities as a fire risk but that doesn’t stop them from being sold almost everywhere and hundreds of them glittering through the darkness.

At about midnight, after dinner and illuminations, we headed off to the banks of the Douro, fortified by a quick cup of coffee in a late night café. There were throngs of people everywhere. Where did they all come from?

At intervals between Ribeira in town and the beach at Foz people were dancing to the extremely loud music playing from the temporary stages.

If you were hungry, there were plenty of stalls, including this one with a (once) full hog on a spit.

Just in case you hadn’t bought your hammer yet, trucks full of them were being hawked.

And everywhere, but everywhere, people are hammering each other.

If you imagine this to be some sort of excuse for violence then you couldn’t be further from truth. In fact the people doing the most hammering are the oldies, who hammer every single person an arm and hammer length away. One old dear stood by the roadside traffic jam and hammered the cars in the tailback until they wound down their windows. Popping her hammer in hand through the opening, she boinked each of the occupants on the head. That was brilliant. For the younger generations, hammering has become a kind of acknowledgment that you fancy someone, so they are generally much more choosy and there isn’t so much same sex hammering! The thing is, of course, that you end up wanting to be hammered because it brings you into social space and acknowledges your presence. And if it is someone cute hammering you, you are, needless to say, flattered, even if they are doing it for good luck rather than anything else.

So crowds of people hammer each other all night long in what has to be one of the strangest and most unique cultural phenomena I have witnessed.

At about 3.30 in the morning I gave up. The coffee high had subsided and I was rapidly tiring. I walked past the neon hammers back to my apartment where the music pounded through the airwaves, and past my earplugs, from all sides, until well past 6.

The following day I packed up my bags and headed for the airport. I am really pleased to have spent time in Portugal. It is a totally new discovery for me. As a child I had a friend at school whose mother was Portuguese and for many years all that Portugal was in my mind, was a funny language that my friend’s mother spoke. As an adult, it was the literature of Saramago, who died less than a fortnight ago, that gave me some insight into the country. But oddly enough, it was in Asia that I got my first prolonged exposure to Portugal. It was the Taiga historical dramas of NHK broadcasts and the Nanban (“Southern barbarians”) art of 17th Century Japan, both of which document the arrival of the first Westerners at Nagasaki, who were Portuguese, that introduced me to this oldest of European colonial powers.

I also really feel that we have achieved something with Viver a Rua, the project to rename a Porto street after a local citizen. During the 4 weeks that the competition was open, from 12th May to 10th June 2010, we held 6 workshops (with the themes of family, history and citizenship), worked with 20 volunteers in 5 separate actions around the city, talking to hundreds of people, engaging them in the themes of the project; we distributed 30,000 fliers, received thousands of hits on the website www.viverarua.com and accepted 253 full nominations both through the post and via the internet. The project became a topic of discussion on television and radio, in newspapers, magazines and the internet. It will take some time before a final winner can be announced. The negotiations with the City Hall have only just begun in earnest. But whatever the final outcome, Viver a Rua has been about offering the citizens of Porto the possibility to imagine what the city means to them personally and to think about it as a social space made up not just of the great men and women that have contributed so much but also of the ordinary people, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, the disadvantaged and the forgotten.

From my own perspective, I have discovered a fascinating and beautiful country; if you haven’t been there I strongly suggest that you go.

A taste of heaven

2010-06-22T19:01:00.019-03:00

The first stage of judging for Viver a Rua having been completed (sorry, the results are strictly confidential) I took the opportunity of a four-day trip to Lisboa.

Wow. What a fantastic city.

Lisbon is a city of hills and views, of winding ancient alleyways and six lane avenues. With so much mountainous topography the transport system is key. It is a delight. Perfect little trams rush round hairpin bends and stagger up impossibly steep climbs. It was with a real schoolboy glee that I sat on the number 28 to the end of the line and then rode it all the way back again.

There are a series of ‘elevators’ that make one journey up and down continuously. Elevador da Bica travels from the riverside to town and back again, the street’s inhabitants clearing a path with a well-practiced millisecond to spare.

More spectacular but no less practical is Elevador de Santa Justa. If it is possible to be a little bit in love with an elevator then I stake my claim to Elevador de Santa Justa. Built by Gustave Eiffel’s pupil Raul Mésnier, it has the advantage over the Eiffel Tower of being incredibly useful. Not only is it an extraordinary city icon it also gets you through the equivalent of nine stories of city steps in a few seconds.

The brilliant thing about these transport wonders is that they are entirely integrated into the metropolitan ticket system. So although they do attract sightseers who come along simply for the ride, they are also part of the working fabric of the city.

From the top of Elevador de Santa Justa the city spreads out below and above, with the Castelo de São Jorge on the horizon.

Up at the battlements of the Castelo, Elevador de Santa Justa beams.

From the eastern side of the castle you can just make out the Ponte Vasco de Gama, Europe’s longest bridge at 17.2 kilometres.

This tantalising glimpse encouraged me to go to Parque das Nações, the ‘new city’ built for the 1998 Expo, but the slightly crappy funicular that erm, just goes along the riverbank, had stopped for the day and I found the whole ‘buildings of the future’ thing a bit soulless after the historic centre.

Buildings that have soul oozing out of their mortar include Torre de Belém, the early 16th Century fort built at the edge of the Tejo to defend Lisbon’s harbour.

And the incredible Mosteiro dos Jerónimos built around the same time to celebrate Vasco da Gama’s ‘discovery’ of India.

As with so much of the old colonial powers of Europe, the marvels we wonder at now were created through the exploitation of trade routes and slaves. This is a history that is not well documented for the visitor. I was staying at Atelier RE.AL, a creative hub in Rua do Poço dos Negros (‘the well of the blacks’) and it took a pointed question to my hosts to discover that this ‘well’ was a pit into which slaves were thrown.

Lisbon is the city of the literature of José Saramago, the Nobel Laureate whose death was announced on the day I arrived and whose body was flown back from his adopted home in Lanzarote to a state sponsored wake, the gravitas of which would only be afforded to popstars or Royalty in the UK.

By a complete coincidence, I found myself having dinner with the staff of RE.AL in the restaurant that was Saramago’s Lisbon regular, and where he held the wedding party of his marriage to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río.

In this modest Portuguese eatery, the walls cluttered with snaps of their most renowned customer, the staff recalled with fondness and respect this most treasured of Portuguese writers. They were recalling him as a man. There was no discussion of literature. I wonder if they have ever read his books. If you haven’t you should strongly consider it. In The Double the protagonist is sitting in front of the television and spots a man playing a minor role in the soap opera who looks exactly – but exactly – like him; the novel follows the search for his identical other. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon the plot revolves around the consequences of a proof-reader inserting the word ‘not’ into a historical chronicle, changing the way in which the past is read. Saramago's novels start from a very simple ‘what would happen if…’ scenario. They are brilliantly crafted.

On the day of his funeral, I went down to the City Hall where his body lay in an open casket to pay my own respects but I couldn’t get past the international media or the Portuguese dignitaries.

Not wanting to spend too much time with a corpse, I decided to forgo filing past (perhaps if I had waited long enough I would have found my chance) and carried on exploring the city.

Saramago’s face, pensive and erudite, suddenly covered billboards everywhere. “Obrigado José Saramago” they read. The authorities must have been planning for his death for some time, with a stack of posters at the ready.

Between the death of the nation’s cultural icon and their football team’s assassination of the People’s Republic of Korea 7-0 in South Africa’s World Cup, the city had plenty to talk about in the bars and cafes. “Saramago” and “Ronaldo” were uttered everywhere with unavoidable pride.

Saving the best until last.

I know it might sound disingenuous to say that the highlight of my trip to this incredible European capital was a custard tart but I promise you that this was not just any custard tart, this was a pastéis de nata, made to a secret recipe in the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém since 1837. I admit that the circumstances of my consumption were in themselves a relief, undoubtedly heightening the pleasure. Having walked half way across the city, taken a wrong train, and having had an encounter with a ticket inspector, I was suffering from a sugar low and, at the very least, needed a sit down. My expectations were also not that high. I don’t really like custard tarts. The thing was plonked, rather than placed, in front of me. But the second my lower lip brushed the thin layers of delicate crisp pastry and my upper lip the soft yellow custard cream, everything in the world suddenly seemed alright. I was completely absorbed by what was happening in my mouth.

This confeitaria can shift up to 30,000 of these creamy concoctions on a single day in the weekend. Their seemingly never-ending series of vaulted rooms can seat up to 2,000 people at a time. There are 40 women employed whose sole job it is just to roll out the pastry cases. Although pastéis de nata are sold all over Portgual, these pastéis de Belém are famous throughout the world with good reason.

They are not overly sweet. The custard is just set. The combination of flavours is comfortingly familiar and yet deliciously unique. The real pleasure – they were 15 minutes out of the oven warm.

Perfect with my bica it was a culinary moment of perfection. I immediately ordered a second.

Everything is hotting up

2010-06-16T10:30:00.010-03:00

While the competition for Viver a Rua has been drawing to a close, I have been wandering around the city waiting and wishing for something to ‘happen’. So imagine how my curiosity was aroused as I witnessed hoards of school children rush out of Escola de Carlos Alberto, ushered by anxious teachers. The roar of fire engines and the arrival of Sapadores Porto, who quickly unreeled their hose, followed the exodus almost immediately.

My excitement at being the only person around with a camera to document the burning down of a school in the centre of historic Porto was tempered by the shock and relief of seeing children who had been trapped by the blaze, wearing oxygen masks, escorted by the firemen out of the building. They seemed unscathed but surely they should be taken to hospital for a check up. Shouldn’t someone call an ambulance?

The smoke became very intense and I began to get worried that things were shifting out of control.

But hang on a second. This thick smoke doesn’t smell of anything much more than a 1980s disco. It was only when I overheard someone listlessly turn to their neighbour and utter the word “simulação” that I realised this was simply a drill; a highly theatrical drill maybe but a drill nevertheless.

When I was at school the fire drills consisted of us ‘forming and orderly queue’ in the playground to be head counted by the form teacher. There were no fire engines, no firemen, no smoke and certainly no friends in oxygen masks.

As the fog machine was switched off and they waited for the smoke effect to dissipate, the class sat in a circle on the pavement outside and cheered the burly blokes who had, erm, pressed the ‘off’ button and given them a break from basic algebra.

This cluster of firemen was another to add to my growing collection of men in groups. They are everywhere here in Porto. Gathering on the street to watch football:

Playing cards in the park:

Lounging around on the beach. There is only one woman in this photograph, out on a rock, on her own:

It is extremely rare to see women gathered together. I guess they are all still chained in the kitchen, or like Dona Jacinta who manages the building I am in, permanently sweeping the wood effect linoleum in the communal hallway.

Of course it is perfectly ordinary to see men and woman together too. In fact, Porto is quite kissy kissy in public places. Just along the shore from the group of blokes on the beach, were this semi-nude older couple dancing away. It was a lovely sight. From the esplanade above, the few of us who were there let out a collective sigh of admiration.

Perhaps it is the approach of summer, or (more likely) because I have been on my own here for too long but I’m beginning to see sex in everything. The priapic Torre dos Clérgios is probably the most famous of Porto’s monuments and certainly one of the most popular. It is the highest tower in Portugal, with 6 floors and 225 steps. That doesn’t seem so tall but given that it was completed in 1763 (by Nicholas Nasoni) I guess it was a wonder of its day that has endured.

It has a strange floor level suicide window from which a not fat person could easily choose to take a jump. I crawled on my hands and knees to the opening to have a peer out and then slunk back. Actually I’ve discovered since being here in Porto, for the first time in my life, that I have vertigo. I have never been troubled by heights before and I don’t know what has brought it on. I experience it as both a fear of falling and a desire to push myself over the edge: quite a worrying combination.

There are lots of bells inside as you might expect.

But what I wasn’t expecting was this organ type thing to operate them. I thought that bells were usually ‘rung’ but here it seems they are ‘played’.

I poked my camera over the stone battlements at the top to take some photos. Here you can see the orange roofs of the city stretching down the hill to the Douro.

Here are the ruins of a shopping mall, a famous blot on the city, which looks like the set from a science fiction film about the end of the world.

And here you can see Lello, commonly described as the most beautiful purpose built bookshop in the world.

It is extremely beautiful, with its gynaecological staircase tonguing out into the centre of the floor but it is not the best.

The books are oddly divided between highly specific set textbooks for the University just opposite and guidebooks to Portugal for the throngs of tourists that come to tick off another attraction.

One attraction that I will very sadly miss (as it takes place after I have left Portugal) is the second Festival Erótico Medieval.

Yes, it really is a four-day series of ‘sexy things’ in Medieval costume, including a ‘Campeonato Internacional Strip Masculino’ and a ‘Lingerie Restaurant’. How on earth someone came up with this idea, I can barely imagine. ‘You know what I think we really need here in the north of Portugal, is to celebrate the Middle Ages by taking all our clothes off and pony trekking in a pair of armoured wrist bands.’ Still, this is its second year, so they must have the interest.

Clubbing

2010-06-08T07:42:00.016-03:00

This week has been packed with cultural stuff.

Thursday was (another) religious holiday in Portugal. This time it was Corpus Christi or ‘Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ’ to give it its full title. It celebrates the Eucharist. In a lot of countries this feast is relegated to the Sunday following the Thursday following Eastertide (it’s all so complicated) but in Portugal they leave it on the traditional Thursday (which I am convinced is simply a precursor to trying to get Friday off too and thus have a super long weekend). Anyway, everything shuts down, so I took a trip to Guimarães.

Guimarães is considered the ‘birthplace’ of Portugal and is a medieval city that will also be European Capital of Culture in 2012. Both things – past origin and future culture – are advertised heavily. This place is well equipped for tourists.

The old city is very pretty and feels almost like a film set, transporting you back in time. At one end is the castle, which looks like it modelled for Playmobil or Lego, such is its order of straight lines and neat battlements.

The palace is generally a bit dark and empty but has the most amazing chimneys built with curved bricks.

Beautiful and moving were the 16th Century carved wooden religious figures held in Museu de Alberto Sampaio.

These distressed statues, ravaged by woodworm, were saved from the Chapel of Casa de Aveleira. The devastation caused by time and insects only contributes to their humanity.

Out in the streets, women had gathered to lay down cut grasses, vegetables and petals in a flower mural celebrating Corpus Christi that stretched down the entire length of one of the winding Guimarães streets.

This highly ephemeral street painting, at the mercy of a simple gust of wind, and laid down with love, felt very close to some of the kinds of interventions that I have been trying to make myself in urban landscapes over the past years. It was very rewarding to see this tradition.

Interrupting this idyll is something I have noticed, not just in Guimarães but across northern Portugal: the tremendous prevalence of hawking on the street. I am not talking about birds of prey, or the advertising of goods for sale from quaint wooden barrows, but rather the aggressive clearing of the throat as phlegm is brought up from the inner regions of the body and spat out onto the pavement. With an upsetting regularity a gentle amble through the delightful old streets of town will be punctuated by the sight and sound of even the most respectable looking of citizens twisting in their cheeks as they round up the yellow mucus, depositing it at my feet as I pass by. No offense intended, I am sure. Even as I sit and type in my apartment I hear the occasional distant sound of rasping glutinous muck being drawn from sinuses across the city. This is one cultural variation I could do without.

FUNICULAR UPDATE:

This week’s funicular is a whopper. Guimarães has one that runs from the city to Penha mountain over 1.7 kilometres, climbing over 400 metres and taking about 10 minutes.

You know that misanthropic feeling that you get when you’re in the queue for things like this, filled with nervous anxiety because you want to secure the best place for yourself (and your companions if you are not alone) and don’t want to be sitting next to some stranger who might somehow ruin the view? Well no such problems were confronted in Guimarães where I had the thing almost entirely to myself.

After a leisurely day, I boarded the train and returned to Porto.

Porto itself was the European Capital of Culture in 2001. The centrepiece of their artistic offering being the incredible Casa da Música designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, which only opened after years of delay in 2005. It was well worth the wait and immediately became an icon of the city. It is a fantastic building with intriguing and sensuous spaces and an extraordinary acoustic.

Once a month Casa da Música hosts ‘Clubbing’, in which music of various kinds fill all the spaces of the building. June’s event commenced at 10.30 p.m. with the Orqestra Nacional do Porto in the main hall as Finnish composer Magus Lindberg conducted his own 1985 composition Kraft, and ended in the early hours of the following morning with German electronic project Moderat.

If you thought the orchestral opening was a ‘safe’ selection then you were in for an ear-drum-shattering shock.

Normally it is the percussionists who look bored during a classical concert, waiting for their one cymbal crash at the ‘dramatic bit’ but in Lindberg’s Kraft it is the string section that is left twiddling their thumbs. The stage (and some of the auditorium) was filled with giant gongs, oil drums, bits of car, and other things that make loud noises when you hit them with a hammer or a mallet.

At one slightly disconcerting moment the entire brass section left the stage and made their way into the auditorium and I found myself staring close-up at the twitching embouchure of the horn player, risking permanent damage to my auditory faculty as he blew up my ear (as it were). The piece ended with at least 2 of the 5 soloists blowing through hosepipes into amplified buckets of water as the sounds shifted from the urban to the marine. Did they buy the buckets especially I wonder, or were they just ones found lying around?

Of course all this is perfectly ordinary now in contemporary classical music. The piece is, after all, 25 years old already but the battering force of sonic energy still packed a strong punch and had some of the well dressed devotees of the Orqestra Nacional do Porto, who were after something a little risqué, wondering if they had taken a leap too far.

(An aside. Not only were the seats in this auditorium silver velvet but instead of hinging up and down like a conventional theatre seat, they slid in and out. I have tried to illustrate here the slide action by photographing my own slid out seat next to the unoccupied seat beside me.)

Other highlights included Alva Noto, the stage name of German sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses overlooked sounds (electronic interference, modems, telephones) as the basis of his heavy dance tracks.

While outside a 17 piece electronic guitar band thrashed away.

‘Clubbing’ at Casa da Música really delivered. It opened up the incredible spaces of the building to an eclectic audience of all ages and the programme was genuinely diverse enough to offer people something that they knew they liked as well as new discoveries. There was plenty of time for drinking, dancing and socialising. Casa da Música is proof that investing in cutting edge architecture can provide a social and cultural epicentre for a city.

Porto has been brimming with ‘activities’ this week. As well as the monthly occurrence of ‘Clubbing’, the giant book fair has taken up the main city square, FITEI 2010 is in full swing, and the annual 40 hour non-stop event Serralves em Festa has drawn massive crowds. On several occasions, locals have been keen to put this hive of activity into perspective: “It’s not normally like this you know. After June there is nothing.”

Serralves is Porto’s contemporary art museum on the site of the massive Serralves estate, which the city acquired in the mid-1980s. The museum opened in 1999 with a new building designed by Álvaro Siza. There is also the old Villa on the estate as well as various outbuildings, a huge park and a working farm. I have been there a few times now and the exhibitions are generally excellent. Shows are themed and the Serralves Foundation have a large collection of artist books and text works on paper that are particularly interesting. Serralves em Festa is now in its seventh year. It is a massive undertaking, with over 80 events spread throughout the estate day and night for one weekend a year, from children’s workshops to late night DJ sets. I had heard a lot about it and was greatly looking forward to being there. We were also presenting our fifth and final ‘action’ for Viver a Rua.

It was great to see so many thousands of people in the grounds of a contemporary art museum but I was tremendously disappointed by the programming decisions of Serralves em Festa. Here was an opportunity to introduce a keen and intrigued non-art audience to new, interesting and high quality work. But Serralves programmed easy, bland and conceptually vapid stuff that I found patronising – mostly circus, street arts, and easy listening.

There was nothing that you couldn’t see in any other park or street fiesta anywhere else. It is true that I was there on the Sunday, which is noted as being the ‘family’ day but even if the remit had been for accessible child-friendly activity, they could have done so much better than the pretty puppets they chose to string up. On the Serralves Foundation website, they state that their mission “is to raise the general public's awareness concerning contemporary art and the environment”. For what it is worth, in my view, they did not succeed, despite leaving the doors of the main exhibition spaces open. It was a nice day out in a park then, but not anything that reflects the dynamic world of contemporary art. A missed opportunity.

It was into this mediocre maelstrom that the intrepid Viver a Rua communicators went to talk about our project to rename a Porto street. Here the stalwarts Joclécio Azevedo (NEC Artistic Director) and Cristiana Rocha (NEC General Director) strike up conversations.

People were generally very receptive. I think that they were pleased to have some one-to-one interaction rather than just look at the pink and purple of a princess on stilts. We move now into the final week of the competition.

Hung out to dry

2010-06-01T06:18:00.015-03:00

The pleasures of working away from home, of seeing new places and meeting new people, are always counteracted by the problems of continually starting ‘afresh’; the lack of routine, negotiating new sets of kitchen utilities, homesickness. Actually, I think my particular ‘homesickness’ is a kind of sickness of being at home. I don’t know how else to explain the fact that I am more often away from mine than in it. This sickness, a friend confided in me, is what Alcoholics Anonymous call “geographicals”. You keep moving in order to escape facing up to the ‘real issues’. Well, I’m not so sure. All my ancestors kept moving. No more than two generations were born in the same place as far back as we can trace. I myself was born somewhere I only stayed for a year and grew up in a city (the Scottish capital, Edinburgh) where I always felt a stranger. Nature or nurture, maybe I just have the nomad phenotype. Or maybe I’m just practically responding to job opportunities in the niche market of ‘socially engaged interactive contemporary art practice’. I feel very lucky to be living (and making a living) in this way but nevertheless there are practical hurdles that need to be jumped and emotional demons to be faced.

Over two weeks into my stay here in Porto and the laundry needed to be done: urgently. Although the plumbing is very neatly in place, there is no washing machine in my apartment. My fantasy of stringing up my t-shirts and towels on the balcony, Mediterranean style, like my neighbours, will have to wait. (Not that I even have a balcony.)

With only one pair of pants left on the clean pile and after several meetings with the NEC production team to discuss alternatives (I’m afraid I refused to hand over my smalls to the Production Coordinator Mafalda Couto Soares despite her generous offer) it was decided I should try and find a launderette. The thing is, there are no coin-operated washing machines here in Porto. Everyone has one at home. There are laundry services but they are for the lazy wealthy rather than the disadvantaged poor. Generally they are for people who ‘send their shirts out’ or who need a carpet cleaned and they don’t know where to begin.

After a preparatory phone-call from NEC Executive Producer Joana Ventura to check that they would ‘handle my load’ by weight rather than charging me for each sock, we set out to Lavandaria Olímpica in Rua Miguel Bombarda, the street with all the commercial galleries.

From behind the counter we were met by Dona Maria Sousa Neto, whose brilliant white business cards were housed in a special container. I left €20 lighter.

When I returned the following day I was thrilled by the multi-coloured stratigraphy of my sweet smelling perfectly folded clothes.

Unlike my laundry, my workload here in Porto is unusually light and I have too much time to think. There is some ‘work’ to do everyday, which means I can’t really leave the city but nevertheless there are huge stretches of time that I have to occupy either with ‘other work’ (there’s plenty of that) or finding something else to do.

On Sunday I went for a walk to the Atlantic. Two hours in, under the blistering sun, I saw in the distance along the beach what at first looked like the zigzag of giant bunting. Was this an art installation? No, it was washing pegged out to dry from the communal laundry at Afurada: Lavadouro Público da Afurada. Outside Porto, clearly not everyone has a washing machine. Around a series of giant square stone basins women pounded their families’ linens. No coin operated slots here either, then. It all looked like something from Ancient Greece or Rome but according to the sign on the door, this communal laundry was in fact only set up in 2003. Perhaps it replaced an earlier facility.

I was temporarily caught up in the romance of this communal clothes-washing scene. I too wanted to wander down to the beach in the bright spring sunshine to pummel yesterday’s t-shirt. But then I thought of Dona Maria Sousa Neto and my multi-coloured sweet smelling stratigraphy and felt envy no more.

The clothes themselves are pinned to makeshift lines all over the esplanade and right down the beach.

As well as being a wonderful site, it is immensely practical. With strong Atlantic breeze and the bright sunshine it takes about 3 minutes for things to dry. You start your pinning and by the time you’ve finished you barely have a moment for a cup of tea (well here it would be coffee) before you go back to the start to take them down. Of course the strong wind is also a hazard. How many trousers and t-shirts have been consigned to the tides, I do not know.

Another difficulty of being ‘away’ is what to do in the evenings. Somehow this is tougher when you’re not in your own home. My relatively new Sony eReader (PRS-600) with its 130 free books is proving immensely useful and I’m getting through an awful lot of novels without risk to trees. But I do struggle with not feeling like a complete twit out on the town on my own at night.

On the way back from an artists’ salon event in someone’s living room last night, which, while enjoyable, was slightly disappointing in its lack of liquid refreshment, I decided to stop off at café and have a beer. Sitting at the counter on a bar stool I enunciated ‘cerveja’ as confidently as I could and was rewarded by a tall glass of ice-cold Super Bock (the leading Portuguese beer, launched in 1927). The thing was, that although the beer was cool and smooth, I was not. I felt like a poseur. Stopping off for a quick beer is just not something that I do, or at least if I do, I don’t get away with it.

Back home then to eat some more fruit. I’ve been doing a lot of that: going home and eating fruit. I have discovered nêsperas, which are abundant here in spring.

I think they must be grown locally but according to what I can discover online they originate from China and Brazil. Anyway, they are delicious. The flavour is intense, like an apricot, nectarine, lychee and apple combination. I’ve been peeling them because the skin slips off and is a bit tart. They have stones that look like a pair of well-rounded bronzed buttocks.

We continue to promote Viver a Rua and the nominations are steadily coming in. This week marked the beginning of FITEI 2010 and our series of public actions. An army of volunteers are acting as Public Communicators for the project. There are about twenty people on rotation. After a day of workshop exercises and tryouts, this band takes turns to tackle the people of Porto, raising issues of citizenship, pride and responsibility and, erm, trying to persuade them to nominate somebody.

FUNICULAR UPDATE:

I can’t promise a new one each blog but these do seem to be very popular here in this mountainous country. This one is the city funicular in Porto – Funicular dos Guindais – that runs from Ribeira (by the bank of the Douro) up into town. The brilliant thing about it is that it is integrated into the city transport system, so although it may well entice tourists, actually it is just a very convenient and cost effective way of avoiding a steep hill or an awful lot of steps.

As you can see, it looks more like a rollercoaster track than any form of public transport.

The views are, however, gorgeous.

Fly away Peter, fly away Paul

2010-05-25T17:32:00.010-03:00

If your image of Portugal is of small stout middle-aged ladies in cardigans with brooms and budgerigars then you would, at least in part, be quite right. Dona Jacinta, who manages the building I am staying in, is constantly sweeping the wood effect linoleum in the entrance hallway, accompanied by the chirp of her caged budgie that tweets through the open door of her apartment. The enormous white cat that sleeps on a stack of cardboard boxes at the bottom of the communal staircase is so overfed that he barely twitches a whisker.

Perhaps fat white tom should have strolled up the road with me last Sunday. I planned a trip to Braga, a town an hour away from Porto described as ‘the Rome of Portugal’ because of its number of religious buildings and monuments. Walking to the train station I was gradually overcome by the sensation that something unusual was going on. There was the oddest noise in the air. A mass of high pitched audio interference, a kind of singsong screech. It was only when I got to Campo Mártires da Pátria, the esplanade in front of the old prison and courthouse, now a photography museum, that I realised what was going on. The ‘bird market’ had come to town. The sound was of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of feathered warblers all (with a few notable exceptions) caged next to each other, singing desperately for a new owner (or so I liked to imagine).

As I snapped away, it was not lost on me that here I was in the open air, outside a former prison that is now a photographic museum, photographing birds who, born to be in the open air, were now imprisoned in their own domestic cages.

Although most of the birds were of the stout middle-aged lady kind – small and colourful – there were also big parrots, peahens, exotic birds that I have no idea about naming, ‘working’ hens and guinea fowl.

It was a multicoloured feathered congregation that ranged from the utilitarian to the decorative. There was also a vast array bird accessories to choose from, including an enormous selection of cages.

The pigeons looked very confused. They nevertheless took the opportunity of scampering around underneath the coops gobbling up the stray seeds that had fallen out from their cousins’ breakfast bowls.

Before I leave the ‘unusual market’ theme, let me briefly mention the flea market that I also visited this week. Well, it was only partly a flea market. It was also a disco and a bar, all in one room: Maus Hábitos, an alternative ‘arts’ space on the top floor of a car park in the centre of town. If you look carefully at the first of these two photographs you can see the DJ (in a red t-shirt at the back) spinning the tunes. It made for a great atmosphere, with people dancing, drinking and shopping all at the same time. Great idea.

As an aside to this aside, there was an interesting (but unexplained) case on the wall with itemised cigarette butts in it. Of course, this appealed to my fascination in collecting habits and the status of garbage.

And so back to my day trip to Braga, 53 km north east of Porto.

Braga is renowned as one of the most beautiful cities in Portugal, for being deeply Catholic and very conservative. Without any map to guide me I followed the arrow that pointed to ‘Centro’ and found myself, almost immediately in the most important monument of the city, Sé Primacial, Santa Maria de Braga, the Cathedral. Unlike any other place of worship that I have visited as a tourist, this one was absolutely packed with Sunday worshippers. Hoards of well-dressed couples genuflected at the altar before streaming out into the square.

I just had time to snap the extraordinary baroque organ before being shouted at by a steward in a comedy purple and red 16th Century outfit with matching peaked hat and plus fours and the incongruous addition of 1980s Tootsie glasses. A conglomeration that looked something like a mixture of these:

The cathedral is full of reliquaries and tombs of the beatified including the relatively recently interred Irmã Maria Estrela Divina, who I can’t find much about but it seems she was witness to various miracles.

(I had a standoff with a couple of devotees as I was waiting to take a photograph in her chapel. Having been ticked off by the steward for photographing the organ, I thought I should wait until I had the room entirely to myself. As I was sitting on a seat opposite her tomb, a couple came in, touched the monument, kissed their hand, genuflected and waited. After some time it became clear to me that they weren’t going to leave until after I did because they didn’t want to be outdone in the time they spent giving contemplation to holiness and prayer. I put them out of their misery by leaving the chapel and hiding around the corner. They left immediately after me and I went back in to take my photograph.)

After this ecclesiastic beginning, I thought I should head off 5 km out of the centre to Bom Jesus do Monte which is a famous pilgrimage destination and one of the most impressive architectural sites in Portugal. A brief stop at the Turismo centre in the central square sent me in the right direction.

Although I had seen pictures of Bom Jesus, nothing quite prepared me for the experience. You arrive at the bottom of the first giant staircase that takes you in sections through the mountain. At key points there are chapels, which looks something like the summerhouses of English country estates. These are, in themselves quite substantial structures.

The chapels are dedicated to the Via Crucis (or Stations of the Cross) and each building contains a life-sized terracotta statue scenario of a moment from the Passion of Christ. As your eyes strain from the bright sunlight and you peer into the half-light of the chapels, the scenes hover like a kind of apparition.

After climbing this first staircase for sometime, you make it to the bottom of the second. It is here that the views both of Bom Jesus on one side and the city on the other are awe-inspiring. The monumental baroque staircase zigzags up to the sanctuary at the top.

At each landing there is a fountain dedicated to a sense – sight, sound, smell and taste – each orifice pouring forth an eternal stream.

In the sanctuary itself the altar is relatively unusual in depicting the whole of Calvary with Jesus, the two thieves and extras in a life-sized tableau.

Although more tourist attraction than working Catholic institution, you do get some sense of what it must be to have a ‘religious experience’, especially when you learn that many pilgrims choose to climb all those stairs on their knees. If you don’t fancy that you can always take the funicular, which has been working consistently without any accidents since it was installed in 1882. It is the oldest funicular in the world that works with water counterbalancing. When the car is at the top, the tank is filled with water. It gets heavier and thus moves down hill, dragging the other car up the hill as it does so. Brilliant.

Back in Braga, I wandered around the mass of religious and civic sites of the old town and witnessed the way in which these architectural histories are part of the living life of the citizens. As I observe a man determinedly praying at the outside chapel of San Bentinho Hospital, appealing for divine intervention in the care of someone sick, even the cynical atheist in me appreciated the consolation found in faith.

It was then, with renewed vigour that I returned to Porto and to Viver a Rua, in my own bid to leave a permanent legacy on the streets of this beautiful country.

Viver a Rua

2010-05-19T18:05:00.012-03:00

Here I am in Porto. The place Portugal gets its name and we get its wine. The city is very pretty and the weather is glorious.

I am here working on Viver a Rua, a project that will culminate the permanent changing of the name of a Porto street. All the maps will eventually have to be altered. The idea is a continuation of my other naming pieces Name in Lights and Rooted in the Earth, in which members of the public nominated someone who deserved a public tribute and the winning names were made into a giant illuminated sign, or planted as ornamental carpet beds in London parks.

This is my second visit to Porto. I came in November last year to run a workshop, to get to know the city and the producing organisation NEC, and to propose some ideas for FITEI 2010 one of the longest standing European arts festivals. NEC are the guest programmer this year, and they invited me. The brief was ambitious: to come up with a proposal that was high impact but extremely ‘economical’. (Well, they are facing a financial crisis here.) It doesn’t cost anything to change the name of a street. The idea is to get the people of Porto talking about citizenship, to actively discuss who they want their role models to be and what it means to leave a permanent legacy in the city.

Many of the streets here are named after ‘key individuals’, much more so than in the UK. Most of them are forgotten townspeople who did something important. I am staying in a very nice little two-bedroom apartment in the eaves of an old building in Rua Dr Barbosa Castro, right in the centre of the old town. Nobody seems to know who Br Barbosa Castro is, or was, and if you Google the name, all you get is the street.

My apartment is a short distance, down steep winding cobblestoned alleyways to the edge of the river Douro. The Douro starts its journey as the ‘Duero’ in Northern Spain and makes its way across nearly 900 kilometres of the Iberian peninsula before ending up at the Atlantic Ocean. It is a very pleasant riverside walk under beautiful bridges from town to the mouth of the river and the Atlantic beyond.

Strolling along the riverside the road suddenly leaves land and heads out into the Douro on stilts. You tread on a grid with the river below.

One of the most captivating bridges is the now inoperable Ponte D Maria Pia designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1877. It rises above you, a perfect Meccano arch, fragile and stable all at once.

The views of Porto from the bridges are incredible. The jumble of buildings scattered over the hills are strangely timeless.

On the other side of the Douro is Vila Nova de Gaia, the city in which all the port wine establishments can be found. The town is propped up (literally and metaphorically) by the signs of manufacturers, many with the British names of their entrepreneur founders: Sandeman, Offley, Taylor, Graham, Croft.

In this beautiful city, which has the faded grandeur of the old colonial power that it once was, I have come to work.

In a bid to get nominations of names that we should consider for the name-changing project, NEC and FITEI have been aggressively courting the press. Earlier in the week, with Artistic Director of NEC Joclécio Azevedo, I was interviewed for ‘Porto Alive’ a remarkably serious cultural news programme on the cable channel Porto Canal. We were hosted by Maria Cerqueira Gomes, who we met in make-up just before the broadcast.

This is Maria Cerqueira Gomes here, although not on the evening she interviewed me. That evening she was very upset because wardrobe hadn’t delivered her on-screen ‘costume’ and she had to make do with the (perfectly respectable in my opinion) white blouse and beige jeans that she had already been “wearing all day”!

The studio was hilarious. The TV visible bit was all white and shiny but the rest of the room was an absolute tip. Bits of broken staging, tables and chairs, a giant polystyrene question mark, all piled high behind the cameras, as if ready for Guy Fawkes and the strike of a match.

Maria did an excellent job of conducting and translating the interview all by her self. She would ask me a question in Portuguese (for the benefit of the viewing public), translate it into English (for mine), listen to my answer, translate it into Portuguese and then comment on it in both Portuguese and English. I had trouble keeping up but she was very much in control.

We saw a rise (albeit a modest one) in the website figures after the live broadcast, which means that people were watching, listening and engaging.

One problem that we are having here is that while people love the idea, they are often unsure that it is real. The heavy hand of bureaucracy is taken so much for granted, that citizens can’t believe that we really have the power to change the fabric of the city in this way. Of course it has been a task of immense persuasion, getting the City Council to agree to our project and, of course, they will have to pass our selected name through their usual naming committee but they have embraced the project and see its benefit. We really, really are going to change the name of a Porto street. Forever.

Suddenly it's Adeus

2010-02-20T14:16:00.008-02:00

My last hours in Rio were spent with a packet of disposable toilet seat covers in a variety of ‘sanitários’. I don’t know if it was the soaring heat (which reached 42 degrees), the incredibly rich salted cod fish risotto, or the permanent beat of the samba, but something done me in.

Clutching a scrap of paper on which were written the cobbled together instructions: ‘Eu gostaria de alguma coisa para diarréa’, I went to the nearest drogaria to try and get something to block up the flow for the ‘executive’ bus trip back to São Paulo.

Rio is truly an extraordinary city and Carnaval is probably the most loony thing I have ever enjoyed but arriving back at Tieté bus terminal, without so much as a paper streamer or novelty hat in sight, I couldn’t help but feel a bit more, well, relaxed. São Paulo is silent. It is the oddest sensation. This teaming megacity has suddenly just paused. Carnaval in São Paulo seems to mean ‘less’ rather than ‘more’.

Back at Débora’s I begin to think about packing my case and about what the year ahead holds. Already two months in, really it feels that returning to the UK will mark the beginning of my 2010.

We threw a small ‘gyoza’ party for some of the people that have been so kind and helpful to us while we were here. As my own contribution, I made…

(FINAL) BANANA UPDATE

…a bolo de banana.

I didn’t have a recipe as such, amalgamating a bit of web-Nigella-web-Delia but I did have two ‘special’ ingredients.

(1) Banana Flour

To be honest, I don’t know if this did anything. Further internet research indicated not to replace wheat flour entirely with banana flour, so I used half and half.

(2) Banana Paste

This was a huge disappointment. I was expecting a creamy pale yellow puree but the thing plopped out of the can clean, a firm brown jellied disc. In the end I mashed only a tiny bit into the mixture, using ‘real’ bananas instead.

The result:

Well, it was a bit dry. Not disgusting. But only one of the party went for a second slice.

END OF (FINAL) BANANA UPDATE

And so to the gifts. I went to one shop. A flip-flop shop. Probably the most glamorous flip-flop shop in the world.

Of course you can buy them from racks in the local supermarket but they aren’t any cheaper (they barely could be) and the range isn’t as good.

Havaianas are quintessentially Brazilian, even if they are named after the 50th US state. Everyone wears them, from the ladies who lunch to the catadores who collect, these foam soles cross the economic, racial and social spectrum, their rainbow shades reflecting the nation.

My strict ‘family only’ policy (albeit with a marginally extended notion of what ‘kin’ means) still meant purchasing 16 pairs. If you have received a request for your shoe-size then imagine yourself stepping into these. If you haven’t, I’m sorry; I truly would love to be able to buy Havaianas for everyone.

I’m sure that some of you will flip at the imperfect fit and that others will consider my colour selection a flop but when they work, they are extremely comfortable. I’ve been wearing mine non-stop. (That will have to end. In exactly a week after this posting I will be in Helsinki which I note is currently -18. A 60-degree variation that I am hoping won’t be too much of a punishment.) If the UK summer never comes, you can always use them as ‘shower shoes’ in the swimming pool.

This trip to Brazil has been unforgettable, for the saddest of all reasons, the death of my beloved Grandma, as well as for the fat papaya, feathered headdresses, fantastic architecture and my forays into the rubbish bins.

I am not surprised that the British Council wants to forge links with Brazil. We hear a massive amount about China and India but Brazil is a country with extraordinary natural resources and a 200 million strong population who also want a slice of the pie. As I have witnessed first hand, it is already a world leader in the recycling of waste, which, with our current environmental predicament, makes it the future. It will be interesting to see how they manage the Olympics in 2016. No doubt their desire to host that circus, so shortly after China, is to show they really mean business on the world stage.

As I close the door of the Little Museum once again, I wonder when I might come back here to Brazil. The Artist Links Manager, Roberta Mahfuz, mentioned that they are looking at maybe an “eight year return” by which she meant that it might only be in just under a decade that the fruits of these exchanges between the UK and Brazil produce fruit. I hope I get to taste the fat papaya again before then.

Carnaval!

2010-02-15T17:24:00.024-02:00

This week saw us move from a city renowned for its ugliness to one renowned for its beauty. Taking advice to travel overnight, we booked the 2 a.m. ‘executive’ bus from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro (with free crackers in a bus shaped cardboard packet and fully reclinable chairs), arriving intact but exhausted at 9.30 a.m., grateful nevertheless for the extra one and a half hour ‘delay’ which meant we could fretfully doze a bit more.

Before we left São Paulo we paid a visit to the Aquarium. Lots of lovely fishies, as you might expect from an Aquarium.

And then without any explanation suddenly there was a series of tableaux chronicling the evolution of man from ape to human.

Australopithecos:

Homo Habilis:

Homo Erectus:

Homem de Neanderthal:

Homo Sapiens:

Truly unexpected, extraordinary and wonderfully odd, if in a crappy sort of way. I was transfixed.

And at the mention of apes…

BANANA UPDATE

We also went to the zoo (nice but sad). São Paulo has the fourth largest in the world and sets about studying and protecting endangered species.

It was here I saw my first ever banana tree (albeit caged with a bird of prey). Look at the strange dangly flower bit at the bottom.

And also monkeys eating bananas.

Quite right too.

END OF BANANA UPDATE

And so to Rio.

The beauty of the city is immediate, epic and lasting. It is like everything anyone has ever told you about it. For the body and the brain:

Golden beaches that are ridiculously busy in this hot holiday season but nonetheless a full on beach experience, in this case Ipanema.

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, possibly the most beautiful public library in the world, with what has to be one of the biggest library desks.

The floating palace of Ilha Fiscal, playground in the days of Imperial rule.

The faded grandeur of Largo do Boticário.

Niemeyer’s extraordinary 1996 Museu de Arte Contemporânea across the water in Niterói.

The ever-present Cristo Redentor, perhaps the cleverest piece of public planning on the planet.

The exceptionally beautiful sunset across Rio, photographed from the spectacular Pão de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf Mountain.

Stepping off the cable car which took us back down into the city, a stall holder was selling t-shirts that spelled it out: I [heart] Rio.

Whereas in São Paulo it is difficult to find a postcard, Rio is ready for tourists. A bit too ready. Our ho-cell, sorry, I mean erm, ‘hotel’ room is very basic. A bed. A toilet. A shower. Not even a window. Well, there is a hole in the wall that overlooks a communal staircase out of which I lean to try and get a better internet signal borrowed from goodness knows who to skype-call Lloyds Bank for the umpteenth time to ask why my cash card won’t work. (“As far as we can see sir, you haven’t made any attempt to use your card.”) All the rates are double price during Carnaval. Literally 200% today of what they were yesterday.

How do you explain what Rio Carnaval is? It’s not just the scantily clad bronzed ‘girls’ wiggling their way down a massive catwalk with sequins and feathers enough so as to make the Baroque look modest; Carnaval takes over the whole of the city, indeed the whole of Brazil, because Carnaval is a festival which follows swiftly on from Christmas and New Year and marks the height of Brazilian summer.

When I asked people in São Paulo what they were doing for Carnaval, almost always I got the reply “Nothing”. As I guess you might imagine, there are two camps: the party camp and the ennui camp. Rio is definitely in the party camp.

Although I spurn ‘compulsory fun’, we did want at least a taste of the whole sequinned shindig and so, many weeks ago, we set about booking tickets for the Sambódromo, the specially built stadium through which the bands (and scantily clad ‘girls’) parade.

The parades through the Sambódromo go on for five days but the two main days are Sunday and Monday. Unless you want to pay the exorbitant prices through a North American ticket agent this is what you have to do. You get Débora to phone the ticket hotline on the one day (yes, really, it’s only one day) that it is active. She asks them for tickets for Sunday or Monday. They tell her they have already sold out. She phones me and asks if Saturday will do. I say yes. She phones them back and books the tickets. Then, get this, she has to go to the Carnaval’s bank and deposit the money into their account. The bank give her a receipt which she then has to fax (this is really all true) to the Carnaval with her postal address. The Carnaval then send a letter to her home address indicating the place and time in Rio where she has to go on a certain day to pick up the tickets. I kid you not. Kind-hearted Débora does all this for us. (It was exactly the same process when we booked our Hotel.) A few weeks later the letter from the Carnaval arrives to confirm our tickets for the Saturday. “What is it on the Saturday?” I ask. “It’s the Champions Parade,” Débora replies, “so you will get to see the spectacular winners.” I think about this for a moment, “But how can the Champions parade before they have won?” It turns out that this Champions Parade happens the following Saturday, when we will have already left Rio de Janeiro and will be zipping up our suitcases and on the way to the airport for London.

We take some relief from the fact that neither Débora (who is from Rio) nor anyone else we have thus far met, has ever actually sat in the Sambódromo. It holds 90,000 people but in a city of over 6 million, in a country of nearly 200 million, all of who are celebrating Carnaval, it is only one element of the ‘celebration’.

I am not going to attempt to do justice to the complex network of parties, balls and parades but try to imagine a festival with 6 million people all day and all night non-stop for 120 hours, all in novelty costumes and you will begin to get some idea of what is going on here right now. The four main elements you can immerse yourself into are (1) following the blocos, which are the local samba schools that don’t enter the official parades; (2) the evening processions along Avenida Rio Branco; (3) the top 14 samba schools who parade in the Sambódromo; (4) the Carnaval Balls.

(1) Blocos
These happen literally everywhere and anywhere at any time of day or night. I was stunned when Débora (who has come to Rio for Carnaval) called for us at 7.30 a.m. Sunday morning (directly off the overnight bus from São Paulo) to go downtown for a “fun bloco”. When we got there at 8.30 a.m. (yes, in the morning) I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were thousands of people all in fancy dress swilling beer and dancing to the rhythm of the drums.

And of course, here, as everywhere that people are drinking, the catadores are working. I saw one guy lazily chuck his empty can on to the street in front of him and within 15 seconds it was in a catador’s bag.

(2) Avenida Rio Branco
Apparently the street Carnaval in Rio is undergoing a renaissance after some years in the long shadow of the ‘main event’ in the Sambódromo. Here, practically anyone can parade and they take it just as seriously as those in the top 14 schools that make it into the commercially exploited ‘big one’.

Although the floats do not have the same high-end production values of Sambódromo, you can see how empowering it is for participants to parade.

And some of the costumes were just as full on.

(3) Sambódromo
Thousands of people, who don’t have tickets, swarm around the stadium. You can see all the giant ‘floats’ lined up on the street. They are monsters. Metaphorically and literally metaphorically if you get my drift, insomuch as many of them depict mythological or futuristic creatures.

One of my favourite things was to see were the impromptu changing rooms on the street; people getting into giant costumes of fruit cocktails, Roman legionaries, the slaves of Egypt or whatever. Every so often a taxi stops and a bronzed dancer in a sequinned thong gets out struggling with several bin bags full of feathered headdress.

Here in the middle of what is normally a main carriageway through the city, is a stable of costume horses ready to be saddled.

Particularly wide costumes are given space in requisitioned car parks.

And then they wait.

Before filing into the stadium in a giant parade.

Each school must parade for between 85 and 95 minutes and there are harsh penalties from the judges for taking too long. Although each school is headed by a group of ‘professional’ samba dancers in carefully choreographed movements, the throngs that follow (which can be up to 5,000 samba-hangers-on per school) are just people that have decided to join in. Anyone can buy a costume and join a school. It costs a fare bit but it is absolutely part of the tourist package on offer.

Although the ticket-ache meant that we didn’t get into the Sambódromo itself, I have to say, I am a bit relieved. Each show is 10 hours long: from 7 in the evening until 5 the next morning. Unless you’re in the ‘luxury boxes’ you have to make do with concrete or a plastic chair. And, well, it’s all pretty much, well, erm, the same kind of thing.

In the Museu Internacional de Arte Naïf, which we visited a few days ago, I enjoyed these paintings of the Carnaval, especially the third reproduced here, which seems to say something about the attitude of spectators as well as participants.

Of course the whole thing is broadcast non-stop on television here, with repeats throughout the day, which are difficult to avoid. Depending on which channel you are tuned into, you get a completely different ‘angle’ on events. One station insisted on shoving its ass-cam right between the dancers’ cheeks and then repeating the shot in slow motion; no doubt to show the skill of her samba moves.

(4) Carnaval Balls
I have yet to go to a Carnaval Ball. In my current state of sequin exhaustion I’m not sure I will make it.

And so Rio parties on…

33 Proposals for São Paulo

2010-02-06T16:15:00.016-02:00

This was the week of my presentation ‘33 Proposals for São Paulo’ at Centro Cultural São Paulo. There was quite a crowd (who were all these people?) and it all seemed to go well, with Patricia doing a magnificent job with the translation. I presented my 33 proposals alongside previous examples of my work and something of what I have learnt here during my trip, much of which has been part of previous blog postings.

Some of the proposals are so slight they are barely worth proposing, while others would require a great deal of involved negotiations (and money) to realise. But I can assure you that at least part of me wants to make them all.

Without too much context, I represent them to you here.

PROPOSAL 1

Rather cheekily I offer the presentation as my first proposal and at the end of the evening it was the only one that I had actually made.

The first proper set of proposals is to do with rubbish itself. One thing I am interested in doing is to question the aesthetic properties and possibilities of rubbish and so,

PROPOSAL 2

I would like to:

I would love to organise this. (Actually, I think I know somewhere to propose this one.) A public call would be issued across the city and people would pay a small fee to enter. Instead of daywear, eveningwear and swimwear, we would have the categories, plastic, paper and metal, searching for an alternative aesthetic to the Playboy image of beauty, and fabricating the costumes entirely from trash. There would be a big cash prize for the winner.

There would be no restrictions on age or gender to enter, but if it is still all a bit too girly for you then perhaps you would prefer:

PROPOSAL 3

in which I would like to:

I’m not entirely sure what this is yet. I don’t want it to be simply kicking cans instead of footballs but I do want to pick up on some of the popularity of football here in Brazil to entice people into playing with waste. Perhaps there could be can crushing contests, cardboard folding competitions etc. This would give catadores a head start, which would probably be a good thing.

As regular readers might recall, my rubbish research has led me to become a collector of Brazilian waste bins. The strange ‘baskets on legs’ that appear in various forms. I am interested in the aesthetic, rather than the utilitarian properties of these strange objects and so:

PROPOSAL 4

is to:

Perhaps people would start throwing things into it, which would be quite fun.

I have been really interested in the relationship between the municipal waste collection and the organised but informal system of catadores. Don’t forget, 100% of municipal waste here is landfill but at the same time 90% of aluminium is recycled. Catadores search out the cans wherever they are.

And so:

PROPOSAL 5

I would like to,

Now I know this is a bit mean but we all live in a lottery culture whether we like it or not. Of course most probably, I would never know what happened to my solid silver can but I would still like to make it.

However, there is no escaping,

PROPOSAL 6

Each São Paulo citizen throws out an average of 850 grams of rubbish each day. For a normal Brazilian life span of 70 years, that means every individual is responsible for 22 tonnes of waste over the course of their life.

Despite its huge landmass, Brazil hasn’t recorded any giant meteorites, so I thought perhaps they would like one of their own. (A few thousand miles away in Mexico, the Bacubirito meteorite is one of the largest single space objects to have been sent on a collision course with the Earth and survive. It is estimated to weigh 22 tonnes.) I would like to cast a giant meteorite in recycled aluminium weighing 22 tonnes as a kind of totem for our individual responsibilities.

As well as these aesthetic considerations I have been giving some thought to pragmatic ways in which I might work with the waste collection system.

I was really interested in the catadores carts. If I am completely honest, my attention was drawn predominantly to the way that they looked, rather than anything else but I did notice that they are often quite cumbersome in their steering.

And so,

PROPOSAL 7

is to:

I don’t really mean this in the patronizing ‘do good’ way that it comes across. I am simply interested to see what happens if you bring two sets of experts together, in this case engineers and catadores.

I have been very interested to learn that as a citizen, you are responsible for the pavement directly outside your house. This means that some areas are paved with ornate marble mosaic and others are completely unmade.

PROPOSAL 8

This proposal is to shift the emphasis from graffiti on the walls to mosaics on the pavements and to try and encourage a competitive spirit in the design of pavements outside your homes.

As you will see, in my trial, I have used discarded disposable ice-cream spoons in the design (and you will see why a bit later) but the general idea is to use the rubbish that you might throw out on the pavement, to make the pavement design.

A much longer-term project is,

PROPOSAL 9

I have been interested in thinking about what catadores collect. Of course their primary concern is to try and make a living, so they collect items for which they will be paid. But I have tried to think about some alternative economies.

Having really enjoyed the abundance of fruit here, I wanted to think about the status of the seeds of these fruit that are so readily discarded. In this proposal, catadores are paid for collecting seeds. These seeds are planted and the fruit harvested. I want to create an orchard out of rubbish.

This project is not economically viable, insomuch as the ‘set up’ costs would be more than the yield from the fruit but nevertheless as an idea it presses the question of how value is determined and understood.

A more direct way of doing this would be to make that information available directly to the consumer. And so, for,

PROPOSAL 10

I would like to:

I have visited both catdores cooperatives and private companies that act as intermediaries between catadores and recycling companies. One such company was paying R$2 per kilo; which means that catadores need to collect 36 cans for R$1. Printing this information on the can itself would simply disseminate the facts of this economic exchange.

More didactic (and perhaps less interesting) is,

PROPOSAL 11

Every day 9,700 tonnes of rubbish are driven in trucks from the city of São Paulo to the landfills at the periphery. 9,700 tonnes is equivalent to 10,000 Classic Volkswagen Beetles, 2,500 African Elephants and 40 Tian Tian Bronze Buddahs. That is a lot of trash. I would like to produce a children’s counting book, where each of the numbers relates to the amount of rubbish thrown out by São Paulo in a single day.

One of the tremendous benefits of working on these ideas here in Brazil has been to see some of the places and meet some of the people that are key to the waste collection and disposal systems for myself. I am interested in thinking about ‘meetings’ as a kind of artistic practice. Art allows us to think in a way or to do things that we might otherwise not do.

PROPOSAL 12

Visitors would be escorted on a day trip across some of the key sites in the life cycle of an aluminium can. The trip would include visits to the places the average public does not normally see: the canning factory, catadores cooperative and recycling plant as well as those that they normally do see: the retail outlets and personal space of a consumer. The idea would be to imbue the kinds of places we normally encounter with the ‘back story’ of those places we do not.

Of the many different things that I personally collect, one of my favourites is my collection of disposable ice-cream spoons. I have thousands. (You will understand now, why my design for the ‘sucata pavement’ was made with this trash.) Actually, I’ve collected quite a lot of spoons here in Brazil, many of which I have picked up off the street.

And so this leads me to perhaps the most self-interested proposal,

PROPOSAL 13

I would quite happily pay well above the recycling value of the plastic, especially for examples that are not yet accessioned into my collection.

In terms of the process in this proposal, as an artist I am interested in inverting the commonsense assumption that the catadores ‘need our help’ and rather want to think about how their expertise might be of value to me.

As for the spoons themselves, what I am concerned with is the value of material culture that exceeds the material value alone.

In this regard I would like to think about forms of rubbish collection that are not predicated on economic models.

And so to,

PROPOSAL 14

In which rubbish might be sorted by, for example, colour or by weight rather than by is scrap value.

Or,

PROPOSAL 15

In which somehow the accumulated waste of an individual would become the mountainous subject of a sculptural classification. Perhaps this could be in the form of a museum diary, rather than a sculpture, with a day-by-day archive of one person’s waste. A collection of rubbish that is never thrown out.

Underlying this proposal is the idea that rubbish may tell us something about ourselves; that material culture holds useful information.

Nowhere is this sense of knowledge being held by material objects more powerful than with the printed word: books.

This leads me onto,

PROPOSAL 16

I haven’t completely worked this one out yet but there is something in it that I am interested in pursuing. Proposal 16 explores the palimpsest: the idea that a piece of writing has been effaced to make way for new writing.

I want to hold a contest to gather books. Clues could send teams of people out on a bibliographic hunt: great works of literature, history and science; cookery books, play texts, political tracts. These books, with their collective knowledge, meaning and power would become the recipe for a new set of books. The paper would be passed through the recycling system and like the alchemical dream, would become a fresh publication. In this way, the new publications are themselves and all the books of which they are constituent parts: a kind of hidden material library.

You may recall my visit to the wonderful beginnings of a ‘Waste Museum’ in a disused office room off the main corridor of the municipal Secretaria de Serviço that deals with waste management.

PROPOSAL 17

The rest of the proposals are really about socialisation and citizenship: about what it means to be a Paulista.

In many ways Brazil is the world leader in terms of what it does with its rubbish, certainly in terms of recycling. One of the reasons that I was so interested to come here after working with rubbish in Japan in 2008 was because Brazil has overtaken Japan as the foremost recycler of aluminium in the world. In Japan aluminium is so successfully recycled because people are ‘good citizens’ and wash and dispose of their waste in the ‘correct’ fashion (all rubbish is separated before it is disposed of, in specific coloured bags and you write your name on the bag of rubbish before you put it out on the designated collection day). In Brazil the success is due to one thing: money.

In this society which is so predicated on economic difference as the benchmark for social status, the issue seems to me to be less about the environmental ramifications of waste disposal or collection and rather more about those who throw that rubbish away or are given the job to collect it.

And so to,

PROPOSAL 18

This simple invitation may well produce unexpected results.

I am interested in the social status of catadores. In some sense they are celebrities. They are high profile - known around the world; they are visible on the streets; they are depended upon. And in another sense they are outcasts, considered the dregs of society.

I started to think about the catadores dogs. Dogs are kept by humans for security and companionship but I wonder if they are not also a point of greater identification for a general public than the human beings who are their ‘masters’.

PROPOSAL 19

PROPOSAL 20

I don’t imagine these portraits to be explained – just to be there. I like the idea that catadores, or rubbish collectors, might meet themselves when at work, and for the rest of us to think about the human contact that our trash will face when it leaves our hand.

PROPOSAL 21

…because the lives of those who are forgotten are often far more interesting than those who are placed on a pedestal.

And while we are mentioning pedestals.

PROPOSAL 22

Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning from the French term ‘flâneur’: that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". This term has been used as a way of understanding some contemporary art practices that engage with the city.

Although they are not ‘strolling’ (rather they are determined hunters of valuable rubbish) the catadores are contemporary flâneurs – always on the streets, experiencing the city.

For,

PROPOSAL 23

I want to:

Many streets would have multiple names and many streets would have the same names, so this isn’t really a practical mapping solution but it would allow us to think of those streets in a different way.

The fact that they are on the streets, experiencing the city and looking around them carefully, means that,

PROPOSAL 24

…we could

Taking this one step further, we could invert the idea that catadores are somehow on the margins of society, outside state control and make them agents of state policing.

PROPOSAL 25

Another thing that we saw at the Secretaria de Serviço was the live tracking of the municipal garbage trucks, so that the location of each truck could be determined.

PROPOSAL 26

…is so obvious that perhaps it has been done already. Make this tracking public.

The idea here is that as a public we are encouraged to follow and track the truck that is coming for our rubbish. It would enable people to check when the truck destined for their street was due, meaning they could put out their trash with pinpoint accuracy, thus reducing the amount of rubbish left on the street.

Perhaps I’m living in a dream world to think that people would engage with such a website and of course it is reliant on people having access to the internet but the incentive here is to get people thinking about citizenship and taking pride in their city.

If this most recent set of proposals are about rethinking the status of rubbish collectors, then the last set are about citizenship itself. I have made projects with these kinds of imperatives before and one of the mechanisms that I used was personal proper names: my name, your name.

So, for São Paulo I would like to use the incredible billboards that mark the way into the city, from the airport and along the motorways. I would like to engage a discussion and hold a competition and for,

PROPOSAL 27

…to print the:

Or perhaps not even the names but,

PROPOSAL 28

…rather the:

I would love to see that. But even more, what I would like to do in São Paulo is,

PROPOSAL 29

Actually, I am already making this project in Porto, Portugal with an organisation called NEC. We are in negotiations at the moment with the City Council to be allowed to do this and it now looks like it is really going to happen. It is very exciting. But I have been really impressed by the fact that so many of the streets in São Paulo are named after the citizens who made it. What I would like to do is to name a street after an ordinary citizen. To engage a public debate on who we want our role models to be, to select a winner and to rename a street. All the maps would then have to change.

And then perhaps there could also be an exhibition dedicated to that one unknown individual.

PROPOSAL 30

In which an ‘ordinary’ person would be given the space and attention usually reserved for those deemed ‘exceptional’.

Art practice offers us a permission to do things and to see things in a way otherwise not expected. At its best, art can flatten the hierarchy of what is considered worthy of our attention: it can make a piece of trash a diamond.

It is this ‘way of looking’ that is at the heart of,

PROPOSAL 31

This is a curated series of tours of places and sites that are not usually public. From the domestic house to the sewers underneath MASP, each tour would allow visitors to see their city in a new way. The point of these tours is that they are delivered by artists or gallery tour guides. They offer an ‘art’ perspective on what is clearly not art.

The works that I am proposing here this evening are above all about conversation; about trying to kick start a debate.

And in an effort to really push this incentive,

PROPOSAL 32

…takes to the streets and directly addresses the public.

So no matter what they are, love São Paulo or hate it, these are the answers that will be published.

And so to my final proposal:

PROPOSAL 33

To wash something is to care for it, to nurture it, to value it, to recognise its worth. I want to engage hundreds of people in this exercise. We take the trash, we sort it and wash it. This vast expenditure of useless energy nevertheless asks us to rethink our relation to material culture; what we choose to keep, what we throw away, and why.

Markets and Malls

2010-02-01T11:47:00.015-02:00

Unlike London, Paris or even New York and Tokyo, São Paulo is not a city for window shoppers. A casual visitor might well think that there are barely any shops at all. You have to know where to go. There are very few glittering window displays inviting you in.

Of course there are shops, with windows, but there is a predominance of markets and malls, the former sprawling over many streets, the latter over many floors.

Personally I have never understood the attraction of malls, the homogeneity of which I find alienating. It has been so wet here though, that sometimes a mall roof is a welcome protection.

Everyone is talking about the rain. It’s a bit like England. I’m sure it will make those of you still enveloped in the winter freeze exercise your schadenfreude to know that it rains and rains and rains. Everyday. If you want to feel better about not being in this tropical paradise, check out the weather report for São Paulo. Heavy rain: day after day.

No umbrella can withstand the pelting downpours. The pavements simply empty as pedestrians take cover. The moment the firmament turns down the volume, the hoards converge to continue with their journey until the next deluge.

As irritating as it is for a visitor to get wet and wonder what to do (having used up all the tokens saved for a rainy day) it is nothing compared to the misery faced by the thousands who have been displaced. With vastly inadequate drainage, huge sections of the ultra poor flavelas have simply been washed away. (This is most probably to the satisfaction of local government, which wants these ‘slums’ cleared anyway.) Even in the middle class ‘heritage world’ of São Luiz do Paraitinga where we stopped for a day en route to the countryside pousada late last year the rain caused devastation. Mudslides demolished the town’s iconic church, many houses, and left thousands homeless. The emergency appeal saw residents calling for ‘anything’. Everything has gone. We need anything.

So as the Haitian disaster quite rightly engages international support, the displaced here struggle with little help. Mother Earth the avenger reeking havoc to humanity with a flick of her wrist.

And so to the protection of the mall. Actually most of this week I have been indoors, listening to the rain drumming on the corrugated roof, writing up my proposals and presentation, venturing out to the gym for a break, or the supermarket for a snack.

At the mention of snacks:

BANANA UPDATE:

This week on the banana tastings we have two lollies, a chip and a pop.

Kibon’s Fruttare, “com pedaços de fruta” was actually really nice. Milky banana with chewy bits of dried fruit.

Sorvesan’s Banana com Canela was the cheapest ice-cream I have ever bought (about 30p) and was quite nice. Banana with cinnamon reminds me of my childhood, where an impromptu desert would be slicing a banana and pouring a mixture of brown sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon over the top before grilling it until it became like a kind of toffee on top of hot banana. Lovely.

Another banana/cinnamon combo was bio2’s banana com canela frutas orgânicas secas which was so moreish that I managed to eat most of them before I took the photographs. Freeze dried bits of banana yum.

And finally, for this week’s update, Ultrapan’s Banan’up Néctar de Banana, which I only bought because of this bloody update thing, fully expecting it to be foul. It scraped a pass, but I will not be purchasing it again.

END OF BANNANA UPDATE

Here are some places to shop in São Paulo.

The area around Brás (suitably spelt like a collection of ladies undergarments but pronounced with a flat vowel, as in a Yorkshireman saying ‘brass’) is the biggest clothing market in the whole of Brazil. 55 streets of outfitters and the largest wholesale mall in Latin America. Mind you, it’s pretty much 55 streets of Primark. Never have I been amongst so many retail outlets with so little temptation to make a purchase. I am however, in the minority. People come from all over the country, and as this photograph will testify, they don’t shop lite.

The area around Rua 25 Marco is a sequin heaven. Yes, here there is truly a bauble for everybody. Shop after shop after shop of beads, feathers, sequins, and threads, alongside party shops selling costumes and novelty accessories. Now here, for me anyway, the temptation is impossible to resist. 25 Marco (“Vinte Cinco de Marco”) is the place you go for your carnival creation and although hectic at all times of year, it is swarming with shoppers as the annual shindig approaches.

In Praça da República there is a weekly market with crappy paintings, leatherwear, and so on, with a line of stalls selling semi-precious stones.

One very interesting novelty here: a group of ‘nurses’ touting for business with sphygmomanometers. This is possibly the most inventive hawking I have ever seen. And they might actually save your life! (Mind you, they didn’t have any takers while I was there.)

Liberdade is ‘Japan Town’. São Paulo has the highest population of ethnic Japanese outside Japan. In the supermarkets there can be moments of cultural and geographical confusion as, for a split second, you think you are on a different continent altogether.

But if there is any confusion, then it is soon put to rest. São Paulo is not Tokyo and the Japanese here are, by their own repeated identification, Brazilians. Most of the immigration was two or three generations ago. As if to underline this, I present you with a photograph of a ‘sakerinha’ – half saké, half famous Brazilian cocktail ‘caipirinha’.

Along the streets of Liberdade there are markets with Japanese goods, including these very cute water lilies.

The mother of all markets, is however CEAGESP - Companhia de Entrepostos e Armazéns Gerais de São Paulo (The São Paulo General Warehousing and Centres Company). To describe it as a ‘market’ is a grand misnomer. It is more like a town. This is the larder of the megalopolis. We got up at the headache hour of 5.30 a.m. and took two metros and two trains, sandwiched with a walk either side to get there. It was also raining. Of course. Without a map of the ‘market’ it was difficult to know where to go. All of food is here but on this, our first trip, we only saw fruit and flowers.

However, here is a nice thing: hunky Brazilian guy with wide smile in back of truck with pickaxe chipping away at ice for fish market.

Streets and streets of trucks with boxes and baskets packed full of produce follow.

Beyond this, the flower market, which makes Columbia Road look as irrelevant as a single grain of sand on Copacabana Beach.

My own preoccupations return to Grandma. The cliché: I can’t believe that she is really gone, triggers an odd sort of upset, in which in a kind of metaphysical way, I step outside myself, trying to observe what I am feeling.

In an absurdly grand (or perhaps it should be grandly absurd) gesture, I ended up buying many more flowers than I could carry at the CEAGESP Flower Market. Struggling back with them on the rush hour trains was no joke.

Back at Débora’s house (and as much in a tribute to the sucata recycling of Brazil as the practical fact that there simply weren’t enough receptacles to house this floral abundance) I made hanging vases out of plastic mineral water bottles.

It was the day before Grandma’s funeral and I wanted to do something. When I returned to Brazil, I knew that I would miss it. To be honest, I felt relieved. But as the time got closer I craved the formal outlet and institutional parade of the crematorium and to hear the family eulogies. So I guess the flowers were to mark this day out as an occasion.

The first picture shows big, plump, pink ‘antique’ Roses and pale blue Hydrangeas. The second Sunflowers. The third Anthurium. The fourth Strelitzia (Birds of Paradise) with Anthurium, and what I think might be a Yucca flower, possibly Adam’s Needle. The fifth shows my desk, with more Roses and a vase of Strelitzia, Anthurium and the incredible Zingiber Spectabile (Beehive Ginger) which look like they have come directly from the set of ‘Pandora’ in James Cameron’s Avatar. The sixth and final photograph shows tropical Protea with more Yucca.

My aunt sent me the order of service, the music and each of the speeches. Half way across the world, with my watch synchronised, I sat at my computer with my photograph of Grandma on the desktop, listening first to the Mozart (Piano Concerto 21 in C – Andante) and later to the arrestingly fragile Gracie Fields 1935 rendition of ‘When I Grow Too Old To Dream’. Whimpering over the keyboard, I read each of the homilies in turn, really trying to summon the voice of each of my relatives: my dear dad, my uncle, my sisters, my cousin, my aunt. Clearly my borrowed desk in São Paulo is not the same as a pew in Oxford crematorium but I did manage to focus very intently on Grandma, to feel the glow of her spirit, and to think again, about what all this means.

Recycling People

2010-01-24T15:58:00.012-02:00

Grandma died on 17th January 2010 at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The following day, which the pundits refer to as ‘Blue Monday’, the most depressing day of the year, I went to her home in Croydon.

This house, of which she and my grandfather were the first, and thus far the only, owners, has, with the exception of the occasional minor decorative adjustment or ornamental addition, remained exactly the same for my entire life.

And bar one or two anomalies, this is the first time I have been to the house without her greeting me at the door. I mope around the rooms. Her spectacles have been casually put down on the kitchen table. Upstairs, her bed is unmade. It is all gut-wrenching.

I suppose I had expected the objects in her house, for which I have developed a deep affection over my own 37 years, to yield up some truth. But without her, they too seemed dead. Somewhat reluctantly, I take out my camera and set about trying to record the rooms of her house. What the lens is drawn to are the patterns on the carpets and curtains, the wallpaper, the tiles, the tablecloths.

These designs, which have been so influential, their colours and shapes, their flocked and embossed textures, have witnessed my life. They are my heritage.

After an hour or two my elder sister arrives. She has brought champagne and her own attempt at Grandma’s speciality: yellow potatoes. We sit in the kitchen and toast Grandma, doing most probably for the last time what we have done at this table since we were tiny children: we eat and drink.

We go to the cabinet and get out some albums. Looking at the photographs, what we remember most is doing just that: bringing out the photograph albums, sitting on the sofa, and looking at the images; most of which were taken before we were born, or before we can remember.

We shut the door behind us. My sister pats the brickwork as if it were a small child, and then we walk down the hill.

The following day I board the plane for Brazil.

So I have returned to the São Paulo heat and tropical rain. In the space of 10 days my own little world has gone through the profoundest of shifts. Saying my eternal farewell to Grandma is the absolute end of a family era, as we all move along the conveyer belt of our own mortality. It is not only sadness. As one friend and colleague wrote to me, “lucky Grandma and lucky you for your lives together”. It is true. And Grandma has been visiting me in my dreams these past few nights, in such a visceral way. Always chatty, alert and calm, it is difficult not to consider these meetings with her as something more than the ramblings of my unconscious.

*****

I am really trying to get back to work. My presentation is on 4th February, less than two weeks away. It is then that I will present some of my research and the proposals that I have been working on. Although I will be in Brazil for a further two and a half weeks after the presentation and my work will continue, the idea is to get it over with before everyone enters the Carnival atmosphere (13th-16th February) which apparently is so all-consuming that anything non-Carnival related is an impossibility. Besides which, I could do with some Carnival atmosphere myself and am aiming for the big one with a trip to Rio de Janeiro.

On the suggestion of an environmental lawyer who I met some weeks ago, I tracked down and watched the National Geographic TV ‘Megacities’ programme on São Paulo. This account of Brazil’s waste system is the kind of slick advertisement a government would commission. The oppressively upbeat narration and pounding graphics hammer out a utopian vision of the world leader in recycling. The facts cannot be denied but as I have discovered they only tell half the story. In the São Paulo of National Geographic, the catador that they interview is wearing the spotless pink and white apron of a domestic to the upper classes. Not exactly what you see on the streets.

The documentary does, however, highlight some of the tremendous successes here, especially the integration of technology and person-power. One fantastic fact is the number of days it takes to turn a can into a can: 33. You could throw out your ‘Guaraná Antartica’ can on the 24th January and be drinking ‘Coke Zero’ from it again on the 26th February. That’s pretty impressive. It goes something like this:

1. The can is collected by a catador. (Don’t forget that 100% of municipal waste here is landfill but at the same time 90% of aluminium is recycled, which means that the catadores or private schemes, are entirely responsible for the collection of cans, and are doing a brilliant job.)

2. The cans are taken to a sorting plant, either directly or via an intermediary. Here they are cleaned and crushed.

3. Crushed cubes of aluminium are then transported to the factory.

4. Here they are melted down and made into a giant ingot. (This picture is of a river of molten aluminium.)

5. The giant ingot is heated up and pushed through a series of rollers until it becomes 2mm thick. These giant sheets are coiled and then sent off to the canning factories.

The process can be repeated again and again. And so somehow the history of your drinking is also the history of those people who drank from the same metal container in the past.

It is the 33 ‘can to can’ days that have given me the number of proposals I am going to present. 33 proposals for São Paulo. It’s been very liberating coming up with ideas without having to think too carefully about the pragmatics of how they might actually happen. But now that I have a collection of proposals, I am hoping that someone who comes along on the 4th February might actually want to commission something.

BANANA UPDATE

Of course being back in Brazil means being back to marvelling at the number of ways to ‘do’ bananas. In the years of my life before I discovered Bananinha, I would buy dried banana in health food shops in the UK. These ‘Banana Passa Orgânica’ are pretty much what I am used to.

Super chewy 100% banana. Lovely but ugly. (No wonder they put them in an opaque wrapper.)

These badly photographed tropical nibbles are chocolate covered pieces of dried banana. Nice idea, but as neither the chocolate nor the banana was actually that good, it scores poorly.

One unexpected banana happening made itself known on my kilo lunch plate. Kilo restaurants are very popular here and very affordable. Basically it’s a buffet and you pay by weight. (A godsend for fussy eaters.) Notice the oblong rust coloured thing at the bottom of the plate that looks like a slightly misshapen fish finger.

Well, it’s a banana fried in breadcrumbs.

Actually it was delicious. Banana ‘frita’; a perfect accompaniment to salad. Who would have thought?

One non-related banana fruit-fact: I thought people that haven’t seen it before might like to be introduced to the fruit of the cashew tree. Next time you buy a 250g pack of salted cashews think of this. Each one of those nuts once sat on top of the most delicate of fruits that looks somewhat like a human heart. The flesh is very fragile and has an extremely short shelf life (which is why they only appear in markets close to the trees). It makes an extremely refreshing juice, something like a cross between apple and lychee.

END OF BANANA UPDATE

This morning I went to see the Boxing Academy that has sprung up underneath one of the many flyovers in the centre of the city. Exclusively for the use of the extremely poor or homeless, the sign on the gate reads: boxing not drugs.

It’s not the most conducive of environs for keeping fit, wrapped, as it were, by fast moving traffic, but the equipment seems of the high standard you would expect in any ‘regular’ gym and there is a lot of it.

The guy that set it up describes himself as a ‘recycler of people’. I found this a very provocative statement. Ultimately we are all subject to the fragility of our corporeality but while we can, we can use our physical matter to effect a personal transformation.

Let the little boy through

2010-01-16T14:22:00.006-02:00

Rachel Sofaer (Photographed 20.10.2009)

This week saw me suddenly and unexpectedly on the next available flight from the São Paulo waste, baking in 33ºc, to -4ºc, via BA Club World. (Steerage was sold out.) Good seats. Nice menu. Balancing Lavender Facial Wipe. The same problems with the ‘entertainment system’. The same difficulty getting to sleep. The toilets are identical (unfortunately) except that they stick a white carnation to the mirror.

On the 29th December last year, less than a week after her 97th birthday, Grandma complained of a pain in her leg. (“Pins and needles. Darn nuisance.”) What wasn’t known at the time, was that a blood clot was forming in an artery just above the joint in her left knee. Her leg began to fail. By the time the correct diagnosis was made, the options were stark: cut off the leg or die.

But in the case of an increasingly ailing 97 year old, chopping off a limb is not so easy and even if the operation is survived, the long-term outlook, which after all cannot be so very long, is bleak.

When the consultant outlined the alternatives, Grandma’s response was typically self-effacing and stoic. “Something had to happen.” Her decision, to be made 'comfortable' meant a stepped increase in the prescription of pain relief, as her beautiful fragile body became slowly poisoned by the septicaemia that would gradually cause her organs to fail, one after the other.

*****

Born in Calcutta in 1912, Grandma is the daughter of a second generation Calcutta Baghdadi mother, and a first generation Calcutta Baghdadi father who came to India from Aleppo. Along with many other Arabian Jews who exploited the trade links along the Asian peninsula from Calcutta at its western most point to Shanghai at its southern most tip, he travelled to India in the hope of making his fortune. He traded in jute. No fortune was made but he provided for his family until eventually he was bankrupt.

Her father was a God-fearing Jew who took his religion seriously, but in order to secure the best education for his daughter, and perhaps also to devolve responsibility for a difficult child (Grandma was, by her own reckoning, “quite a handful”) she was sent to a Catholic Boarding School. Saint Helen’s Convent in Kurseong is still at the foothills of the Himalayas where India borders Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and what is now Bangladesh. Here she went to school under the English system with Catholics, Parsees, Moslems, Hindus and Jews of a variety of nationalities and mother-tongues, taught by nuns – the Daughters of the Cross – who came from Liège and delivered the Cambridge Examination Board Senior School Certificate curriculum with thick Belgian accents. English may have been the official language of instruction in India since 1835 and my grandmother’s first language, but she needed Hindustani to converse in the kitchen and the street, would have been required to read basic Hebrew for religious instruction and was aware of the Arabic of her ancestors.

In 1930 Grandma left Calcutta for London to train as a nurse. Like most middle-class daughters of the Raj she had never had to undertake any domestic chores. Arriving at her London training hospital in an era when nurses were expected to deliver complete care to patients, including cooking, cleaning and washing, Grandma was presented with a broom by the Ward Sister. Gazing at it rather forlornly, and without any hesitation at embracing hard work, she rather ruefully explained, to the horror of her colleagues, that she didn’t know what to do with it. She described the experience as “shameful”.

Grandma had been a ‘champion roller-skater’ as a teenager. I don’t know which championship this was but neither did I want to ask. The image created was of a strong, athletic girl with a ribbon pinned to her white cotton shirt.

In her late 80s, the fever to feel once more the rush of those wheels underfoot caused her to take herself on the bus from Croydon to a Streatham roller-skating shop. Grandma stood in the queue behind a row of South London youth and at the appropriate moment gave her shoe size to an increasingly nervous attendant. Thank goodness the fever abated the moment the skates were on. “I felt a little bit unsteady.” She took the skates off and the bus back home.

Grandma had the mischievousness of a child and the determination of a warrior. It was with these qualities that she lived for her family. Her bloodline was her duty and her reward. As far as she was concerned we were the most important people in the world. This didn’t make us feel better than anyone else, just more important to her. She delighted in our pleasures and was distressed by our pains.

Although private, polite and not making any public fuss, she would take all necessary steps to give us the best possible experience that she could conjure. At the Lord Mayor’s Parade or the Changing of the Guard, she would elbow her way through crowd with cries of “let the little boy through” pushing us ahead of her, so that we really did get the best view possible, while she made do with a face full of backpack behind a 6 foot tourist.

Arriving at her house for a family gathering, or even for a casual visit, not so much as a saucer of space was left on any horizontal surface, such was the assembly of plates and bowls of delicacies. Her one disappointment was if you didn’t try everything. On numerous occasions I would complain after the third ‘main course’ that I was in agony from being so stuffed that I had heartburn. “Oh god Josh dear,” she would say, “take a break, go and stretch out of the sofa, and come back when you are ready.” Those meals really were a marathon.

And she would run a marathon for us. You know that ‘film moment’ when you say goodbye at the carriage door and as the train pulls away, you gaze from the window to see your, well normally it’s your lover, not your Grandmother, run with the train, waving. Well, Grandma always ran the full length of the platform. Right into her late 70s. Always. Running, crying and waving all at the same time. Inside, cosseted by the love we felt, we would immediately rummage through the many layers of plastic bags to disinter the ‘food for travelling’. To the envy of fellow passengers we would bring out a gastronomic feast of things that were our ‘favourites’. One delicacy that was almost exclusively saved for train journeys, was ‘yellow potato sandwiches’ which consisted of a soft brown roll, a layer of mashed yellow potatoes, sliced chicken breast and thinly cut pickled cucumbers. They were delicious.

Yellow potatoes are a whole entity unto themselves. These golden globes, crispy on the outside, chewy in the middle and soft on the inside (a heavenly trio) are specialities of Grandma alone. The post colonially curious amongst you can check out the article I wrote with Grandma on their hybrid origin here.

*****

Stepping into that hospital room and seeing her there for the first time is devastating. Hollow face. Trying to find things to say. “Hello Grandma.” She opens her bright black sparkling eyes. “Josh dear” and brushes away the tears from my cheeks. She is the one person I have known that when she said “Josh dear” or “Josh darling”, as she always did, the ‘d’ of that darling or that dear, was so affirmative, so full of ardour, that sometimes it almost stung.

It is amazing how quickly you adapt. You accept that this is now the situation and you deal with it. You are pushed between wanting to make her ‘better’ and for the executioner to do his thing without hesitation. She always wanted “a quick chop”.

*****

Grandma has been the constant in my life: the steady, reliable haven, a kind of ultimate return. Her own devastation and subsequent depression at the loss of her beloved husband Ellis, after over 60 years of marriage was a profound setback in her late life but even then she remained dedicated to us all.

Grandma’s devotion to her family was not just some holy altruism. It was also what gave her purpose, pleasure and meaning. When her husband was dying, aged 91, she was desperate to make him more comfortable. “What can I get you? What can I do for you?” she begged. “Peace,” he responded. With a forlorn sigh she replied, “That’s the one thing I can’t give you.” What was not in her power, was to leave us be.

In 2000 Grandma and I went to Barcelona together on a long weekend break. We strolled up and down Las Ramblas and through the cobbled streets of the old town. We had to have late lunches as nowhere was open early enough for our suppertime. We ate paella at the harbour and went paddling in the sea. In El Corte Inglés department store in the Plaça de Catalunya, Grandma bought a towering stack of Turrón, the Spanish nougat, as gifts for members of the family. At one point we agreed to separate and I arranged to meet Grandma back at the hotel an hour later.

When I arrived at the hotel there was no sign of Grandma. As time progressed, I began to panic. Whenever we visited Grandma, we would have to contrive a stated arrival time that was later than that intended because Grandma would always position herself behind her net curtains in a constant vigil, gazing at the pathway in front of her house. Just 10 minutes late would produce an outpouring of grief as to how worried she had been.

The tables had been turned and I sat outside her hotel room cursing myself for what I had done and wondering what on earth I should do now.

Forty minutes later, I saw her tiny little frame appear at the top of the stairs, her arms wedged together like a steering wheel lock, dripping with bags. She had found a street market. “I just couldn’t resist,” she said.

We sat on her hotel bed eating sweet, perfectly ripe peaches like naughty children at a midnight feast.

*****

I think about her house: the abstract floral world of the 1950s, 60s and 70s; the couch, which has lasted my entire lifetime; all now accidentally à la mode. I remember the stacks of food in boxes and bags in the garage, where the extra fridge and extra freezer would store ‘additional supplies’.

I see the Yves Klein blue of the nurses’ uniforms. We sit around her bed, waiting. The depersonalised trappings of the hospital are safe but alienating. We look at her fragile chest, with shallow breath, go up and down; the pulse, strong, is visible at her neck. We follow each of her movements, looking for meaning. Every so often we try to reassure her. Very occasionally, she smiles.

*****

I was asked recently what made Grandma special to me. To be honest I had difficulty in answering. It was not that she was unique but that she was uniquely mine, ours, as her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In a way what Grandma provided for us was a kind of aggressive ordinariness. To be part of Grandma’s world was to experience unquestioning love, to know that there was always someone who was thinking about you and wanting what was best for you with unlimited generosity. Above all, Grandma represented ‘home’ in all its ramifications: a place where one lives, a social unit, the situation in which something flourishes, and where the vulnerable are cared for.

Yes, she had a good innings but that’s not really the point. The point is that without her it will be harder to uphold what she represents. The best we can do is to strive to be more like Grandma. I am sad that she is going; I feel relieved that she will no longer be in pain; but most of all I feel thankful, so incredibly thankful for the benefit of her love.

Religion, Recycling & Recycling Religion

2010-01-05T21:31:00.018-02:00

We brought in 2010 at the celebration of a terreiro (or temple) that is part of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé.

Candomblé has its roots in Africa and the many different religions brought over to Brazil by the slaves who were forced to immigrate. Compulsory conversion of slaves to Catholicism meant many of the religious rituals had to be made in secret or combined with Christianity in some way. The result is a kind of syncretistic approach incorporating bits and pieces of different religious approaches from across the world, though centring on the Yoruba Orixás (spirit) tradition. It is almost entirely an oral culture with no official holy text.

Although widely practiced in Brazil (especially in the northern state of Bahia, centring around its capital Salvador) it is only relatively recently that it has been legally recognised. There is still something of a stigma and a degree of hysteria, about the practice today. Stories of strange and sinister ‘happenings’ in terreiros abound, with descriptions of frightening possessions as the spirits descend into the bodies of worshippers. Got to be worth a visit.

The invitation was extended to us (but not without prior appraisal and agreement from the pai do santo, or master) via the ever-smiling Renato Bolelli Rebouças, a very interesting set-designer, who has one of the sunniest dispositions of anyone I have ever met. Indeed his permanent glow of euphoria was one of the strongest drives to see his ‘church’ and learn something of his religion.

The terreiro that he belongs to is called Aruanda and is described by the pai do santo, Kabila, as being ‘contemporary Candomblé’, in which the syncretism of centuries is adapted to the modern world. Drinking and sex are allowed (one might even say, encouraged).

Kabila is a fashion stylist. When I was told this, before we met, my vision of a wizened wise old man suddenly receded and I was left thinking that it was rather an incongruous mix, couture and faith. But actually it makes for a very interesting and extraordinarily ‘stylish’ terreiro and is very fitting for a religion that is premised on the power of material culture. You dress and arrange objects to entice the spirits.

Just over an hour’s drive from the centre of São Paulo, Aruanda is set in the countryside of Itatuba. Aruanda is an incredible looking place with a superabundance of mainly recycled objects that hold next to no economic value but are positioned in such a way that they shimmer with aesthetic and spiritual purpose.

We were given a tour and I was allowed to take photographs but I can’t really remember the detailed and complex meanings apportioned to each place. Here is a wall covered with votives and offerings that Kabila has arranged and left open to the elements.

These weather beaten bits and bobs are strangely magnetic and oddly unified.

This is the hut dedicated to ancestors.

This altar (made out of empty wine bottles) is a place to, erm, well I’m not quite sure exactly but it’s to do with the physical body.

Whereas the altar in this room is to do with the spirit.

There was also a very pretty Wendy House type thing that represents childhood.

One of my favourite things was that the clothes of the Orixás that have already ascended and no longer ‘possess’ the body of Kabila are placed high up in trees and given to the elements.

There is also a brilliant floor made out of salvaged tiles in the place where worshippers eat and chat.

I don’t have any other terreiro to compare this one too but it was very beautifully done and had a serene kind of atmosphere that was quite overwhelming. Many of the devotees here are artists and it had something of the spirit of what I imagine an arty commune from the 1960s might have been like. Visiting on New Year’s Eve was out of season because the rituals proper (sacrifices, multiple possessions, etc.) don’t start again until mid-January. This was mainly a social occasion for about 20, of the 60 ‘children’ of Aruanda. However there was an incarnation and visit from Kabila’s personal Orixás: Dona Maria Gertrudes. If you are thinking that this sounds like the name of a Brazilian drag queen then that’s not completely inappropriate. Dona Maria Gertrudes describes herself as a kind of permissive transsexual, a female prostitute in a former life whose spirit has now entered the male body of Kabila. She is the queen of all Orixás in Aruanda.

We were all sitting around drinking beer quite happily when all of a sudden, as if a tornado had swung into the room, and amidst the loudest possible multiple drumming, Dona Maria Gertrudes entered spinning like a wild dervish whirligig. Could this be the same person who had calmly shown us round the premises just an hour earlier? It is a cliché but really, you had to be there. The force of this crazy dance was extraordinary, compelling and quite scary. Even as a jaded critic of ‘performance’ I would still say that the rush of energy was something powerful. To be honest, I was quite unexpectedly nauseous and felt close to tears.

After singing and dancing things calmed down a bit and Dona Maria Gertrudes went round and talked to us all individually. She was quite lewd and confrontational. And it is my understanding that it is through these kinds of provocations that this spirit tries to shift the perceptions of the congregation and, no doubt, the person whose body she borrows for her incarnation.

I asked permission to take some photographs and Dona Maria Gertrudes seemed quite happy. I’m including a blurry one (very low light levels!) to give something of the movement of her frenetic dance.

Then after auctioning off some of her adornments and clothes (devotees want them to keep something of her energy and to make a contribution to the upkeep of the terreiro) she left. A short time later Kabila came back and we all then sat down for a feast.

Talking of feasts…

BANANA UPDATE

The mind-boggling array of banana produce here really became apparent this week when I stumbled upon a ‘banana market’. On sale were massive range of shapes and sizes of banana. The sheer volume of bananas was impressive in itself. I have subsequently learnt (actually from the back of a packet of Tipikus ‘100% natural banana pieces’) that bananas are Brazil’s favourite fruit and their largest international export.

I bought a bunch of teeny-weeny ones and ate them immediately as a kind of ‘amuse bouche’. Intense banana flavour. Lovely.

On the same day we passed a very large supermarket, not so close to home, but we decided to explore anyway. There was half an entire aisle dedicated to banana produce!

This is where the aforementioned Tipikus was purchased.

Plain dried banana. OK but nothing special. Other banana purchases this week include a ‘banana flavoured ice-bar’: Melona. Milky, cold, banana. Ordinary. Nice. (Actually, I think the melon flavoured ones which the brand names itself after are actually much tastier.)

And then these, erm, crisp things, simply called ‘Banana’. Not crisp. Oily. Barely recognisable as banana. Pretty horrible.

Bananinha still wins.

END OF BANANA UPDATE

Although 100% of municipal waste collection ends up in landfill there is a Brazilian obsession with recycling. It is something of a paradox.

Much of this preoccupation is to do with seeing ‘pretty’ things made from trash. There is even a word for it: ‘sucata’. While the literal dictionary translation of sucata seems to be ‘scrap iron’, my understanding is that in Portuguese it has come to denote something that is made out of trash. There is a whole rubbish craft thing going on here.

These Christmas decorations were some of the nicest I have seen and are made entirely out of recycled materials:

The ingenious ‘super-dust-pan’ is made out of a recycled can:

And here is recycled Jesus:

There was even a TV drama in which the central character’s rags to riches Hollywood dream is due to recycling. Rainha da Sucata (Queen of Scrap) was a Brazilian telenovela broadcast in 179 episodes in 1990. It follows the fortunes of Maria do Carmo Pereira, who makes millions from scrap and then spends. The melodrama follows her rise and fall. ‘High-rise’ and fall in the case of the dramatic antagonist Laurinha, who ends up throwing herself off the top of a skyscraper. If you want to see what the Brazilian telenovelas are like click on the image below. This 1 minute 29 second clip should tell you all you need to know. (One random addendum. In Brazil’s multi-racial utopia almost all the characters, in these hugely popular telenovelas, are white.)

For a more radical televisual experience and certainly a more extreme form of recycling, you might want to try and get hold of the incredible 2005 documentary Estamira by Marcos Prado. You may have already seen it. It was on international release and won a slew of awards.

Estamira is the real life story of the woman who gives the film its title. Born into a middleclass family she suffers a series of misfortunes and is subject to different kinds of domestic abuse. She ends up working (and for sometime living) on Jardim Gramacho, the massive rubbish tip on the fringes of Rio de Janeiro, which she declares she loves.

Estamira has developed a psychosis, a kind of schizophrenia that manifests itself in wild ramblings that nevertheless often sound completely sane. In the ultra-Catholic God-fearing suburban environment in which she lives, she has totally rejected conventional religion and sees humans as legislators of their own fate.

Although it depicts people living in conditions I can barely imagine, Estamira is a very beautiful film. At first I found this over-aestheticisation inappropriate: sweeping long shots, dramatic music, grainy black and white sequences. But what it does more than anything, especially in a society so predicated on economic difference as the benchmark for social status, is to give the subjects of the film dignity. Ultimately it seems to be a film less about the political situation in which thousands of people turn to trash to try and eek out a living and more about social stigma.

So as the angels of sucata carry the gravy train of recycling skyward (in what has to be one of the oddest seasonal decorations ever) I am left realising that, in Brazil at least, the environmental ramifications of rubbish are eclipsed by those for this country's citizens.

Paradise & Bins on Pins

2009-12-31T11:25:00.031-02:00

After a quiet Christmas a group of us set off for a four-day holiday to the ‘countryside’.

200km north east of São Paulo is the pousada (or ‘inn’) Trilha das 7 Cachoeiras (Trek of the 7 Waterfalls). This was our destination.

Leaving São Paulo and the holiday gridlock was painful but we were soon on the open road, past countless sprawling favelas and into the Atlantic forest. En route we stopped for a juice at the seriously quaint town of São Luiz do Paraitinga.

Here even the rubbish looks cute, like slightly over-sized festive decorations hanging off the railings.

The town felt like it was on a kind of permanent holiday, with live musicians in many of the bars and cafés, spilling onto the street.

Not long after this the concreted road gave way to a muddy track and the car slowly bumped its way around the mountains.

Much of the Atlantic woodland has been deforested; first for coffee plantations and then for cattle, but apparently this aggressive farming is on the decline and there is a genuine push to reforest and bring income through ‘eco-tourism’.

The biodiversity of the forest is extraordinary, with some claiming that it has a higher (if less flamboyant) variety of plant and animal life than the Amazon. Giant walls of trees make mountains around you and not a patch of land is barren. Everything is a shade of green.

At the end of the mud track was Trilha das 7 Cachoeiras, an incredibly idyllic series of simple and sensitively made buildings set in a massive landscape of forest and connected by the 7 waterfalls that give its name. It really is a special place. Arriving there after just 3 hours from the crazy megalopolis of São Paulo felt like stepping into some kind of paradise.

A husband and wife who live between this place and São Paulo own the pousada and surrounding land. They are on an ambitious plan to, quote, “save the planet” and are planting thousands of trees on their estate. Well, you have to start somewhere.

Our first full day was spent doing practically nothing. (This is not something that I am usually very good at.) Lounging around in hammocks, exploring the ‘territory’. That kind of thing.

One of the 7 waterfalls close to the main house is a kind of natural ‘hydro-massage’. We clambered down the mud and rock and dropped into the refreshingly cold and fast-moving water. Easing our way up stream with the help of a guide rope, one at a time, we pushed ourselves under the torrent.

The pressure of the water is extraordinary. Even from this relatively short drop the impact is fierce. It gives you a glimpse of the power and strength of water. Pummeled, you grip the rope and hold your breath. It’s like a thousand tiny hands punching you over and over.

The second day was the organised ‘trek’ through the forest. A thousand pairs of feet must have hiked the trail before, but because there was no formal path, it really felt like an adventure into the unknown depths. Scrambling over rocks or under vegetation, wading across streams and avoiding plants or poisonous insects, it was all somehow marvelously reminiscent of the childhood dreams I used to have of traveling across the jungle.

At many of the 7 waterfalls we stripped down to our trunks and splashed around or made for the cascades themselves, offering our bodies once more to a battering from the torrents.

4 hours into our 7 hour hike it began to rain (and rain and rain). A kind of fleshy, hot, wet rain. I know it probably sounds odd but the rain here somehow seems wetter than in Europe. Each drop is a kind of heavy, plump peach of a raindrop.

Needless to say we were soaked. Trouble in paradise: my sneakers now stink of pondweed. They just refuse to dry out completely.

The third day we walked a leisurely 40 minutes away from paradise to the little village of Catuçaba. Here even the taxis are super-cute:

VW Beetle. The standard cheap car in Brazil is still the best looking.

The afternoon was spent again in the falls. In the evening there was a beautiful firefly display. I had wanted to see this for a long time and no idea that it would happen, so for me it was a big thrill.

The fourth day and it was already time to go. Non-stop rain made it easier to leave paradise behind. Well, actually, it made it a lot, lot more difficult. The mud track was like a swamp and even once we made it onto tarmac the frequent ‘mountain in road’ where the rains had caused pinnacles to topple and slide, made the journey hazardous at times. We owe our safe passage to the driving skills of the newly titled ‘super-Breno’.

BANANA UPDATE:

The quest for banana things that nevertheless aren’t quite bananas continues. Paradise provided a plate of possibilities at breakfast during which the ‘banana lady’ came and served us a variety of banana-based dishes.

Baked banana with cinnamon in which you scoop out the warm soft banana from the skin with your spoon; banana virado, which is a kind of compote with cheese, and; banana pancakes – easily my favourite and which commanded a forceful: “Sim, por favor! Obrigado”, each time the banana lady passed by with her copper pan.

All of these were delicious in different (albeit banana-related) ways but none has quite surpassed the pure banana pleasure of the Bananinha eulogized last week.

At completely the other end of the banana-pleasure-scale come the children’s ‘treat’ discovered in a café in Catuçaba and simply titled: ‘Banana’.

Although the graphic is excellent (and promises a banana delight) the thing itself was foul. Like a dump of extra sweet refined sugar held together with Evo-Stick in a supposedly edible cardboard cup and tasting not one gobbet of banana. Oh well. You can’t have it all.

END OF BANANA UPDATE

My rubbish research has led me to become a collector of Brazilian waste bins. The particular bins I mean are the strange ‘baskets on legs’ that appear in various forms.

At first I thought that these were a municipal initiative but their sporadic appearance (they are much more common in richer areas) and the vast differential in size, shape and style, made it clear that this could not be the case. Apparently, the city officials turn a blind eye but do not sanction them at all. As a citizen, you are responsible for the pavement directly outside your house, which, as I am sure you can imagine, means that some areas are paved with ornate marble mosaic and others are completely unmade. These ‘baskets on legs' are therefore erected by the owners of the houses directly adjacent and are constructed in order to prevent stray dogs ripping open the bags.

Here are a few from my collection thus far:

This one looks like some kind of sculpture. You might just see that it has a catch for a padlock. Some people lock their rubbish away and give the collectors a key to avoid 'rubbish theft'.

This one is kept behind bars.

This is an interesting one because it is made out of rubbish. I like that. A waste bin made of waste.

I’ve been trying to think of what I can actually ‘make’ in the limited time that I have in Brazil, without any formal institutional space and modest support. I think I’ve come to a decision. I plan to make a number of proposals for projects, pieces or ideas. I am thinking that there should be quite a large number of proposals – between 30 and 50 – I’m not sure yet. Some of these will be ‘almost impossible’ and will have to exist at the level of a proposal alone; others will be so slight that they are barely worth proposing. I will then make a kind of performance lecture in which I will present the proposals to those people that I have met here in São Paulo: curators, programmers and people working in the rubbish and recycling industries. The idea of Artist Links is to make connections for potential working relationships, so I would like to use these proposals to try and create collaborations for projects in the future.

It is the last day of 2009. Somehow being in this hot, sprawling, foreign place all sense of occasion and time has evaporated. As everything is new and somehow ‘special’ to me, it seems excessive to think about the celebrations as well. But Brazilians like a party, so we’ll see what happens tonight. Happy New Year.

Treats, Trees & Trash

2009-12-23T13:55:00.011-02:00

This week has seen us move from Sumaré to Aclimação (think Highgate to Brixton) to the house of Debora Bolsoni, artist and programmer at Centro Cultural São Paulo. We are now in the centre of this throbbing megalopolis and I have fallen in love.

I have fallen in love with an after dinner treat.

This is no stale after dinner mint imperial served in an aluminium bowl and fingered by many clammy unwashed hands. Oh no. This is an individually wrapped chunk of smooth banana pleasure in the form of a ‘Bananinha’.

I’ve always had a ‘thing’ about bananas. It hasn’t always been a good thing. When I was a child I hated them. And as I am still unsure about the fibrous texture, I am often sniffing out the ‘pure banana flavour’ delivered in the perfect form: ice-cream, candy, chocolate. At last, I think I might have found it.

Yes, it looks like a cuboid of poo with crusty bits on top but really, it tastes of a tropical paradise.

Each bite presents a soft chewy melt of banana loveliness.

Early experiments with refrigeration have proved highly successful and have only increased the gooey pleasure. No, I am not taking orders.

Refrigeration is certainly needed as it’s early summer here and Santa is melting.

I’ve managed to avoid mentioning it so far but it seems impossible to go any further without some kind of acknowledgement. The unavoidable truth is that here, like everywhere else, it is Christmas time, and despite the blistering city heat there is snow everywhere. Snowdrifts have passed under the tropical storms and have landed on shopping centres and artificial Norwegian pines everywhere. Take a look at this 75 meter high compelling monstrosity. You just can’t help but wonder.

Riding on top of this tissue paper, cotton-bud and neon avalanche in his fur-trimmed red suit is the pervasive Santa. In fact, I have never seen so many Santas. You, like me, like many Brazilians (it would seem) might find it odd that in South America, this fat old white unshaven man with inappropriate clothing, braves the city summer heat to be more present than he has ever seemed to me in Europe.

Here, unlike in the UK, children still get to sit on Santa’s knee. (No hysteria here then, about wandering ‘clause’ or what might be happening in Santa’s lap.)

But as the beautiful brown children of this multiracial continent plead with this white father for his benefaction, I, like so many others it would seem, search for an alternative image of festive cheer.

That can be found in the incredible (incredibly simple but incredibly effective) illuminations in the trees of Ibirapuera park. Streamers of low voltage lights have been pinned up trunks and right to the ends of branches, creating an enchanted and spellbinding forest that does offer something of the ‘magic’ of Christmas.

And so to rubbish. There have been a couple of very interesting meetings this week.

‘Coopmare’ is a cooperative of catadores and the longest standing in São Paulo. Although their numbers have been severely reduced due to the curtailment on the days trucks can collect garbage (another traffic reduction measure) there are about 20 full time catadores that work here with additional affiliated members.

Although there has been some sponsorship (through for example the Corporate Social Responsibility schemes of Brazilian banks) basically this is a private set up.

Based underneath a city fly-over are thousands of bags of bottles, cans, cardboard boxes etc. Anything that can be recycled. These have either been collected by the catadores or brought by local residents.

The items are then sorted, where possible compressed, and then collected by the recycling companies.

90% of aluminium in Brazil is recycled. This is a huge amount and the foremost in the world, recently overtaking Japan. But whereas in Japan it is (as I discovered last year) because everyone is a ‘good citizen’ and disposes of their rubbish correctly, here in Brazil it is purely because of the economic imperative. Aluminium cans are hunted and collected because they are worth money. You don’t see cans littering the streets because they are swept up almost the second they are thrown away.

One interesting thing about Coopamare: no smell. And this isn’t because they are washing it at the cooperative because they aren’t. After 20 years of living next to Coopamare, the citizens of this neighbourhood have come to learn that it is they who need to wash the recycling before they throw it out.

Another fascinating trip was to the Prefectura da Cidade de São Paulo Secretaria de Serviços to meet with the Diretor da Divisão Administrativa, Jorge Bernardino Tassi (the person in charge of the rubbish personnel for the city). I don’t think a more welcoming man could be met; or one that could manage to share so much personal information with complete strangers in such a small amount of time. (‘My son speaks Russian, Spanish and Japanese, he is 2 meters tall and very muscular; my daughter is severely anaemic, she recently had an operation to remove body fat; I am a football referee and have a classic white beetle VW.’) Patricia Ceschi who is my (brilliant) producer here didn’t know quite which bits of information it was useful to translate.

Jorge Tassi is a self-confessed ‘people person’; that is, after all, his job. He introduced us to the ‘star attraction’ of our visit Alfonso Celso Teixeira de Moraes (they don’t stint on the names here).

Alfonso is a mechanical engineer by training who is now, well, a kind of rubbish engineer. For 20 years he worked as a mechanic in the municipal department that maintained the garbage trucks. When waste collection and disposal was privatised, he was called upon for advice. After some subsequent training in environmental management, he became a technical expert on trash. (He has been surrounded by rubbish for 38 years.)

He is a living database on all things to do with São Paulo garbage. All the figures were available to him without the slightest hesitation or recourse to any notes. And some of the figures are astounding.

São Paulo produces 9,700 tonnes of domestic rubbish each day. Out of that, approximately 2,000 tonnes have the potential to be recycled but in reality only 140 tonnes make it. (In fact, as Alfonso explained, 60% is organic matter and cannot be conventionally recycled, 20% is immediately suitable for recycling, and 20% is suitable but practically near impossible to recycle – think of a piece of paper torn into little bits and thrown out with your banana skins.)

Recycling is handled by private companies or by the catadores, without municipal support.

Each person throws out an average of 0.85 kg of rubbish every day, which means I would discard about 6 times my body weight in a year. (If you count in the commercial waste, the figures nearly double – 15,000 tonnes per day, 1.2 kg per person.)

There are 2 private companies that are 5 years into 20-year waste collection and disposal contracts. Each is responsible for one half of the city. As companies they are not allowed to do any other activity and they are subject to continuous review. So far, Alfonso thinks they are doing a pretty good job.

If the waste suitable for recycling is not sorted before it is thrown out for the municipal collection, it will not be recycled. What happens to the waste? 100% landfill. One-hundred-percent.

This badly photographed maquette shows what a landfill (supposedly) looks like before it has been filled and how it is transformed into a lovely green field 20 years later, once the toxic fumes have died down:

And here is a photograph of some photographs of the ‘historic’ landfills of São Paulo:

The current landfill in operation is 1,000,000 cubic meters. That is a lot of space. But each day 970 trucks, each carrying 20 cubic meters of ‘produce’ make the journey to the dump. Eventually it is all dumped out.

São Paulo is on its last landfill. Even in a country this huge, desperate alternatives need to be found. (1) Incineration would see an 80% reduction in the necessity for landfill but is very expensive, (2) Composting would need to take place outside of the city as the fumes are very hazardous, (3) Effective recycling would reduce the amount of waste that needs to be disposed of, but the most dramatic solution would be to (4) Reduce the amount of rubbish people throw out. The rubbish expert’s advice: waste less. Yes, it sounds like something we’ve heard a million times before, but when each of those one million times represents a cubic meter in the last landfill in São Paulo, the urgency for action cannot be overstated.

While all these facts and figures were mind-boggling and important, it was actually something Alfonso said about littering in the city that really made me think. São Paulo is clean in the rich parts but littered with garbage everywhere else. Why? Alfonso said it was about pride. He wants people to have pride in their city, to own it, to feel it is theirs. Once they do that, he believes, they will treat it with respect. He gives the example of the metro. Although it is limited in size, it is a vital transport route for the millions that travel on it everyday. And it is spotless. This is completely true. When you walk off the street and descend to the underground railway, it is like entering the sanitized world of the cosmetics hall of an upmarket department store. Alfonso says that people who eat a chocolate bar on the metro put the wrapper in their pocket until they have passed through the exit barrier where they retrieve it only to chuck it on the street. Alfonso was wary of over-interpretation but he seemed to think that people don’t litter the metro because they need it and are proud of it. That is the way he would like them to think of their city as a whole. Perhaps this is the real solution to the garbage problems, and not just of Brazil.

It was an immensely informative meeting.

Just as we were about to leave Alfonso mentioned the sort of beginnings of a ‘Waste Museum’. Of course my interest was immediately peaked. In a disused office room off the main corridor was an eclectic collection of objects salvaged from the rubbish and arranged thematically.

Some with descriptive labels: ‘89: Chimpanze Talhado na Casca do Coco’.

Who did this? Why? Is it ongoing? Information was scarce and Alfonso had left for another appointment. But I am determined to find out more. In this ‘museum’, away from the public eye and barely bothered with by the staff of the municipality, lies something of what is at the heart of my research here in Brazil. Why do we cherish some objects and throw others out? What is the value of material culture? While the art market is kept buoyant with high cost artefacts, what worth can be found in the things we throw away?

Coffee, Cars & Catadores

2009-12-17T10:23:00.000-02:00

Here I am in the land of football, soap operas, cars and coffee; literally in the latter case, as my companion Goh and I, are staying in a small but well-appointed studio in the lower level of a private house in ‘Cafelândia’.

Coffee Land is in Sumaré to the west of the centre of São Paulo, Brazil’s megalopolis and the 7th most populated city on Earth. We have this studio for few days while we find a base for the next two and a half months. Sumaré is a very safe neighbourhood, we are continually told. (I don’t know whether this is despite or because of the 24-hour security guards stationed in booths – think portaloo with windows – along the street.)

I am here as part of the British Council Artist Links scheme. Artist Links offers time to develop creative practice while working in another country. It is not an exhibition programme and you are left pretty much to your own devices. My project is to pick up on some of the work I was making in Japan last year, which focussed on waste collection and disposal.

As I have discovered during this first week, rubbish is everywhere in São Paulo, on lips as well as on the streets. Key to the discussion (and collection) of rubbish are the ‘catadores’, or ‘human scavengers’. The catadores have a vital but nevertheless ‘informal’ relationship to the city’s waste system and counterpart the official government run or privately contracted collection and disposal services.

It doesn’t take very long before you see catadores, with their trucks and dogs.

Estimates vary but even a conservative figure of 300,000 catadores in Brazil, indicates how many people are working in this way. There are 84 catadores cooperatives in São Paulo state alone, handling over 700 tonnes of scrap each month.

And while the catadores pull their trucks in this city of contrasts, everyone else is driving, or rather trying to. São Paulo does have a public transport system but the Metro only covers a tiny proportion of the centre of the city. There is no rail network at all. In the 1960s the government decided to let the railway decline in favour of the American model of a city of motorways. The result in a city with millions: gridlock.

The saying in São Paulo goes: you can’t get anywhere without a car and you can’t get anywhere with one. In this last week we have spent some considerable time behind the driver, behind the driver in front.

The city authorities have tried a bunch of things to try and reduce congestion including a rotation scheme banning drivers from using their cars one day each week. The consequence however, is simply that people who can afford it buy another car, meaning that there are more, not less, cars on the road.

Road rage rules. The Brazilian version of the Highway Code is thrown out of the car window and into the gutter. No wonder there are accidents. We saw the results of a really nasty four-lane-tumble round the corner from Cafelândia.

And so someone’s catastrophe becomes the object of our curiosity.

Pedestrians have almost no rights. Zebra crossings are purely decorative and traffic lights, like festive colours, have a vague signification without ever committing to a definite meaning.

There seems to be a constant tug of war, a push or pull in opposite directions. Take busking for example. The other day we were walking down the Avenue Paulista, one of the main thorough-fairs in the city. On one side of the street there was a young urban dance troupe strutting their stuff to incredibly loud dance music…

…while on the other side a band of young players, dressed in their smart red uniforms with gold braid, were working through their repertoire with the visual accompaniment of a velvet and sequin clad gymnast performing alternately with a ribbon, hoop or clubs.

As the audience of the band strained their necks to listen to a groovy arrangement of Gruber’s ‘Silent Night’ and the velvet gymnast waved her ribboned wand (a cultural conglomeration that was already odd enough in itself) the urban dance group pumped up the volume, just six lanes of traffic away. And so the stille nacht became a musical battleground, with the conductor of the band widening his arms to encourage a crescendo. Not to be outdone, the dancers took advantage of the gridlock to make their way over to the band’s side of the street and began dancing just meters away to their own rhythm. Meanwhile the ribbon twirls became more frenetic. As observers, we didn’t know quite which way to look.

And after one week, it is this diversity, this upfront feistiness that makes Brazil so terrifying and exciting all at once. All of life is here in this city of abject poverty and extreme wealth. In the space of just a few hours I had visited a catadores rubbish deposit and had a delicious cocktail in watermelon slice Hotel Unique.

Was it unique? Well no, not really. It was just another luxury hotel with a fancy bar on the roof. But the context and contrast of Brazil does feel unique. It is a thrill and a privilege to be able to experience so many different aspects of one culture all at once.

Rubbish Events

2008-12-16T07:47:00.001-02:00

And so to my final post. I am writing this entry with only two more nights in Japan. If everything goes according to plan, I will be in the UK by the end of the week. I still haven’t packed a thing. Despite not buying any clothes I seem to have amassed a good extra suitcase worth of stuff in the last two and a half months. (What? No clothes? None at all? And to think that you went from XS to M overnight and you didn’t even bother to take advantage of the situation!)

The majority of the last two weeks have been spent in my library in a range of different posts – but mainly as librarian and waiter. It has been very nice to see the space being used.

The reactions have been generally very good. Children seem to love it. There has been more bewilderment than I had expected. I thought that it was quite an easy project to understand and encounter. Some people walk through one door, see me sitting at my desk and walk straight through the other door, looking for the ‘art’ and not understanding what this ‘office’ is doing in the middle of a studio.

The Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish events have helped to activate the space.

Champagne Reception
Saturday 6 December 7-7.30 pm
Do you work in the garbage collection or recycling industries? Then you are welcome to this exclusive private view of the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish. You will be given the chance to browse the shelves of the library while sipping champagne.

Well despite quite a bit of cajoling, no rubbish collectors showed up. There I was in my bowtie and apron with the beautifully hand crafted champagne cups made out of plastic green tea bottles, forlornly waiting for guests that never arrived.

To be honest, we pretty much knew that this was a step too far for Moriya but it was still disappointing. The piece operated for the art crowd who showed up for the opening, insomuch as during those thirty minutes of the evening, if they tried to get into my piece, they were asked if they worked for a garbage collection or recycling company and were turned away when they responded in the negative.

The Traditional English Afternoon Tea (with specially imported Fortnum & Mason Earl Grey) was however a sell out.

Traditional English Afternoon Tea
Saturday 13 December 3pm
Come and enjoy a traditional English Afternoon Tea, with cucumber sandwiches and scones in the unusual surroundings of the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish.
¥1,000 per party of two

The table layout was all made out of recyclable stuff. Even the cushions were bin bags with packing material stuffed in them.

I donned my bowtie a second time to serve a kind of watered down version of what I once had on an awful afternoon in the Ritz.

Despite several years of silver service training and practice, I could not negotiate my way behind the guests in the narrow Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish and was excusing myself over and over again as I stepped on people’s toes with hot tea in hand. It was more Fawlty Towers than Piccadilly. It was terribly bizarre. It certainly had the effect of enticing into ARCUS some of the Moriya ladies of leisure, which was my intention.

I was determined that the service for the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish Hotel should be truly silver.

Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish Hotel
Saturday 6-Saturday 13 December (check in at 7 pm / depart following morning by 10 am)
Book a night of luxury in the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish. Whether you want to celebrate a special occasion or simply treat a loved one, let the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish Hotel be your host. The package for two people includes:
- candle lit dinner for two
- personal tour of the library by artist
- curator’s talk from the Director of ARCUS
- private musical entertainment
- continental breakfast
So why not wake up in unusual surroundings by spending a night with us.
¥15,000 per couple, per night

I cannot tell you how much organisation it takes to run a hotel. Even if there are just two guests and it is only for one night! (Although this was advertised as running for the duration of the installation, we were only ever going to do it once. It was too expensive and way too much effort to repeat it.)

I was determined that we shouldn’t have and art world couple and despite the gallery goers being by far the most numerous would-be guests, we offered the night to Mr and Mrs Shimoda from Yokohama. We don't know very much about them but it was rumoured that he is a decorator and that they are interested in art.

Machiko went to pick them up from the station. (“I am the Manager of ARCUS but tonight I am your chauffer.”) They arrived at ARCUS and were met by Mizuki, who took their bags. (“I am the Director of ARCUS but tonight I am your bellboy.”) I greeted them in the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish Hotel with canapés and champagne. (“I am one of the Artists at ARCUS but tonight I am your waiter.”) They really looked completely unsure of what on earth was going on and what world they had stepped into.

After a brief artist’s talk from me, Mizuki gave them a tour of the building and the other two artists’ shows. Daniel and Paulien were plied with beer and asked to stay to answer any questions. (Daniel Salmon has issued a currency as part of his residency here – the Mono – new ‘Esperanto money’. Paulien Oltheten has been making photographs and video of half found half contrived everyday ‘happenings’ around Japan. Their work is intriguing, funny, thoughtful and beautiful.)

And then it was dinner time.

Junko Ito (who ardent followers of this blog may remember escorted me to the doctor and informed me that I had pneumonia) is a fantastic cook (as well as being a painter and costume designer) and after some collaborative discussions, she created a nine course chromatic extravaganza, from white to black, for our guests.

The costs of the ingredients alone were more than Mr and Mrs Shimoda paid for their night of luxury. For the foodies among you, here is the menu.

WHITE
Marinated Seabream
Marinated Nagaimo Potato with Apple
Sashimi of Yuba

BEIGE
Boiled Tofu with Yuzu
Burdock Root and Potato with Sesame Dressing
Chicken Leg with Miso Sauce

PINK
Japanese Soup (Fu, Rolled Yuba, Myoga Ginger)
Raw Spring Rolls of Smoked Salmon
Salad of Grapefruit and Seafood

YELLOW
Sabzi of Cauliflower
Boiled Chrysanthemum Flower
Flan of Sea Urchin

RED
Spicy Tomato Soup
Pickled Red Pepper and Carrot
Tandoori Masala

GREEN
Green Salad
Sauteed Codfish with Butter and Parsley
Boiled Green Beans

PURPLE
Marinated Sweet Potato and Octopus with Basil
Pickled Cabbage and Eggplant with Sour Cream
Grated Daikon Raddish seasoned with Yukari Mint

BROWN
Roast Beef with Wasabi
Sweet Chestnut

BLACK
Christmas Squid Ink Pasta
Compote of Prune with Black Olive
Chocolate Mousse
Coffee

And here is a picture that doesn’t do the plates any justice at all.

It was pretty spectacular and the leftovers that us workers got to taste after the guests had dined, were truly delicious. I was trying to give the food the best possible platform and employed the most formal ‘Opera House’ dining service that I could remember.

I took the plates on the cardboard tray up to the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish Hotel and made sure that formal butler etiquette was followed.

At the end of dinner, it was the cabaret. I sang three songs, with the costume change merely requiring I remove my apron. Funny Valentine, How Do You Keep the Music Playing?, and Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. The final of these, was learnt and sung in Japanese. Oh yes, makka o no ha na no!

I’m going to so enjoy annoying people with this for many Christmasses to come…

Makka na o ha na no
Tonaka-i sañ wa
I tsumo miñna no
Wa-ra-i mono
Demo sono toshino
Kurisuma su no hi
Santa no oji san wa
I-i ma-shita
Kura-i yo michiwa
Pika pika no
Oma-e no ha na ga
Ya-ku ni ta tsu no sa
I tsu mo na-i-te-ta
Tona ka-i sañ wa
Koyo-i ko so wa to
Yoroko bi mashita

After that it was a quick set change and time for the Shimodas to hit the sack.

The following day, with my eyes red as Rudolf’s nose, I cycled the fifteen minutes to ARCUS to make them breakfast in the ‘salon’.

They went home very happy and left us happy too. And now we all have some time to think about what it all really means! The idea with all these events, was to activate the space in a way not normally associated with either libraries or rubbish dumps and to push some of the conceptual frame of the installation a bit. It will take time to make full sense but it was a really great thing to have tried.

The final event was the Book Wreck.

Book Wreck
Sunday 14 December 5pm-7pm
Have you been annoyed by something that you have read? Do you despair at how some things get published? Are some words not even worth the paper they are printed on? Why not come and take out your frustration on one of the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish books? On the last day of the ARCUS Open Studios you will be invited to rip, tear, punch, kick, smash, whack and batter the books. (They will then be officially sent to the paper-recycling centre, where they will be shredded and pulped and hopefully become something better instead.)
The Book Wreck will be on a first come first served basis. No booking required.

The intention here was probably quite clear: the book is supposedly sacred; libraries are about preserving them; in a world of decreasing natural resources what is the status of the paper publication, etc., etc. Actually I had wanted to give the books away, with the idea that they would have another life but I was strictly told that they would have to be returned to the paper recycling plant. They had been thrown out by the citizens of Moriya in the expectation that they would be destroyed and destroyed they must be. So I thought we could start by giving a little helping hand.

Unsurprisingly, this was popular with kids too.

…and families.

Here is Mizuki, the Director of ARCUS destroying a book.

This guy decided to disrobe for the occasion.

And there was quite a lot of throwing torn books up into the air.

There was a big audience in a small space to start with but then by the end, there was just me and this lone guy, who tossed Dante’s Divine Comedy (in Japanese) into the ether.

And so that is it. My rubbish is now ended. It has been an extraordinary rollercoaster of a journey here in Japan, from sashimi to sick bed. It will be one that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Thank you for reading.

Sayonara!

[Photographs of Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish Hotel by Hironao Kuratani; photographs of the Book Wreck by Goh Ideta.]

Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish

2008-12-05T07:30:00.000-02:00

The invitations have been sent, the windows have been cleaned, the beer has arrived and we are all set for the opening tomorrow. In the last blogless fortnight I have been sanding, sorting, washing, stacking, vacuuming, displaying, labelling, alongside a group of stalwart volunteers, to get my Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish ready. Twice my bodyweight in white emulsion has been laboured on these shelves. I laid the carpet with such precision that even my father (the master craftsman) would be satisfied by the joins. Hours have been spent considering the Japanese-English translation of various items of rubbish. And so now I can sit at my library desk and write my blog.

Let me take you on a tour of the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish.

The library is built as a room within a room in the centre of my studio. You can walk through it and come out the other side. But before you do, you have to take off your dirty shoes and put on a pair of slippers. Oh yes, I want my rubbish room to be clean, clean, clean, just like the recycling and waste disposal plant Sahima Clean Center Teraku that I visited all those weeks ago.

The outside view has been kept purposefully ‘rough and ready’, with the intention that when you step inside, you feel transported to another place.

The internal space is a long corridor of a room, with shelves on two sides. At one end there are the library notice boards that explain a bit about each archive.

At the other end is the librarian’s desk at which I am typing now. (Yes the Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish is fully equipped with sockets and internet access! And, OK, no, I didn’t wire them myself.)

On one side of the room is the Rubbish Library, a selection of reading material thrown out by the citizens of Moriya on a single day: Thursday 6 November 2008. Visitors are invited to browse the shelves, remove and read the books.

This is only a selection of what was available and doesn’t seek to be representative of anything other than itself. It is fascinating however, to see what has been thrown up (or rather thrown out) by the process. There is a lot of Manga and it is very satisfying to be completing sets in the library from various different people’s collections.

I have tried to include some jokes in the layout by placing different subjects adjacent to each other. For example, this:

...is next to this:

Actually it was religion that caused most ‘trouble’ as Moriya Manabi-no-sato, the building that houses ARCUS and belongs to the city, is strictly not to be used for ‘religious purposes’. So these books are as taboo as the pornographic ones, if not more so.

There are some very pretty pictures created, like the fading spines of the music books.

My personal favourite is the section dedicated to men’s hairstyles.

There were quite a few books thrown out on the subject on 6th November, including this one, which depicts the latest styles.

I wonder which one the owner chose.

There are also some classic retro editions in the Rubbish Library, including this 1987 football coaching manual.

On the other side of the room is the Library Rubbish, an archive of all the rubbish thrown out by Moriya City Library in one week: Sunday 9 November to Saturday 15 November 2008.

Although everything that could be washed has been washed, some of this stuff is a bit nasty (for example the newspaper used to dispose of organic waste) so visitors are requested to liaise with the librarian if they want to take a closer look. Disposable gloves and masks are available should they be required or requested.

Although washing the rubbish was a real chore, it wasn’t half as bad as it might have been in any other country in the world. If you are set the task of washing rubbish, make sure it is in Japan. The entire liquid waste for the week can fit into half this medium sized jar.

I hope you appreciate that each of these coffee granules had to be sorted from the rubbish! But as they were wet they stuck together and weren’t too difficult. The dust however, was more problematic.

But gram for gram, the pencil shavings were the most time consuming thing to sort.

Other everyday things have a kind of banal beauty to them.

A lot of the stuff had to be dried first. I had shallow drying racks with various foodstuffs both inside my studio and on the balcony for several weeks. The fruit parings were the most troublesome because of the flies but after a windy day or two they dried out.

There are a few lonely odd things that have a kind of pathetic resonance. The single book spine for example:

…or the small blue bouncy ball. (It is a ball and it bounces but to be honest, I don’t know if it really is a ‘bouncy ball’ or not.)

I think my personal favourite is the long row of stacked bento boxes.

It has to be said that I am very happy in my library. I put on some music and dance up and down the aisle stopping every so often to pick up the odd bit of fluff that might have gathered somewhere. I hope I don’t get over protective of the ‘layout’ when the punters come. I’ve got a series of events planned, which start with the Champagne Reception for garbage collectors in the middle of the opening tomorrow night. After all, the whole idea of this space is that it is encountered by the public. Thank goodness they are Japanese.

Jesus and Jizo

2008-11-19T10:41:00.000-02:00

Merry Christmas!

Yes, before the pumpkin decorations were cut from their strings (Happy Halloween!) the Christmas marketing opportunities, erm, I mean celebrations, were ready to take the to the shelves.

Although there isn’t a baby Jesus in sight, nor wise men or angels and Mary and Joseph seem never to have existed, Christmas trees abound, as do snowmen. There are cattle, but they are not lowing at the manger. Cows are everywhere in preparation for the New Year celebrations (which in truth are far bigger deal). 2009 is the year of the cow.

It is surreal to make my way to the sushi counter of the supermarket here accompanied by Frank Sinatra singing The Christmas Song but it is just another example of Japanese culture that decides what ‘bits’ it wants from the rest of the world and often does them better.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack Frost nipping on your nose,
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir,
And folks dressed up like Eskimos.

…and off to get some tuna sashimi.

Actually chestnuts are in season at the moment and it has been a marvellous opportunity to indulge my absolute love of them. Everything becomes chestnut for a few weeks. I even had chestnut tofu a couple of nights ago.

The week started with a trip to Kappabashi – kitchen land – which is an area of about ten blocks devoted to culinary equipment and eating utensils, in the centre of Tokyo. Shop upon shop of everything you could possibly imagine to make and serve the perfect dinner…

…display it…

…and of course, wrap it.

As well as buying every kitchen aid going, you can also buy the food you might want to end up with – in plastic. Kappabashi is as famous for its plastic food as anything else.

I was looking for jars to display some of the rubbish for my installation and there was an overwhelming variety of choice.

The Rubbish Library / Library Rubbish is really beginning to take shape now. Although the fabrication of the library itself is running late (clearly the time keeping of carpenters is not culturally variable) I am really happy with how it is shaping up.

I have spent hours and hours and hours washing rubbish. But I have finished the last bento box and now I get to the fun bit of thinking how it will all be displayed, archived and indexed. I am also planning a series of events including a champagne reception for the ‘bin men’; a traditional English Afternoon Tea; opening the library as a luxury hotel for a night; and a final event in which you will be able to take your aggression out on some of the books by destroying them. So there is a lot to do and I am spending most of my time in the studio now.

However, as ARCUS was shut at the weekend, I went on a two-day holiday, which might be my last opportunity to travel overnight before I have to leave.

My trip took me to Izu Hanto, which is the peninsula underneath Yokohama, about 100 km south of Tokyo, formed a zillion years ago by an eruption from Fuji. I was interested to go there for several reasons, not least of which was because it is the territory that continually appeared in Yoshitsune (see ‘Rubbish Fever’ below) and because it is where the Kaleidoscope Museum is located.

Travelling on the regular commuter train along the coast (it was far less expensive than the Shinkansen) I was thrilled by the ingenuity and thoughtfulness of the carriage designers, that they had given the traditional coach a makeover with large windows and side facing seats, on the coastal side of the train, so that passengers can admire the view.

I’m sorry that there is no view in this picture, I was too busy admiring it. Here is a coastal view from Izu, looking east to the Pacific and beyond.

Next stop San Francisco!

The Kaleidoscope Museum is a small, privately owned, eccentric little place, with lots of kaleidoscopes rather unnecessarily housed in ‘fun’ ways: you picked up telephones, peered through post-boxes, lifted up toilet seats and the like. The rather naff exteriors didn’t seem to do anything for the genuinely beautiful interiors. I hadn’t realised that there was such diversity in the kaleidoscope genus. The real highlight was the largest kaleidoscope in the world, the ‘Space Walk’ in which you enter into the kaleidoscope itself. Here are a few shots of the ever-changing interior:

After an overnight stay in a local ryoken, I headed for Kamakura to see the giant bronze Buddha and Hase-Dera Temple.

The Hase-Dera Temple has been a holy site since 736, with a series of ‘halls’ built and sanctified up until very recently. It was surprisingly moving and very beautiful. Particularly effecting was the Jizo-do Hall with thousands of little Jizo stone statues standing in long rows. They are there to comfort the souls of children that have died or were unborn. Some parents had left toys and sweets as gifts by the main golden Jizo-Bosatsu statue.

In the Temple gardens, this bamboo fountain (the opposite of Versailles) showed that beauty is also incredibly humble.

Down the road is the Daibutsu, the Great Buddha of Kamakura. This bronze statue of Amida Buddha, stands on the grounds of Kotokuin Temple. It was originally housed in a large hall but that was washed away in a tsunami at the end of the 15th Century and since then has been in the open air.

Cast in 1252, it is over 13 meters high and the second largest bronze Buddha in Japan. You can go inside it.

It took me a moment to realise what these were but in a portico nearby are a pair of giant rope flip-flops for the statue to wear!

Apparently a couple of years ago there was a massive outcry as some teenager had scribbled nipples onto the sacred chest, which made me realise that I haven’t seen any graffiti at all since I’ve been here. Not even one little tag.

On the way back to Moriya, I stopped off in Tokyo and went to the Kite Museum, which I had spotted marked on my map. This one room museum was incredibly difficult to find but well worth the effort. It was really very beautiful.

Kites of every shape and size but with an emphasis on traditional Japanese paper.

I loved these trompe l’oeil butterfly kites.

And then it was back to ARCUS to sort some more rubbish. The countdown has commenced. Open Studio in two and a half weeks.

Tongue Twister

2008-11-12T12:27:00.001-02:00

This week has been about rest, recuperation and of course, rubbish.

After my emergency anti-biotic drip and the course of pills that followed the Dickensian diagnosis of pneumonia and the concerned phone-calls and emails from friends and family following my last blog (thank you), I have tried to take it easy.

Here are some pictures of my sick lungs. Look for the shadows – that is the pneumonia, apparently. And no, I am not suddenly pregnant. I was told to take a very big breath and hold it for the xray.

I went back to the hospital a few days later and the blood test showed that I was well on the way to recovery and the doctor was pleased with my progress. Nevertheless, I was encouraged to take things a bit slowly.

36 episodes into Yoshitsune I thought it best to lay off the drama of 12th Century Samurai Japan that had been the subject of every sick bed moment and do something else instead. So I have been trying to learn some Japanese tongue twisters and verbal conundrums. Here are a few of my favourites for you to try out in the comfort of your own home.

Unraniwa niwa niwa niwa niwa niwa niwa tori ga iru.

Easy to learn but guaranteed to impress native Japanese as ‘charming’, this translates as: There are two chickens in the backyard and two chickens in the garden. (Yes, there really are supposed to be 7 ‘niwas’.)

Then there is the one that you should say really fast:

nama mugi
nama gome
nama tamago

This is the Japanese ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ only I find ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ much more difficult to say fast than the Japanese twister, which means: raw wheat, raw rice, raw egg. I’ve got this one really speedy and have people chuckling away when I show it off.

Then there is a toughie:

Tokyo Tokkyo Kyokakyoku

This means, Tokyo Patent Permission Centre. It is hard to say properly. People laugh at me when I try this one, especially if I do it fast. So I say, “What? What did I do wrong, let me hear you say it again.” And then they say it again: “Tokyo Tokkyo Kyokakyoku” and I repeat it, “Tokyo Tokkyo Kyokakyoku” and they laugh some more and say, “No, no, no, Tokyo Tokkyo Kyokakyoku” and I try again and they still laugh. I just don’t hear the difference.

Not hearing the difference for the Japanese means there is often an inability to differentiate between ‘r’ and ‘l’. It’s a commonly known phenomenon. So ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ might as well be ‘red lolly, yellow lolly”, which is in fact much easier to say. Try in yourself and you will see!

After a week of hearing about the presidential erection (hurrah! President Obama, hurrah hurrah!) we are now in the full thrust of a mayoral erection here in Moriya. Endless leaflets come through the door of my cell, erm, I mean room, announcing candidates. The current mayor has been in post for over ten years, so there might well be a feeling that change is needed. As ARCUS is a government sponsored initiative, developments are being noted with interest. One really off putting thing, is the constant series of vehicles that cruise the streets with their megaphone announcements of where the hustings are taking place. In such an ordered and polite society it is surprising that this continual noise pollution is allowed. If it isn’t the erection, then it is someone selling bicycles or advertising a special discount at a furniture warehouse or something. Just as every surface is a potential advertising hoarding, so too every sound wave is a potential marketing opportunity. It is the same everywhere: streets, shops, lifts, trains. The soundtrack is non-stop. In the streets of Tokyo massive lorries drive through the main drags blaring advertisements for the latest this or that.

Talking about erections, my library is beginning to take shape. The carpenters are in. We are behind schedule but so far it is looking good.

In my post-pneumonic-recovery-phase I had to go back to the paper-recycling centre to pick up the reading material that will form one side of my library. As I cycled into ARCUS that morning, I saw, with pleasure, the daintily wrapped presents of reading matter that people had put out for the twice-monthly paper collection.

The entire paper of the city is then delivered to the recycling centre and the books and magazines are dumped into a great big pile.

This is what we were at liberty to search through. Thank heavens it was not raining. I cannot express how horrible it would have become if the paper had been soaking wet, not to mention my post-pneumonic-recovery-phase self.

There were some great finds and we loaded up the little truck that was loaned to us by City Hall, twice.

A day or two later and it was time for the beginning of the other rubbish delivery: all the rubbish from Moriya City Library for one week. And so in facemask and rubber gloves, I have begun sorting, washing and drying.

It is slightly surreal to see fragments of plastic food wrap on a makeshift clothesline, out to dry.

Last night we said goodbye to Ya Chu, who returns to Taipei (for about 10 minutes, before she goes for another residency in New York). We had a feast at a traditional Japanese inn. There were two different kinds of ‘nabe’, which are basically giant ‘one pot’ dishes, which you cook at the table. Nabe means cooking pot. We had a seafood one...

...and a horse meat one. Yes, it’s my little pony again.

The horse nabe is called ‘sakura nabe’ which means ‘cherry-blossom cooking pot’ because the colour of the meat is a dusky pink. Rub it around the hot pot for a bit, then dip it in raw egg and eat. Delicious. Rinsed down with a few glasses of ice-cold soju, my first alcohol in over a week and a half. Soju is a distilled beverage native to Korea but also a really big deal in Japan. Though traditionally made from rice, other starches such as potato, wheat, barley, sweet potato, or tapioca are also used. There are literally hundreds of varieties, a bit like Aboslut Vodka. I had the one distilled from sweet potato. Lovely. Campai!

Rubbish Fever

2008-11-04T10:33:00.000-02:00

This week has been rubbish.

It started off with good rubbish and another meeting at City Hall. Whereas in the UK you would hit off an email and wait for a reply, here everything is done through face-to-face meeting. The President of Shiina Clean Life, the garbage collections company, meets with us at City Hall. There we outline our project proposal. We would like him, please, to deliver all the rubbish from the Library to our studio for a week. Potential problems are discussed and resolved. He arrives personally at ARCUS two days later to tell us how much it will cost. From his briefcase, he removes a beautifully headed pale green cardboard foolscap wallet with a single white sheet inside. It will cost us ¥1,000 per day. (That’s about £6.) We bow graciously at the affordability.

The meetings about meetings culture does slow things down but it seems to have a high success rate. It also makes you feel wonderfully good. I am happy to get my rubbish. The President of Shiina Clean Life is happy to be able to help. ARCUS is happy that I am happy. City Hall administration is happy that ARCUS is connecting with the community. And because we all see each other being happy, we are even happier. If part of my strategy as an artist is to make social connections, which I think that it is, then the Japanese model of face-to-face meetings could well be one way forward. Having stated that, I cannot imagine having the same wonderfully good feeling on departing from a face-to-face meeting with, say, Camden Council garbage collection services.

We also made a visit to the recycling centre that receives Moriya’s bimonthly household paper waste. It was incredible and also strangely humbling. Giant bales of colour matched paper stacked on top of each other.

Yes, they even colour match their waste paper. And that is why I am Japanese.

These proud and wondrous paper battlements seemed at once to justify the aims of my project here while at the same time calling my process to account. Their epic beauty clearly highlighted the value of rubbish – both aesthetically and economically as a commodity sold by weight – but they also made my small library seem insignificant. Wouldn’t it be better to simply organise a tour to the bales?

And then I got ill.

And then it really did become a rubbish week.

I can honestly say that I haven’t had such a violent fever since I was a child. Four nights of soaking wet sheets, continually changing my t-shirt, eventually sleeping on a towel to try and absorb the water that was pouring out of me; hot showers at 3 a.m. to try and arrest my chattering chills. Groggy days spent groaning and gargling; washing and drying all the salt wet linen; agonizingly slow trips to the local shop for fresh food. I wasn’t good for much except ‘coping’. Thank goodness that someone had lent me all 49 episodes (with subtitles) of the historical television drama epic Yoshitsune. (Come to think of it, I wonder if maybe I got ill because I was lent all 49 episodes. I did think, when they were handed over: there is no way that I am going to have time to watch all those.)

Yoshitsune is the NHK (the Japanese BBC) drama about the life of Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189) the late Heian and early Kamakura general of the Minamoto Samurai clan. If you crave the history then a concise biography can be found at the following link:

http://www.samurai-archives.com/yoshitsune.html

It is very dramatic. Yes, as the world prepares to hear the outcome of the vote to see who will be the figurehead of the only real superpower there is, I am sweating into my futon watching the dramatisation of a political show that is already over.

It is highly gendered. Men, by in large, speak with a deep, gruff, sometimes almost hoarse, guttural intonation.

While ‘feminine’ women do so in an almost absurdly high bell like sing song. It has been great fun repeating the odd word here and there ‘in character’.

The sex is entirely implied. There isn’t so much as an onscreen hug, let alone a kiss. I haven’t inquired about how the strict obscenity laws in Japan filter down to mainstream television drama but a bit too much is left to the imagination.

In episode 18 there is a strange moment of mirroring as I watch the Heike leader Kiyomori in his sick bed with a high fever sweating away, in my sick bed with a high fever sweating away.

Only he’s dead by the end of the episode and my fever is still rampant.

To be honest, for most of his onscreen time, the hero, Yoshitsune just stares moodily into the middle distance and breathes thoughtfully.

Finally he sees some real action in episode 25, where his ‘successful rear-assault marks the beginning of a consecutive series of victories as leader of the rear’. (I’m just copying down the subtitles.)

This is what we’ve been waiting for. Ataaaaaaack!

And then he goes back to being pensive again.

And who is the dashing young actor who plays this outstanding warrior, this man among men, this mighty fearsome fighter? Well, it is the popular actor Takizawa Hideaki (nickname Tackey) who won Best Actor for his portrayal in the 8th Nikkan Sports Drama Grand Prix (I have no idea). And, erm, well, erm, this is his spotlight photo.

You know, I’m sorry, but I really don’t get the straight guy hair thing here. It’s like, the more you look like a teenage girl Country and Western singer, the better. But that’s what the women here seem to want.

Episode 30 was a real turning point for me personally. I couldn’t believe that I had been febrile and prone in bed for THIRTY EPISODES of Yoshitsune. That is a lot of fever. Maybe I should go and see a doctor.

Poor ARCUS, who have to deal with all my rubbish requests, now have to take on board my illness.

I want to see a doctor.

Takashi picks me up early. Out of politeness I am wearing one of the paper ‘infection provention’ masks that I bought as a joke present for a friend back in London. I realise how tiny my face is as it is practically mummified by the thing. I feel ridiculous but try to remember that everyone here wears them. (I am so glad that it is not compulsory for me to take a photograph of myself wearing one of these masks and show it to you). We arrive at the hospital (there aren’t really separate GP surgeries here) and fill in some forms. I wait for my name to be called. I am thinking, this is a waste of everybody’s time. I have the flu. I just need to see it through. What can they do but tell me to suck on lemons and take aspirin? Eventually my name is called. (You know, people who have not heard it practically never pronounce my name correctly in the UK but here, everyone always gets it right. I think it must be something to do with the phonetic transliteration. There it was, a perfect “Joshua Sofaer-San” out the loudspeaker.)

We had already ticked various boxes and scribbled in answers on one of the forms: number of days ill – 5, cough – yes, pregnant – no, fever – yes, runny nose – no etc., etc., so he had the basics before we went in.

It was over in about 30 seconds. Did I have trouble breathing? No. Did I have a good appetite? Yes. Could he listen to my chest. I unbutton my shirt. Hmmm. 5 days of fever. He wants to give me a chest x-ray. Is that OK? I guess so. OK, then he’ll see me a bit later on. Take this form to door number 14. And we’re off again with more forms.

A chest x-ray? What on earth was going on? I have had a fever for the last 5 days. I need something stronger than aspirin. I felt cheated. I had my story all planned out but wasn’t given a moment to tell it.

My chest is x-rayed by a smiley radiologist with a runny nose.

By this time we have been at the hospital for nearly two hours and Takashi has to go to ARCUS, so with extraordinary generosity his wife Junko, who works for herself and so can be a bit more flexible with time, came to take over as my translator, armed with her portable electronic bilingual dictionary.

We are called back into the consulting room. This time the Doctor is wearing a mask too.

The x-rays of my lungs are on his computer screen. He points to some shadowy bits and explains something to Junko. Junko checks her electronic dictionary, turns to me and calmly says: “You have pneumonia.”

Pneumonia? A lung infection? Isn’t that more Victorian England that 21st Century Japan?

Apparently there’s been a spate of cases. (To be honest, I knew that all this travelling around that I have been doing over the last year and the various stresses that it has brought was going to catch up with me eventually.)

I am advised to take an antibiotic drip immediately followed by a course of pills. Nobody seems overly concerned, so I manage not to be myself.

As I am lying on the hospital bed, the nurse precedes each separate action with an explanation and a request to proceed, all in Japanese of course. Even the alcohol wipe used to swab my arm before the blood sample was taken, got a request for permission. I give a clear and sharp ‘hi, wakarumas’ (‘yes, I understand’) in my best Japanese accent to everything, thinking of Yoshitsune on receiving orders from the Monk Emperor, even though I don’t really know what exactly she is referring to at any particular time. Her one English word, just before she inserts the cannula for the drip is: ‘pain’. Actually there wasn’t much more than a little scratch and I could almost immediately feel those little Samurai molecules at work on the Dickensian phlegm in my lungs.

I am now at episode 36 (so an unlucky 13 to go). It is my age. It seems like a good place to stop; or at least to get well.