http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Origination Fri, 24 May 2013 22:29:53 +0000 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://www.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 30th January 2009- We visit Hull  We took great-grandmother Edith's postcard collection, and arrived in Hull on a very cold and bitter day. We began by finding the views in Edith's postcards, and on the whole decided that 21st century street furniture left something to be desired. Many of the grand views of Hull from the early 1900s were now gone, instead a conflagration of Primark, giant TV screens and the ubiquitous signage ruled the day. However, the original dock offices hosted a Maritime Museum where we discovered to our excitement a map of “Shipping Routes before 1914”. We explored Hull further and located Edith's house at 25 Tynemouth St, still extant, but the nearby site of her father Leopold's tailors shop is now a giant DFS store, while the Synagogue on Osborne Street has undergone a transformation into the “Heaven and Hell” club. We then met historian Dr Nick Evans, who is a specialist on Jewish immigration to Britain between 1880 and 1914. He took us to the Victoria Dock where our great-grandparents Woolf and Gittel Beinart would have arrived from the port of Libau, Latvia after journeying from Rokiskis, Lithuania by cart and train. He described how they would have brought pickled herrings, boiled eggs and other familiar foods on their journey, and would have arrived at the dock cold, tired and disorientated, to be offloaded and put onto horse-drawn carts bound for the station. At the station, the emigrants waiting room (now a pub) would have been the place to get a hot meal and a wash before the onward train trip to London, Southampton and then a ship to South Africa. We walked and talked, feeling so close and yet so distant from our ancestors, back to the Humber Dock where more affluent passengers from St Petersburg would have arrived, amongst them our great-great-great-grandfather Nicholas Filaratoff, and his daughter Ann. Dr Evans then left us to find our way to the station, and experience for ourselves somewhat of the sense of disorientation and confusion. This was aptly recreated by modern British town planning, and as we hurdled the ring road and dodged the multi-story car parks, I could only imagine the busy industrial dockyards that greeted my ancestors. Finally we arrived at the station and found the platform specially reserved for emigrants. A plaque commemorates the 2.2 million people who passed through the platform, over 1000 a day onwards to new worlds. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Feb 09- South AfricaKaty Beinart  In February I visited South Africa to try and track down more information about our familys journey and arrival there. Talking to my Great-Uncle Magnus was fascinating. While it was hard to distinguish between myth and reality (eg. His father's family had descended from a spy for the Russian czar) I loved hearing his stories, particularly of his grandfather Leopold Pearlman, who had come to South Africa in 1902 with a British regiment to supply them with suits and later set up a tailors shop.. His wife Anne was rather fierce and smoked 50 cigarettes a day, in a holder, and collected cigarette cards.   In Cape Town I found a huge amount of information at the Jewish Museum and found records of Beinarts who had stayed at the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter in Whitechapel, London, en route to South Africa. I also found a Russian brochure, advertising the delights of South Africa to potential emigrants, and giving advice on what to take: “It is recommended not to take too many things.. Women- two pairs of shoes, one warm dress, one paper dress, light wide brimmed cap or thick felt cap, one little cap, one pair of shoes, coat, 6 changes of cloths, sewing accessories, towels and linen sack” I did feel I'd overpacked a bit.   Talking to Gail, another Beinart, I found out that my great-grandfather Woolf had had salt pans out near the Great Berg River, where he would collect salt to sell in his general store in Malmesbury (near Cape Town). I began to get interested in salt, and wanted to visit, but running out of time I compromised with a visit to the Department of Land Affairs. This is a fascinating place with hundreds of maps and aerial photographs of the country, and I got taken down into the bowels of the building where cavernous corridors of plan chests threaten to topple at any minute. There I found aerial photos of the salt pans, and also 19th century maps of Cape Town docks where my family would have arrived, now filled in and gentrified into a top tourist destination.   While in Cape Town I met Kathryn Smith, an artist who lectures at Stellenbosch University, and she invited me to give a talk at Stellenbosch to the undergrad art students. Visiting the campus was like yet another country, and Kathryn gave me an insight into the Cape Town art scene in all its contradictory wonder. I also went to a VANSA event where more Cape Town artists gathered to share their work, Pecha Kucha style, with short presentations. There seemed to be a huge amount going on, from live art festival Infecting The City to a discussion between David Goldblatt and Jo Ratcliffe about image space/reality in photography. A quick visit to Greatmore Studios in the Woodstock area of town got me excited about the possibility of spending longer in Cape Town through their residency programme. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Katy and I have returned to Origination in waves over the past year and a half - between the other projects we are working on. It has had a long gestation period, and in a strange way because we're sisters, perhaps even longer than we're conscious of. Over this period, several artworks have bubbled up, and many more ideas. We are currently planning to move the project on through a period of working together intensely on it as part of a residency. We have been discussing this blog, and how we're using (or not using) it within our project. What's a blog for? Sharing ideas, archiving thought processes, highs and lows, and creating space for other people to observe and discuss for our process. So, to make the most of this space, we have decided to put more material up from the project so far. Project History Since April 2008 various artworks have come out of Origination: the slow process of research and conversation finding form in different ways. A conversation which began as a letter sent back and forth became part of a performance at the OVADA Gallery, excerpts thrown (verbally) back and forth down a dinner table; guests were then served borscht and black bread and a film played showing the preparation of these recipes. We documented people's dinner party chat which varied from family recipes, cultural identity, to what attracted them to the event.. Also as part of the OVADA show ('Gift') Katy made an installation at the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens, which used the language of botanical classification to notate plants which had made the same migrations as our great-grandparents. In the gallery, this was mirrored by a 'family tree' of etchings of plants drawing on the traditions of botanical illustration. Katy also created an artwork in situ in the gallery, a map made of lace work which charted the journeys back and forth, made by family members. Working in parallel, in the South West (where she was studying for an MA) Rebecca was processing these family stories through a performance. She recorded members of the family attempting to speak the languages used by our Great-Grandparents, and herself attempting to speak Yiddish. She set up a performance space with these audio recordings, a large map on the floor, drawing materials, a projector, and a series of small boats carved out of beetroot. The performance was improvised with these objects: a cycle of listening, making drawings, attempting to remember something beyond her own memory, and physically tracing her ancestors journeys. Phil Smith who watched the performance commented on the strange mixture of informality and structured activity. The performance was an attempt to make tangible a set of stories no longer within our grasp. We keep realising that we are constructing these stories as much as re-constructing them.      ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Work in Progress.. Since 2008, we have been developing ideas for a journey, and a longer period to focus on making work for the project. We have been offered a residency in Cape Town, at Greatmore Studios, part of the Triangle Arts Trust, and also at the University of Stellenbosch, in spring 2010. Cape Town was the point of arrival for our great-grandparents Woolf and Gittel Beinart, who then went to live in Malmesbury, a small town in the Western Cape. We want to respond to sites of memory, transposing our practice and using a series of tailor-made constructions to explore rituals, real or invented. We are developing ideas for forms of luggage which might transform to become mobile kitchens, collecting apparatus, or transporting artworks made through the journey. We are continuing our conversations through a number of means, from an expandable letter, to email, and face-to-face. We will explore how different means of communication shape our dialogue, and our responses to questions about possessions, home, identity, and place. Selected highlights will be posted here.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Making a sourdough starter culture, using grapes from our childhood home. This starter culture will be kept alive and be used to make bread. We hope to take it to South Africa.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Visit to Lithuania September 2009 In September, Katy took part in "Transient Spaces - the Tourist Syndrome Summer Camp", Palanga, Lithuania, organised by Berlin based arts organisation uqbar Going back to my roots... I arrived in Kaunas feeling dislocated, having got up at 2am, taken 2 coaches and a plane, and realising that I knew not a single word of Lithuanian. I hung out at the bus station hoping I would get on the right bus and feeling at the hub of a web of migrations, as coach after coach stopped to let weary passengers out for a rest break, en route to St Petersberg, Antwerp, Talliin, Riga.. As we travelled through the countryside, the wooden houses and gentle pastoral landscape seemed somehow familiar to me. Perhaps evocative of ideas I had about a home, a place where time had stood still, I daydreamed about my familys shtetl in Rokiskis. But I was headed to Palanga, a tourist resort on the Baltic Sea, for a week of intense conversation and making work (and a bit of tourism). I took part in a workshop called Displacements, lead by Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti. The starting point was the idea of movement, of a displacement being a move from the stable condition; that the artist acts as an agent of displacement, enabling movement. We examined the stable conditions of Home, Role and Identity through the mirror of language, exploring how translating (in our case between English, Italian, Spanish, German, Lithuanian) added, changed or subverted these ideas. We talked about “the other;s gaze”, and the way identity is formed through the projections of others. These reflective gazes create an acknowledgement, a sense of recognition, that allows us to form an idea of ourselves as belonging. We discussed the meaning of home and the unheimlich (Uncanny/Unfamiliar in English). In English, the familiar is similar to habit, from which words come meaning home, use, clothing, space. So when does home become disquieting, unfamiliar, uncanny, even sinister? Perhaps this relates to the experience of being a visitor, being an alien, feeling alienated. I was visiting the home of my great-grandparents, and in a sense it felt familiar (in the family sense) but also unfamiliar. Someone used the word Immanence, which seemed to fit - the alienation existed in time rather than space, and if I could collapse time so both past and future existed simultaneously, I wouldn't feel so distant but rather would feel a sense of home... On the last day I had a moment like this, where I had Borscht for lunch and the flavour felt so much like home, not a memory of a place I've ever known, but it reminded me of my work with Rebecca, of all the borscht I have cooked, of eating with my family. Every time it's a little bit different but the earthy taste is also the same.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Making the starter culture: we took a bunch of grapes each and half a bag of flour, and made the culture at our homes in Oxford and Nottingham.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Feeding Culture My sour-dough culture is living in a bowl in the kitchen.  I have lived with it for two weeks now, feeding it daily, smelling it, and looking for signs of life. I worry that it is too cold, or that I have forgotten to feed it. It smells strange, a yeasty slightly acrid smell. Sometimes I feel fond of it, proud of the culture that is growing there, the potential it holds. At other times it is a surly child, sulking and demanding my attention when I am busy with other things. The language of bread cultures and their care is strange - another name for the starter culture is the 'Mother'. But at the beginning, I am mothering my mother.I am trying to judge whether my culture has reached maturity, and is ready for it's first batch of bread-making.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Today I baked my fisrt loaves of bread from the culture Katy and I started together. I enjoyed the slow process: mixing the dough, leaving it overnight, adding more flour and mixing it again, then leaving it to prove for hours. My house is cold and the dough took it's time to expand. But the alchemy started to work it's magic and finally this evening I put two loaves into the oven. They came out looking slightly peculiar - I think they got a little over excited in the heat of the oven and rose too fast. So each loaf has a crack down the side. They look like mouths that have just opened to laugh or to tell me something. I ate a piece of the bread and it tasted great.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Bread from Starter Culture: Mark II Katy's first attempt at making bread..it seemed to have a life of its own..... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Home Delivery: a performance On saturday 7th November, we carried out our performance "Borscht and Black Bread" for Artwash The performance took place at the home of Barry Reeves, and we read extracts from our ongoing correspondance about the project, on identity, memory and objects. We then invited the guests to eat a meal of borscht and black bread, made from our starter culture. After the meal we asked guests to tell a story about one of their ancestors, and we toasted each ancestor with a shot of vodka. The images show the preparaiton of our performance.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Home Delivery: Borscht and Black Bread A Performance Images from the event at Barry and Edith s House, Saturday 7th November 2009.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 We set sail in 2 weeks... Starting to pack and prepare for the voyage, it feels like there is so much to do. We are attempting to fold away our lives here, and chose the items to take with us on the journey. We have booked a passage on a cargo ship that leaves from Antwerp and will take 19 days to sail to South Africa. The departure date has yet to be confirmed: the cargo, rather than the passengers are prioritised. We each have our own fears and hopes for the journey, there are many unanswered questions. Will we get sick, or bored? Will we take the right things with us? Will the cooks allow us to use the oven to bake our bread? How many different skies will we see?... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 We depart... Have spent days packing, trying to work out how to preserve and transport everything from starter culture to detail paper and ancient dresses. Resulting in a bizarre assortment of suitcases and luggage. Tomorrow we set off for Antwerp to find the Green Cape (maybe its something we should wear?) and set sail for Southern Climes. We have been given many tasks to do on board, as well as a jigsaw puzzle. We are ensuring a taste of home with earl grey tea and marmite. We will be busy: Learning to crochet Fixing the world Working out our Carbon Footprint (done it already, cheated) Carrying out an action Checking the charts reading The Prophet Writing a log book Trying to discover what is in a container Drawing the horizon Meditating Recreating family photos in costume Being Victorian lady watercolourists Sending messages in bottles Playing chess Inventing new constellations Finding out the crews favourite recipes and other things too...    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Journey to boat and arrival on board   We travelled by train to Antwerp, via Brussels. Katy read Maus on the train and was transported between times, other trains and travels across Europe, people fleeing for their lives or already captured and in transit to camps. We arrived at Antwerp station with all our motley cases and bags, feeling a little worse for wear, and were totally bowled over by the station building. Later we read the description in Austerlitz (WG Sebald).. “Delacenserie (the architect) borrowed the main elements of his monumental structure from the palaces of the Italian renaissance. But he also struck Byzantine and Moorish notes. And perhaps when I arrived, I myself had noticed the round grey and white granite turrets, the sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval associations in the minds of railway passengers..”   At the station we were met by a disgruntled taxi driver who proceeded to issue warnings about the crews desperation for female company, so that our arrival at port was tempered by a certain wariness. We weren't on any lists and we weren't expected. A man casually looked at our passporits and waved us on to the Green Cape, which was loading cargo. We had to climb a rickety staircase leaving our luggage on the dock where it was unceremoniously hoisted up by crane and dumped on to deck. The Steward, Niko, then welcomed us with a little too much enthusiasm and showed us our cabin, and we breathed a sigh of relief (collectively). It had a lockable door. We ate in the Officers Mess and were informed the boat would not depart for another 24 hours at least. So, the next day we wandered off into Antwerp through the snow, to explore. We found the contemporary art museum, the MHKA, which had a show on textiles and social fabric. We tried on parangoles (capes), by Helio Oiticica, and were inspired by his instructions. We talked about where you first go in city, what you first look for, and what our ancestors would have looked for. Later we found ourselves in a mixed ethnic district and stumbled across a Russian shop where we purchased Lithuanian black bread!!! We headed back to the ship for our second night, and watched The Fugitive as cargo was loaded outside our window.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Life on board ship Early on Thursday morning, we finally embarked from Antwerp docks. It was snowing, and no horizon was visible as we stood on the bridge listening to the captain shouting readings – “20 starboard... 10 port” We have been aboard for three days and are already getting accustomed to the different rhythms of life on board ship. Everything runs to a strict schedule: mealtimes are the same each day and the crew work in shifts. We have also been shifting through time zones, latitudes and longitudes, slowly making our way through the English Channel, across the Bay of Biscay, and along the Spanish and Portugese coasts. We are trying to get used to the rhythm of constant movement: the motion of the Sea has been rough most of the way, and our bodies are always attempting to balance. The entire crew are Polish, apart from one South African who is training to be a sailor. The food is Polish too, which involves a lot of meat and potatoes, but we have managed to negotiate vegetarian options. Katy is braving the sailor's menu! We go up onto the bridge everyday to look at the charts and navigational equipment. The crew are not hugely communicative, partly due to language, but they are happy to show us the readings and our position. We travel at 16 miles per hour, a great big vessel ploughing slowly through the waves – we've still got a long way to travel. Last night, the Captain invited us to join him and the first mate and his wife (the only other female aboard) for a drink in his lounge. We had Polish vodka and the cabin was filled with cigarette smoke whilst we discussed the benefits of smoking, eating, drinking, early death and life at sea.   Activities: Exercise - quite difficult. Due to rolling. Daily horizon painting, photos. Methodology seminar. Sleeping a lot. Reading Ricouer (also quite difficult)    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Sea Observations Part 1 17th December. Snow, hail and strong winds – the sea is wild and wavy, white spray against the boat, a dark aquamarine meeting the bruised brown sky at a black horizon. 18th December. The sea is light grey-turquoise, lively and choppy, each wave capped with white 20th December. It’s breathtakingly windy. The dark grey-blue sea looks sculpted – solid and fluid at once. As the boat ploughs through the unyielding waves, it shatters them – revealing glimpses of bright turquoise and sending huge sheets of white spray up onto the containers. The sky is cold blue grey today. 21st December. The sea is breathing and we, travelling across her belly, feel every inhalation and exhalation. Sometimes she breathes deep and slow, sometimes she pants excitedly and our huge vessel feels like a toy, tossed from side to side, trembling. (Later) the nose of the boat bounces slow motion up and down through the waves, huge crests of white spray bursting with every down-stroke. I see rainbows in the spray. 22nd December. What a night. The sea has been unrelenting, tossing the boat violently all night. I didn’t get much sleep: it was an effort to stay in bed. Skittish waves playing in the sun, spray whipped off them by the wind: a moment of gold, a handful of glitter in the sunlight. 23rd December. Another rough night, lightening flashed on the horizon and rain lashed the boat and the sea flung us about. (later) I just went up onto the bridge, looked out at the stormy seas. There was a small black bird following the boat, keeping up in the buffeting wind. Is it seeking shelter or looking for food in the turbulence caused by the boat? it is a small black bird with white spots on the top and a white underside to each wing. It’s the first animal I have seen on this journey, apart from seagulls. 25th December. Christmas day and my first day of sunbathing. It’s windy but hot and the sea has calmed down – is even resembling blueness. I am sunburnt. 26th December.  An amazing sunset and dolphins following the boat, jumping along beside it. We go to the front of the boat for the first time, scary and exhilarating – we stand on a precarious ledge, looking over a railing out to sea. Nothing but sea. 27th December. It is hazy hot, the sea a silver mirror fading into the sky. 28th December. Today the sea is light blue-grey, ruffled by the wind into a million tiny waves. 29th December. The seascapes, the horizons, are a flow – a changing continuum. I have tried and failed to capture the horizon each day in a painted sketch, tried to capture a snapshot. But it doesn’t work, it doesn’t tell of the continual slipping by of the sea, of all the shades and shapes that run into one another. I try to stop time, to steal a moment. But my hand is not a camera and as soon as I start painting, that moment is gone. Or perhaps, as Bergson suggests, it exists along with all the other moments. Katy was gazing out to sea, and asked – what if we haven’t been moving at all? Could it be a hoax – there’s nothing to tell us that we’ve covered any distance, apart from the changing stars, of which we are mostly ignorant. I think about the changing seascapes, and suddenly think of them as a blanket of scenes pulled past our static boat to create the illusion of movement. 31st December. We induced the wrath of Neptune, by crossing the equator without seeking his permission. But after being put through an endurance test involving being dunked in beetroot soup and smeared with engine grease and mustard, we were brought before Neptune and forgiven, and christened with our new Seafarer’s names. Rebecca Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Sea Observations Part 2 1st January. I saw flying fish shimmering over the sea like giant dragonflies.  2nd January.  On the bridge I look over the railing, straight down to the sea, 15 metres below. The deep blue is interrupted by clouds and eddies of white and turquoise, caused by the turbulence of the boat’s passage. Looking down I have a half-desire to jump, a half-fear of falling. It is vertiginous. 4th January. I watched the lifeboat drill: the sailors jumped in whilst the boson winched the boat down to the water. They tested the engine and ran a few checks before being winched back up again. As the boat levitated a few metres above the sea, a seal appeared underneath it, and turned belly-up before slithering away beneath the waves. 5th January.  Still at anchor outside Walvis Bay. We have been sitting here waiting for two days. Being close to land, and still, the Sea is completely different. Calmer, more transparent, a patchwork of colours and currents. There’s a rich turquoise green and a muddy brown, clouds of pink-orange jelly fish and dark seaweed. There are seals and birds. And on the horizon is the hazy yellow desert – a series of colours and shapes that seem all the more foreign to eyes that have seen only sea for two weeks. 8th January. Ha! the sea says. Ha! you thought you were safe, that all I had left in me was calm-blue easy-riding. Oh fools, never underestimate me! I can still toss you awake at night and shake your brain, making you wobble around like a drunkard. (I didn’t sleep much last night.) Rebecca Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Time and Waiting For four days the table is occupied by Katy’s jigsaw puzzle. It mustn’t be moved. It’s a difficult one: a picture of a steam train, with lots of leafy foliage and vague white steam, which means many pieces that look extremely similar. Katy works at it patiently, and spends an entire day finishing it off. She tells me that she learns a lot from the experience: that you only find the right piece when you stop looking for it; that when you think there’s no solution and you walk away, the solution offers itself to you when you return. I do not help with the jigsaw puzzle. I have made a surprising discovery about myself on this trip: I am impatient.  We have a calendar on the wall, on which we cross out each day as it ends - counting off the days until we arrive in Cape Town. Due to bad weather, and waiting at anchor, we have been adding days almost as fast as we cross them off: seven extra days so far. A lot of this voyage has been about passing time, and waiting. Waiting to leave, waiting to arrive. In some ways it is a luxury for us both: to have so much TIME at our disposal. Time to think and read, time to sunbathe and relax. But as we near a month on the boat, we feel like we are running out of ways to fill the time. Each day is similar, the routines of the boat runs like clockwork, and there is a ‘Groundhog Day’ like repetition of waking, meal times, and conversations with the crew. We repeat daily tasks to keep track of the passing time: a logbook, a video diary, daily sea observations, and photos of the sunset.  We have been reading Henri Bergson’s writings on Time and Duration. Bergson challenges our usual conception of time, as a linear experience: he argues that this way of understanding time is based in a scientific, spatial way of thinking. The way we describe our experiences of the world in this mode of thinking are as something we can count, and quantify. He argues that what we actually experience in our lives is very difficult to reduce to language, and that our experience of time is not an unwavering forward march. He offers instead the notion of ‘Pure Duration’: our experiences as we live them, which are not a linear narrative. Time is simultaneous, fluid and flowing: our inner experiences of the world are overlaid with immediate and remembered emotion, sensation and association. The closest we may come to an awareness of Pure Duration is in our dream life, where there is no linearity.  Bergson uses the metaphor of melody as a way of thinking about our experience of duration: ‘The metaphor of the musical phrase conveys the notion of ensemble that attaches to the experience of duration... a multiplicity without homogeneity, in which states of feeling overlap and interpenetrate one another, instead of being organised into a distinct succession.’ [Time & Free Will, p67]  Bergson’s ideas change our way of thinking about the duration of this journey. There are a host of characters, stories and memories that are travelling with us – as real and influential on our experience as Niko the steward or the Captain. In some way, our ancestors are making this journey now, with us - and we are making it with them, then. The seascapes slide into one another: not a series of distinct scenes, but ever-changing and flowing, exactly the same and always different from yesterday, a year ago, a hundred years ago. We count the days, but we also stop counting. We give in to the idea that we will arrive when we arrive. Rebecca Beinart   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 (Mis)Communication   Without easy communication, time slows down, and we think more about what to say, how do we communicate our feelings. We miss people. Writing a letter becomes an action, a gesture of expressing feelings and emotions which have no other outlet.   Jiba tells us that there is a tradition of sending a message 'home' when you cross the equator. We decide to send messages in bottles, to past, present and future homes. We write to our great-grandparents in South Africa, our father in England, and to our future selves, who knows where. We mail the letters by dropping the bottles from the side of the ship, watching the words disappear into the waves. Perhaps this is the most appropriate place for our words to go – we have let them out, but it is the lived emotions that really matter, not the externalised words.   We send a lantern into the sky on New Years Eve, with a message translated into Morse Code. Using the code, words become a series of lines and dots. The ultimate removal from the confusion of emotion to the cool rationality of representation. Maybe its right that the lantern is caught by high winds, the code is ripped and flies off to the skies, part caught on the crane, burning.  Words on fire, seems to express them better than the ink on dry paper.  Bergson writes that language used to describe emotions and feelings can trap and externalise feelings. Language rationalises things which are not rational.   Translation, which derives from the Latin 'Transferre', meaning 'to bring across', can be seen as a metaphor for migration. (Basu & Coleman, 2008)  An object transferred takes on a new set of significances – or may be evoked using new objects which 'stand for' the original. Similarly, in the carrying over of language, words take on new significances; Benjamin's question of how translation can constitute the continued life of the 'original' mirrors the question of how the migrant can continue the life of their 'home' in a new context. The difference between translation (word for word rendering) and transduction (sense for sense), and therefore of entextualisation, extracting discourse from its original context and re-inserting it into a new context, expose how translations and migrations can transform, as well as cross boundaries.   The written language of ship is in a multitude of words: German/Polish/Italian/English..a palimpsest of makers/users/voyagers. Original signage has aged and one language has gradually replaced another, hastily typed and pasted over. The crew speak Polish, and we write out a series of questions for them, and ask the Captain to translate for us. Somewhere the question “A family recipe” gets confused into the Polish “what do your family think of your job?”- a question that has a very different, emotive meaning. We provoke angry, difficult, upset responses without meaning to. By the time we work out that the word 'recipe' has been confused with the word 'receive' we have already had some difficult but interesting conversations about the hardships of their lives, one perhaps we would have avoided with a question about the culture of food.   On Christmas Eve, we were invited to share and exchange tiny pieces of communion wafer with all the officers and crew, a ritual they always share at Christmas. The etymology of the word communion is moi, and signifies change or exchange. (Newling, 2001) Common, communicate, mutual and renumerate all spring from the same route. Etymologically, a companion is a person with whom we share bread. Sharing the wafers, or our baking bread from the starter culture and offering it to the crew, seem more profound means of communication and exchange than the verbal questions, which lead to confusion.   Katy Beinart     References: Bergson, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les donnees immediates de la consience) Basu & Coleman, Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures,  Mobilities Vol 3., No.3, Nov 2008 John Newling, The Kitchen Table, August 2001... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Identities Part 1 We set off on this journey with a pile of books and texts and a suitcase of assorted costumes, unsure as to how these would coincide on the journey to unravel the myth of identity we were trying to explore. In Austerlitz, (Sebald, 2001), a search for lost identity, the main character explores narratives of place to re-find memories of self: “And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?” Being on this journey, we hoped to somehow keep these appointments, to touch moments our ancestors had experienced in their migrations Southwards. But we became more and more aware that our identities were performed, invented ones, constructing an idea of a fictitious past based on our own (recent) histories. We reconstructed family photographs taken on board ship, and dressed in the original garments belonging to grandparents and great-grandparents. What was curious was the change in sense of self, as Rebecca felt herself filling out the enormous dinner jacket and shoes of her Granddad Ben, and Katy felt herself taking on the airs and graces of her Great-grandmother, Edith. The photographs themselves are a deliberately unhistorical reconstruction, a hotchpotch of times and places; the setting is a ship constructed in the 1980s, the clothing dates from the 1930s and 1950s. But perhaps this is a more honest attempt to explain our confused identities than a deliberately accurate reconstruction of the past. After all, surely our family, by leaving behind their home and community, were trying to create new identities. The idea of the diaspora can suggest either a clinging to memories or liberating from the past, either a feeling of homelessness or an unreal sense of rootedness in a fictional homeland. Garfield (2006) writes: “Jonathan Boyarin suggests that nostalgia is a denial of the state of sustained rediasporisation, which is the nature of Jewish history”; why attempt to reconstruct a past which most Jewish families have for one reason or another been forced to leave behind?. “Diasporic subjectivity offers the contemporary world a way of understanding community without statehood or attachment to territory..the emphasis is not on where you are from, but where you are going.” This makes sense in the context of our journey – we are not seeking a complete identity, a return to the past, but rather like our ancestors perhaps more of a disentanglement from narratives of orthodoxy; acknowledging the complexities of heritage, with Jewishness as a part of our identity but not all.  When his father says “I don't want you should write this in your book. It has nothing to do with Hitler, or the Holocaust”(Maus, 1996), Art Speigelman, argues  “But Pop, it's great material. It makes everything more real – more human.” It is precisely the details and handed down elements of disaporic existence and of migration that constitute the human identities of our family. So for us, it's not the archetypal traditions but rather a family recipe that allow us to reconstruct an identity.  And its the changes in these elements that capture the sense of that diaspora as temporal rather than territorial/geographical. No place better to realise that than on board ship, a no-country, non-place – so identities can be constructed, without actual adherence to rules or nations. Katy Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Identities Part 2 We became very aware of our gender on board ship. From before we arrived we were repeatedly warned of the Polish seamen. We were told again and again how unusual it was for two young women to travel in this way. So things haven't changed that much in 100 years. Victorian Lady explored a fictitious idea of a genteel past of sea travel, where lady travellers in full dress would paint careful watercolours. Perhaps a more accepted version of what a woman artists should be? In contrast, for Dangerous Cargo we printed our bodies with the words Dangerous Cargo and posed on the bridge; playing on the fact that we had been told that passengers were the most ‘dangerous cargo’ on board ship, as they could move, ie. fall overboard. The sub-text to this was the danger we presented as women, a danger of temptation? In No Name, (Wilkie Collins, 1862) Magdalen takes on different roles through a series of disguises. Arguing with her servant over the servants' lack of willingness to swap roles with her, Magdalen says: “Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown and has a sense of her own importance.” Cross-dressing was suggested as one solution to our gender issues, and for Sailor Suit, Katy wore a sailor suit and moustache to take on the typical male role of seaman. The experience wasn’t one of integration, but it did make her feel more in sync with the ship, and the male-ness of the spaces we inhabited. While in Antwerp, we happened upon an exhibition which included Helio Oiticia's Parangoles (Made-on-the-body-cape), and it seemed a strange coincidence that the name of our ship was Green Cape. During the journey we embroidered and printed a piece of fabric as a “Green Cape” and then filmed Rebecca wearing the cape and dancing to unheard music on the fore of the ship. This work took on Oitcicia's philosophy of non-theatre, non-ritual, non-myth; process not display; not-nostalgic but rather concrete action. (Helio Oiticica, 1972, Synthesis-Parangole) The identity became not about the photograph or document, not about the past or our history, but about our being on the journey, on the ship at that very moment; it felt liberating. In another unintentional performance, the Crossing the Line ceremony, an event orchestrated not by us but by others (the crew) also spoke more about a moment in time and space than about an attempt to define identity. Katy Beinart References: Rachel Garfield, Towards a Re-Articulation of Cultural Identity; problematizing the Jewish Subject in Art, Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 1, January, 2006 Helio Oiticica, Synthesis-Parangole, 1972 W G Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001 Art Speigelman, Maus, 1996) Wilkie Collins, No Name, 1862  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Movement and Containment   The limiting nature of the space aboard ship has affected our energies and our physical and mental capacities. We have both slowed down. But the slowing down is necessary: a coping mechanism without which we might go crazy. Our bodies respond appropriately to the situation, they rest and wait. As the weeks pass, Katy and I react differently to the new world we are in. Katy allows herself to relax into it – to enjoy retreating into novels, and her internal world of thoughts. But I become increasingly energetic, and that’s when cabin fever set in. The ship becomes a prison. A pleasant one, where we have comfortable beds, plentiful food and our own (limited) entertainment. But it is nonetheless a space of confinement, entrapment. We cannot leave.   Aboard this Container Ship, I start to think about what ‘containment’ means. In the absence of a dictionary I check Microsoft Word’s synonyms. It suggests: ‘repression, suppression, control, restraint, or inhibition’. I think of the way we speak of a person being ‘contained’, not revealing their emotions. I associate containment with a lack of freedom, and yet sometimes it’s useful to contain yourself, it’s a form of protection. Containing something can mean keeping it safe. Katy says one of its meanings has to do with being full of something, for example ‘containing wisdom’, so it’s not always negative.   The reality of being contained in the world of the ship is a limiting of our movement, of company and of stimulus. Although we are moving all the time, covering thousands of miles and passing by numerous different countries, our bodily movement is contained within the limits of the boat.  Each day, the same movements are repeated: walking down four floors to the officer’s mess where we eat; walking up one floor to the bridge to watch our progress; walking to the front of the boat to watch the waves.  As I grow more frustrated with the lack of anywhere to go, I invent challenges for myself. Each day I ride the rusty exercise bike, pedalling furiously as the bike stays obstinately on one spot. We work out that a total circuit of the deck is 200m, and we walk five times around, to make a kilometre.   The only real means of escape is in the worlds of our imagination: we create new worlds to overlay on the world of the boat. We fancy-dress, draw, read and watch films. We discuss philosophy – altering the way we see this experience by trying out different theories as a series of different lenses to look though.   Tim Ingold describes all living creatures as Wayfarers. He writes: ‘Wayfaring is a movement of self-renewal or becoming… Making their way through the tangle of the world, wayfarers grow into its fabric and contribute through their movement to its ever-evolving weave.’[1]  There’s an important difference between being a wayfarer and a transported passenger: where you take no responsibility for your own journeying through the world, and don’t engage with the environments you encounter.   On this journey, I feel like we are transported passengers: gliding across the surface of the sea, our means of locomotion totally in the control of Polish sailors. We are transported, carrying our inner worlds with us. We can switch off from the world we are moving through if we choose. We are not completely disengaged from the environment of the sea, nor the environment of the boat. But we are not engaging as ‘wayfarers’: we are not really a part of the world we pass through. The deck is too high for us to touch the sea with our hands; we only feel it through the constant movement of the ship. Our dialogue with our environment is limited. The sea offers limitless horizons, but the boat prevents us from reaching them.   In Walvis Bay, after two and a half days of waiting at anchor, we finally go into the harbour. We are allowed off the ship for an afternoon’s freedom to roam this strange desert town. It’s a pleasure to walk, to eat what we please, to see different people. But I also have a strange feeling of having become so familiar with life aboard ship that the real world is a bit challenging. We are glad to return to the safety of the ship, to scuttle into the cabin and lock the door. We have become familiar with our own containment.   Rebecca Beinart [1] Ingold, LINES: A Brief History Routledge, 2007, p116... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Bread and Salt Reading the accounts of Jewish migrants who made this journey over 100 years ago, we are struck with their apparent obsession with food. They describe the barrels of pickled herring and potatoes that sustain them through the journey, and sometimes complain of a lack of understanding for their dietary needs. We add a category to our daily logbook, recording the food we eat each day, and pretty soon we start to understand what an important part of the voyage this is. Meal times on the boat are strictly timed, and we must eat what we’re given or not eat at all. The meals in the officer’s mess offer us our main daily interaction with other people. The menu is Polish, and heavily based around meat and potatoes, which is challenging for me as a vegetarian. On one occasion I am presented with a plate of potatoes accompanied by a large boiled carrot, proudly presented to imitate a steak. It makes us realise what a fundamental part of our culture and identity food is. We have brought with us the bread culture we started a few months ago. It was transported in the bread-making suitcase that Katy created and since our arrival on the ship it has sat in a tupperware in the fridge of our cabin, smelling distinctly. It is perhaps our most unusual piece of luggage. Artist Eva Bakkeslett writes about bread culture as a physical and metaphorical model for culture. She writes: ‘The word culture comes from the Latin words cultura – meaning to cultivate – to prepare the ground for something to emerge out of… It is interesting that the word culture is used both for human culture and fermented foods, which have been a vital way to preserve and enhance food for centuries. Culture is alive. It breathes and moves and develops a structure, given the right conditions and a portion of TLC.’1 On Christmas day, we decide to make some of own sourdough bread. We are given permission to use the ship’s galley, and Katy mixes our dough whilst I record her. The strip-lighted stainless steel room is a strange backdrop for this domestic process, and the bread-making begins to look like a soviet-era instructional video. We leave the dough to prove, and return later in the day to bake the bread. As usual, Niko offers advice on what we should do and how we should do it. But the loaves come out perfectly, and the crew are happy to have fresh bread with dinner. Spending three weeks aboard a ship makes us aware of the importance of food preservation. Before huge freezers could be loaded with as much meat as a Polish chef desired, salted food would have been a necessity. Mark Kurlansky writes of salt’s ability to preserve: it’s ability to protect against decay, as well as to sustain life, has given salt a broad metaphorical importance – we associate it with longevity and permanence.’2 He writes about rituals that use bread and salt: ‘Bringing bread and salt to a new home is a Jewish tradition dating back to the middle ages.’3 We create our own bread and salt ceremony to mark the thresholds we cross on our journey. When we cross the equator, we take our Lithuanian black bread down to the deck, and each eat a piece, dipped in salt, to quietly celebrate ‘crossing the line’. On our long-awaited arrival at Cape Town harbour, we repeat this ritual, sitting on suitcases at the harbour-side watching cranes unloading cargo from the ships. Rebecca Beinart 1 Cultural Fermentation: A talk by Eva Bakkeslett, 2008 2 Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky 3 Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Arrival On Sunday 10th January 2010, twenty-five days after leaving Antwerp, the Green Cape docked in Cape Town. Our arrival faithfully imitated the journey: nothing was going to happen in a hurry. On Saturday, Table Mountain appeared, distant and hazy on the horizon. We watched all day as it grew larger and more solid, the city eventually becoming visible at the base of the mountain. We dropped anchor in Table Bay and spent twenty hours waiting for a space in the harbour. We had a fantastic view of Table Mountain and watched as the sun set and the lights of Cape Town gradually twinkled into life. I was reminded of the writing of a Jewish migrant who had made this journey in the 1900s: “ We were more than pleased when our wandering had come to an end. The ship now lay peacefully in the harbour and our wonder grew as we looked at Table Mountain with its tremendous tablecloth of cloud. It was one of the most magnificent sights I had seen in my life...” Moishe Levin1 At 2pm on Sunday, the ship docked in the harbour, and we lined up our bags, ready to disembark. As soon as the Captain allowed it, we triumphantly left the ship, skipping down the rickety steps to stand on South African soil. Several hours later, we were still sitting on the harbour-side, waiting for a mythical taxi that was supposed to take us to immigration. Eventually, the second mate appeared, and explained that our ride wouldn’t arrive until 6pm due to mysterious circumstances involving paperwork for drivers entering the port. He persuaded us to get back on board and have a final drink with the crew. We started to feel like we’d never leave: that we were a permanent fixture of the Green Cape. We sat in the kitchen drinking a vodka-based beverage with the cooks, half-laughing half-crying at our predicament. But at 6pm we were finally put in the back of a pick-up truck and taken to a decrepit, imposing 1970s building that houses the immigration office. Our passports were checked and stamped, and we were officially in South Africa. Rebecca Beinart 1From Eastern Europe to South Africa: Memories of an Epic Journey 1880 – 1937, Gwynne Schrire  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Homecoming From the immigration office, we were picked up by Robyn, a friendly tour guide who drove us to our new home in Observatory, a quirky suburb west of the city centre. We arrived at the house in Alfred Street where we met two of our fellow visiting artists: Emmet (from London) and Evelyn (from Holland). This is to be our home for the next three months. In the front garden, an old hammock hangs under a Frangipani tree, but it looks like it might collapse if you were to actually sit on it. In the back yard, an avocado tree overhangs the wall, with promising green fruit that we hope will ripen before we have to leave. On Monday we went to Greatmore studios, to be welcomed by Mishkaah and given the tour by Aunty Yvonne. There’s a lot to take in, especially after our confinement on the ship, but it’s great to finally be here. We start to occupy our studio, filling the walls with ideas, drawings and texts. We meet some of the other artists and Kim arrives from Namibia, also staying at Alfred Street. We have a house excursion to an opening at Joao Ferriera gallery, for a show by Leon Botha and Gordon Clark, which is an intense introduction to the South African art world. Or perhaps one facet of it. Katy & Rebecca Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Oh! Darling.. Visiting the State archives on Roeland St, we find our way through the many keys and locks to a bare room with empty desks and piles of brown cardboard boxes. Eventually we suss the form filling system and order up documents, pertaining to our great-grandfather Woolf Beinart and his business interests. We hit a goldmine: the Darling Salt Pans and Produce Company, Ltd., was evidentially a going concern circa 1929 and there are a multitude of polite letters back and forward in his scratchy handwriting on headed paper, assuring the planning department of the hygienic nature of skin-preserving. We also find a blueprint for a railway siding at Kikoesvlei, near Darling, where he had his salt stores... So on Saturday we set off to Darling, and firstly visit the Darling Museum, home of South Africa's foremost Butter-making artefact collection. There we find more evidence of Beinarts in the area, as there was a Beinart tailors in Darlings' early days. From Darling we head north down a dirt track to Kikoesvlei, which consists of a railway siding and a sign. We look for evidence but find nothing, and so we head to the nearby farm. The farmer turns out to know the local history, and takes us to the site where he says the salt stores were, in his 4 x 4, past the Ostrich farm. There we find some remains of foundations, and a house on a pole, which he says is an owl house. They encourage the owls to live there to eat the mice that eat the wheat. Organic pest control. Then we drive past a huge dairy farm (not so organic) to Koekiespan, another farm, and the site of a salt pan. It is an eerie, uncanny place, a vast stretch of white emptiness under the blue sky. You walk onto it and it feels like desert, but also like ice, and you feel it could give way at any moment. I take photographs and the light is blinding. I feel a bit like I have landed on the moon. We collect the salt and add to our collection of envelopes, started with salt from the decks of the ships where sea-water has pooled and evaporated, leaving white crystals in patterns on the green paintwork. Katy Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058  Searching for clues  I am looking for the Deeds Office on Plein Street. There’s a huge imposing building that looks official, so I go in through the rotating doors and the security check and ask if I’m in the right place. The man at the desk tells me to go to the thirteenth floor. There, I wait for my number to be called as a smelly gentleman talks incessantly to me about his claim on his late mother’s house. Finally, I am summonsed to the enquiry counter by the moustachioed Eugene. I tell him I am looking for ownership records of the farms around Darling from the 1930s. He tells me I must go to the Surveyor General office on the 11th floor to find out the numbers of the farms. Downstairs there is more waiting as a guy uses a confusing computer program to try and match up the names I give him with numbers allocated to each plot of land. Finally I am equipped with the information and I head back to Eugene, to give him the numbers. I am handed a huge heavy volume full of carefully handwritten deeds showing the ownership of the farms around Malmesbury & Darling from the 1900s-1950s. I go through each of the farms in the Kikoesvlei area, looking for evidence of the Beinarts. We thought that possibly Woolf might have owned some of the land where the Salt Pans are located. The documents are fascinating, but bear no Beinart fruit. However, I realise that Mr Basson, the farmer who kindly showed us the salt pans, is part of a family who has owned land in that area for over 100 years. I leave the building with no further clues as to exactly which pan our Great-Grandfather would have harvested salt from, but with the satisfaction of feeling like a detective. Rebecca Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Baking in Cape Town Our culture has survived 26 days at sea, two weeks in a fridge in Cape Town, and a power cut. It was definitely high time to let it express itself in some loaves. At the weekend we decided to make our first batch of South African bread, and started the process in the kitchen at Alfred Street. The culture smelt ripe, and responded the warmth of unexpected summer with enthusiastic bubbling. On Saturday evening, the dough was ready and we baked three small loaves, which were enjoyed hot and buttery by our housemates.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Stellenbosch We visit Stellenbosch to see the University gallery, where we’ll be showing our work in March. It’s an amazing venue, in an old church with a beautiful vaulted ceiling and old chandeliers. There’s great potential in such a big space. But it also made us look at the calendar with a quiver of fear: despite Bergsonian philosophising, time is passing fast. Walking around the sleepy streets of typical Cape Dutch architecture now filled with chichi shops and cafes, we spot a toy and miniature museum. We appear to be the only visitors, and get a personal tour. As I have just started to construct miniature stage sets, it seems optimal timing by the universe to drop this in our laps. We marvel at the tiny recreations of a basement garage (complete with crushed coke can). The curator has extensive knowledge of plants and shows us the museum grounds, explaining the origination of the trees and plants. I am struck by the imposition of environments, so that the whole of Stellenbosch is really like one of the miniature models, a constructed world, an amalgamation of styles and mismatched objects, plants and trees, brought together to create a new version of place and identity for the colonists.  And our tourist experience is yet another veneer of artificiality, a reconstructed pastiche of this reconstruction of place. At Stellenbosch University, we have a long chat with Kathryn Smith, artist, curator and lecturer in fine art. I notice her collection of minituare cameras, each offering views of famous tourist sites of the world. Somehow it is an apt ending to our day to look at technicolour views of the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal. Katy Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 “Sewe Sakke Sout”  Tuesday 27th January: We set off early and head north out of Cape Town on the N7. It is raining slightly, and the morning traffic crawls around the knotty road junctions. Soon we are away from the city, driving past dry yellow fields with dark mountains in the distance. We pass the turn-off to Malmesbury and keep going. We are looking for Velddrif, at the mouth of the Berg River, where salt is still harvested. It’s further than we’d thought, and we drive 60km on a small bumpy road that cuts through the velt, with barely any other people or buildings to be seen. We do see several tortoises, ambling slowly across the road with no concern for the large lumps of metal hurtling by. We reach Velddrif town and look for the Khoisan Salt factory, where we’ve arranged a tour. We are greeted by the friendly manager, who sits down with us and patiently explains the process of salt evaporation that they use here. He shows us a technical graph depicting how long different concentrations of salty water take to evaporate, and the trace elements you find in salts. Then he draws us a beautifully confusing map and sends us off to see the huge salt lakes where they harvest the salt. Katy drives along the precarious sandy road between the lakes, and we see flamingos sunning themselves in the shallow water. It’s a remarkable and strange landscape. In the centre of this complex of water we find a mountain-range of salt, which a group of men are mining to fill sacks that are then loaded onto a lorry. We are given a tour by Isac. He takes us to the first pond, where 400-year old briney water filters through a bed of seashells which are the remnants of an ancient seabed. He explains that their salt contains calcium and other trace elements due to this source. From here, the water flows 6km as it filters through the complex, becoming increasingly concentrated, so that the last ponds are thick with pink-white salt. We see the small pans where the finest grade of salt crystals are hand-harvested, to make ‘fleur de sel’ – the salt of the Pharaohs. Kathryn Smith had told us about an Afrikaans saying, “Sewe Sakke Sout”:  If you have shared Seven Sacks of Salt with someone, it means you have walked a long way with them. Rebecca Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058   Relationship Issues  An artistic collaboration between siblings seems to fascinate other people, perhaps partly because they are secretly wondering if we fight all the time. After 26 days in a small cabin aboard a ship together and 3 weeks sharing our bedroom and studio space, Katy and I have been feeling the pressure a little. Before we reach the point of playing mean tricks or pulling each other’s hair, we had a grown-up chat about our relationship. We realised we’re starting to feel like a couple who never have any time apart – it stops us from appreciating each other, and squashes our creative relationship. So we’ve decided to have some time apart, pursue our own interests and plan a special date. We haven’t written to Mariella Frostrup yet.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Holy CokeFriday 29th January.We go up to the University of Cape Town, where two generations of Beinarts have worked or studied, to visit the Kaplan Centre for Jewish studies. The campus is beautiful, up on the side of the mountain with Ivy-clad buildings and a panoramic view of the city and the sea. We are greeted by Milton Shain, a historian who remembers Granddad Ben and our Dad. He is very helpful and takes us down to the library where we look through books and documents relating to Jewish migration into S.A. We read an interview with Ziporah Beinart, who married Koppel Beinart, describing life in Malmesbury in the 1920s. We see extracts from a Yiddish cook-book and another book in Yiddish which contains some pictures of Rakishok (Rokiskis) - the Lithuanian town we believe our ancestors came from. In the archives, I look at photos of Cape Town docks from the 1890s and 1900s, and try to get an idea of what Woolf, Gittel and their contemporaries might have seen on their first arrival. The librarian working there remembers our aunt Helen, from her student days. It sometimes feels like ‘Beinart’ is a magic word here – it allows us access into the South African Jewish community, and people are very friendly and willing to help.In the evening, we have been invited for Friday night supper, Shabbat, at the home of another relative. Hilary Joffe is the Granddaughter of Chana Beinart, who was Woolf’s sister. The dinner is at her son, Ivor’s flat. Ivor is a Cantor at the local Shul, and officiates at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I find myself stumbling over the terminology connected to the Jewish faith – we have been bought up with none of this in our lives, and I feel ignorant about Jewish customs and beliefs. The family are very welcoming. Ivor’s sister Peta is also there, and Hilary’s mother, husband, cousin Cynthia and her husband. There is much talk before supper of who’s related to whom and how, of facial characteristics and pondering over the family tree. Then Grandmother lights the candles and we sit down at the table. I am a little nervous – I’m not sure exactly what will happen and how I should behave. Ivor fills up the silver cup with special kosher wine and says the Kiddush prayer, to which the others occasionally respond. He fills up small cups for each of us with the blessed wine. Then something very strange happens – he pops open a can of Coca-Cola and fills the holy silver cup with that, repeating the prayer to bless the brown fizzy liquid. He gives the holy coke to his grandmother, explaining that she doesn’t drink alcohol. I ask if that’s traditional and they laugh. Next, Hilary’s husband cuts the challah, the plaited bread, and sprinkles it with salt before passing us each a piece. Katy and I are fascinated by this – it seems our bread and salt obsession is still relevant to Jewish culture. After that, we are served a feast of soup, followed by fish and vegetables, and finally cake. Before we leave, this generous family invites us to their other daughter’s wedding. We say we’ll come – perhaps this will be the only Jewish wedding we’re ever invited to.The following week we have lunch with Gail, another Beinart. Her father was Abe, Woolf’s youngest son, and she tells us the story of how he ran away to join the army when he was seventeen. As soon as the train pulled out of Malmesbury station and his strict father was out of sight, the young man threw his prayer shawl and cap out of the train window. But in the end he married a woman from an orthodox family, so he didn’t reject Jewish customs entirely. I am struck by the way that one generation holds tightly to their traditional culture, whilst their children reject it, and their grandchildren search for it. That seems to be a typical pattern in migratory families. I find myself confused as to whether I am trying to understand Judaism as a culture or a religion, and whether the two can be separated. But at least the centrality of abundant shared meals in our lives has remained.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Tiervlei, Lwandle and a bed called HomeTuesday 26th January: Katy and I drive out to the N1 City Mall, a sprawling metropolis of warehouse buildings housing chain stores and fast food restaurants, next to the highway. I have boycotted MacDonald’s for my whole adult life, but today we enter the dreaded golden arches for, of all things, a community arts meeting. The oddness of the setting begins to make sense as Edwina and Sheila explain their project. The whole area where the mall now presides used to be called Tiervlei, but the 'coloured' residents were moved off this land by the Apartheid government in the resettlements of the 1950s. The area their community lives in is now called Ravensmead, but the older folk still call it Tiervlei. Edwina and Sheila are setting up a cultural centre in an attempt to keep the history of this place alive, and provide much needed space and activities for young people in the area. They give us a tour, pointing out a few old houses that still remain, and the course of the buried river and marshlands that people had to build on. They show us how the highway cuts the community in half, and tell us about the riots in the 1980s, when this was the main route from the airport to the rich white neighbourhoods. It’s a fascinating place, and a classic example of the systematic division imposed on people by apartheid. We have been invited by Edwina & Sheila to run creative workshops with different generations in Tiervlei, to make some artwork to help launch their centre in an old school building.The following week, we go to the township of Lwandle, to visit the Migrant Labour Museum. This museum documents the migrant labour system and the hostels that started here in the 1950s, to house workers coming mostly from the Eastern Cape. The hostels permitted only employed men over 18 years of age, and their work meant that they would only go home for a few weeks per year.  We are shown round by the curator, Lunga Smile. He is a fantastic guide, and he talks us through the displays, telling stories of overcrowding, divided families, and the dehumanising laws of the Apartheid system. We see some incredible photographs: David Goldblatt’s haunting images of workers queuing for the bus at 3am, to begin their 18 hour day; an image of a whole family occupying a bunk with another family on the bunk below them; a newspaper clipping from the 1980s showing a man proudly standing in his shack, smiling, accompanied by a derogatory article suggesting that the township bred disease. Lunga asked us to think carefully about how we represent Lwandle and it’s inhabitants in our own photographs.The township that has developed around the old hostels now houses around 80,000 people, in converted hostels, houses and shacks. Conditions aren’t exactly luxurious, but there are no longer four families sharing one tiny room. Lunga takes us to see Hostel 33 – the one hostel that has been left in its original form, and we stand inside, trying to imagine how so many people lived together in this space. I am struck by what a luxury it is to have space and privacy. Mine and Katy’s concerns about having to share a room pale into insignificance. Lunga asks each of us what ‘home’ means to us, and where it is. We discuss this for a while, thinking about the homes we grew up in, and the various places we call home now. He tells us about a book, ‘A Bed Called Home’ and ponders on whether the cramped bunks of the hostels were ever truly home for their occupants. For some people, Lwandle was never home, but always a temporary dwelling – a necessary but unwelcomed place. For others the hostels and then the township became home, and their children and grandchildren were born here. I think about the elderly people in Tiervlei, who will always remember the homes lost to them when they were forced to move. South Africa is scarred with memories of injustice, of forced ‘resettlement’ and appalling conditions for people of colour. But people in places like Lwandle and Tiervlei are proudly keeping their histories alive, not wanting the younger generations to forget how they came to be here, and the rights they have won through years of struggle. Rebecca Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Sweet Home In a junk shop in Observatory I find a painting which proclaims “Home Sweet Home”. I purchase it and take it back to furnish my room. I am starting to feel at home here, and its got me thinking about how you make a home, and whether a home begins to make you as well. “Home..is supposedly a vessel for the identity of its occupants, a container for, and mirror of, the self”1 As migrants make home, they are also forming themselves, their new chosen identities, consciously using their home to reflect what they have chosen to keep, or leave behind, of their past homes. Daniel Miller writes about home as a process, a writing and rewriting of our personal narrative or biography.2 I notice the names of the informal settlements at the edges of town, on the front of the buses. Lost City, Panorama, and Sweet Home. I try to find out more about Sweet Home and discover: “Sweet Home is an informal settlement that was originally a rubble dump in the Philippi farm area and is now home to approximately 12 000 people, with around ten people per home. It is still largely undeveloped in terms of access to water and electricity. Half of the community have no proper toilets and the other half share six families per toilet unit. Community leaders estimate that the unemployment rate is a shocking 70% and malnutrition and other social ills that go with poverty, pervade. Sweet Home is a community facing many social evils and although only a few kilometres from the wealth of the suburbs and city centre, most of the people who live there will never see the 'other side' of Cape Town.”3 The optimism of the name astounds me. I ask Adelaide, our cleaner, about where she lives, and she describes her shack in Philippi as being about the size of our kitchen, 2 rooms for her and her 2 boys. It cost 4000R (about £400)she says, but she doesn't own the land. We make another research trip to Malmesbury, and meet Trevor Ringqvist, who recalls our family's shop and says he has a photograph of the Darling Salt Pans and Produce Company delivery truck. We drive to his home, a dilapidated wonderland of overgrown jungle and two houses stuffed full with antiques. He lives alone amongst the relics of his family, the last one left. He sorts through piles of old photographs and pulls out a blurry image of a man standing by a truck, the logo clearly visible. He tells us as he offers us a pomegranate from his tree that he can't manage the place any more, its too much to keep up. I think about immigrants arriving in a new place with nothing, gradually making home, acquiring, accumulating. I wonder how many possessions in the average shack and how many possessions in Trevor's house. His house feels like a museum. The social action of ghosts creating an atmosphere of lost memories. Katy Beinart   1Jonathan Hill (2009), Immaterial Architecture. Routledge 2Daniel Miller, Accomodating, in Colin Painter (2002), Contemporary art and the home,  Berg Publishers 3 http://www.warehouse.org.za/progshf picture credit: Resource Access cc. http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/stats/CityReports/Documents/Informal%20Settlements/Annexure_2C__Sweet_Home_Photos_2722006122351_359.pdf    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Ancestor Rituals We visit the Jewish cemetery in Malmesbury, and wander among the headstones, finding our great-grandparents Woolf and Gittel's graves covered in dust and fallen bark from the bluegums which tower overhead. We collect bark, twigs, earth and weeds from the grave; a plant is growing that is reminiscent of tarragon, a herb that originates from Southern Russia. I imagine the bodies of my ancestors containing seeds from their homeland, growing up through the red African earth. It is bakingly hot, and I shelter in a small derelict building at the entrance to the site and notice a line of stones which lead to the graves. I have a distant memory of being about 4, sitting in a hut in rural Transkei, and staring out at piles of white stones which marked the burial places of the village ancestors. In the Suku of south-western Congo, ancestors are appealed to at times of crisis. The elder men go to sit on the graves at night, or at a crossroads. “The old men 'feed' the dead certain foods considered to be their favourite: particular kinds of forest mushroom and wild roots, palm wine, and sometimes even manioc, the Suku staple. A small hole is dug in the ground and the food is put into it. Communication with the dead takes the form of a conversational monologue, patterned but not stereotyped, and devoid of repetitive formulae. One speaks the way one speaks to living people: 'You, [such and such], your junior is ill. We do not know why, we do not know who is responsible. If it is you, if you are angry, we ask for forgiveness. If we have done wrong, pardon us. Do not let him die. Other lineages are prospering and our people are dying. Why are you doing this? Why do you not look after us properly?' The words typically combine complaints, scolding, sometimes even anger, and at the same time appeals for forgiveness.1” Looking for traces of our family, I am reminded of Hilary Mantel writing about ghosts: “for some years I lived in Botswana and people there used to say that to see ghosts, you need to look out of the corners of your eyes”. 2 At Trevor's house in Malmesbury, surrounded by the possessions of his long-dead ancestors, I feel the presence of ghosts, as if they are holding him to ransom. I think about collecting, about our need to keep hold of artefacts as justifications of our own identity. In 'On Collecting', Susan Pearce writes that “heirloom material..is a kind of ancestor worship, where part of the point is to participate in the power which can flow from the mighty dead of one's own kin and partly, in a more limited sense, to enjoy the prestige which accrues from having ancestors at all”3 Perhaps the material objects are unnecessary, they are merely a conduit, a channel to keep the lines of communication with our ancestors open. Ghosts don't respond to the direct approach. Katy Beinart     1. Igor Kopytoff, Ancestors as Elders in Africa, 1971 http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/era/ancestors/kopytoff.html 2. Hilary Mantel, Ghost Writing, 28th July 2007, The Guardian Newspaper. 3. Susan Pearce, On Collecting, 1995, Routledge    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Cupid’s clues and the salt army At Malmesbury Museum we interview Trevor Ringqvist whilst the museum’s curator translates between English and Afrikaans. Trevor remembers the Beinart shop but he doesn’t recall the salt pans in detail. He tells us about a man who’s father used to drive one of the trucks for the ‘Darling Salt Pans and Produce Co.’ His name is Cupid Peterson, and the curator calls him for us, to ask if he remembers which salt pans the company used. She is on the phone for a while, speaking in Afrikaans. Cupid tells her that he used to ride in the truck with his father, and they would visit many of the farms in the area – including Koekiespan and Burgerspan - to pick up salt harvested from the pans. But he said that the farm the Beinarts owned was called Vredefort and is further north, near to Berg River station. We head out to Darling again, early on Friday morning. We visit the Bassons at Kiekoevlei and Bea kindly takes us out in the Landrover, to traverse the bumpy tracks between the farms. We revisit Koekiespan, and then go on to Burgerspan, where we see an even larger salt pan where hand-harvesting is still active. There are small mounds of salt lined up across the pan, like a marching army frozen under a spell. The place is beautiful, and we immediately feel that this is the location we want to use for our film. Katy uses a medium format camera to take a series of photographs for the installation we’re planning. Bea takes us to visit the farmer at Burgerspan, who has found some old photo albums in the attic. Amongst collected portraits of Shirley Temple, and various family holiday snaps, these include a few pages of photographs of the working salt pans from 1943. They are amazing images: the dry crust of salt being broken up with shovels, a line of men barrowing it across the pan, and using a wooden contraption with a ramp to drop the salt down into large sacks. There’s a horse drawn cart, and white men in suits standing proudly in front of a large pile of salt. It’s unlikely that these are our ancestors, but it’s fascinating to see the harvesting process they used at that time. Looking at the pictures later, I wonder how many people worked for the salt pan business. The working conditions look hard: being out in the glaring sun of the white pans all day and hauling heavy salt around. What effect does salt have on your skin if you are handling it every day? I wonder if Woolf and his partners actually had much to do with these physical sites. We meet up with Gail again and she is pleased that we’ve discovered the name of the farm that she'd been struggling to remember. She tells us that for her father, the salt business was really a sideline – the store was his main source of income. Over the past century, salt has fallen in price dramatically, as it has become increasingly mass-produced. But here the aesthetic pull of the pans overwhelms faithfulness to history. We have become fixated on the salt pans as a site for our work, and they somehow seem to hold the key to the search we’ve been on. Perhaps it’s because they are at once very specific to our family’s story, but also places that belong to nobody, that feel timeless and untouchable. The salt pans constantly renew themselves, growing a new skin that erases clues from the past. Rebecca Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Hand Writing At a stall at Paarden Eiland market, I find some ink wells dating to the early 1900s, around the time Woolf Beinart would have arrived in South Africa. I start talking to the guy who runs the stall, who tells me that 5 million bottles of ink a week would have been produced around that time, disposable glass or pottery bottles stoppered with wax. He says the ink would have been made from gall nuts, growths on oak trees, mixed with iron salts. As the ink oxidised, it became darker. The ink could only be removed from the paper by scratching off the layer of paper containing the ink, which made it suitable for writing Torah scrolls (the handwritten version of the Torah, the Jewish holy book). “If users find a letter to be cracked, common with text of a vellum document rolled and rerolled daily, a calligrapher must remove the letter in its entirety before it is redrawn, for the scroll to remain ritually pure.” I think about Woolf's letters, and other family documents, postcards, recipes, scribbled notes. The words are faded but intact. I wonder how we will pass down our digitised, typed words, or if these will be lost and forgotten, a whole wordless generation. Tim Ingold writes of the loss of understanding of writing as a scribal practice; that we “fail to recognize the extent to which the very art of writing, at least until it was ousted by typography, lay in the drawing of lines”. In the Dada exhibition at the National Gallery, I notice a piece of work by Willem Boshoff titled “Bangboek”. It is a series of tiny hieroglyphs and it reminds me of a religious text. Later I look up the piece and read that the translation of the title is ‘the book that is afraid’. Boshoff wrote it as a secret, silent protest to enforced military conscription during the apartheid era. I wonder if it is the action of writing by hand that carries an intent, a strength of conviction that invests the words with meaning. Perhaps this is why our ancestors collected postcards, letters and written ephemera so preciously, not just for the words but for the action contained within the words, the physical gesture of scripting. I stop reading words; instead I trace the shapes of the letters, imagine the motion of the writer, and try to deduce the sensations they felt, try to get under their skin. Katy Beinart   Tim Ingold, Lines, 2007, Routledge http://www.willemboshoff.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_gall_ink  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Photographic Memory I go round to Gail's to look at her collection of family photographs, and there in faded black and white is a photograph of Woolf, striding, no loping, down Darling street. It feels strange to see him caught off-guard, unposed, more real somehow. Gail tells me that photographers used to stand on the street and snap away, and then they'd stick the photographs up on the wall and you could come and buy the photograph of yourself. She remembers getting dressed up and being taken for “tea in town” at Stuttafords, or Garlicks, or Cleghorns, or Fletchers on Adderley Street, then going shopping. There is a picture of her as a little girl, proudly walking past the very same spot on Darling Street as Woolf, carrying her purchases and holding her mothers hand. Seeing Woolf in this photograph feels like a moment of time-travel; I have passed the same spot myself so many times, it is like a glimpse into his life. He looks somewhat cross as if he has business to attend to and doesn't want to be interrupted, and he walks with a slight hunch, his oversized jacket hanging loosely over his hands. I feel like he is hiding something, perhaps he is ever an immigrant, unbelonging, trying not to be conspicuous. Gail tells me that the Beinarts came to South Africa earlier than I thought, around 1896, and they were escaping the pogroms. This heightens my sense of Woolf as a man watching his back, hiding from potential danger. I am reading The Emigrants by W G Sebald, and I come across this passage: “Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” The photographs make me feel a little like this – giddy with the nearness and yet distance of my family, with these moments of almost catching them, but then feeling them recede again into the unknown. Katy Beinart   References: The Emigrants, W G Sebald. Harvill 1996  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 And we’ve been making some art… The past three weeks have seen us teeter on the edge of endless hills of research and plunge dramatically into the raging sea of production. Something strange happens when you’ve been developing ideas for a long time and then get to the point of making artwork. It’s like you have to forget everything, and start afresh with a different part of your mind. And you just have to trust that somehow parts of all that thinking and research will emerge through what you make. We’ve been gradually generating works throughout our time on the ship, and in Cape Town, but the intensity has increased of late. Recent weeks have involved hectic missions made all the more challenging by the extreme heat. We spent 24 hours at Burgerspan making a film, camping overnight to make the most of the low orange early morning light and the coolest part of the day. Being there at night was incredible, we made a fire and watched the moon over the gleaming salt pan and it felt like another world. Shooting the film was a surreal experience; we set up the dinner table in the middle of the salt pan and made our offerings to the ancestors. We wore beautiful 1930s dresses, and it was silent apart from the sound of silk in the wind. We shot it on an old 16mm camera but a few days later, we discovered that the film didn’t come out. We have a digital back up that we’re using instead, but it doesn’t quite live up to our vision. There’s a lesson in there somewhere – either about making things in a hurry, or perhaps that ghosts just can’t be filmed. We’ve been hunting markets and strange little shops for random objects, printing photos, arranging salt deliveries, designing images. I’ve made a handcart, with the help of the remarkable Doug, to conduct salt experiments. At the weekend I went for one final trip to the pans and tested out harvesting and preservation techniques with the cart. And now, with three days to go before our show at Stellenbosch opens, we are taking stock of what we’ve generated. We could have easily spent the full three months researching and testing ideas, and now we have to draw a line and make some choices about what to show. It’s exciting to push ourselves to create something public, to distill our thinking, and to open up our work for conversation.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Hard Graft The past week has been spent driving up and down to Stellenbosch in fierce heat, gradually assembling our extensive research materials, photographs, film, constructions and 2.5 tonnes of salt into an exhibition. On Tuesday, we picked up 8 enormous prints, photographs taken at Burgerspan, and gingerly transported them to the gallery. On Wednesday morning, 88 sacks of salt arrived and the day was spent shaking, raking and tidying it into a smooth plane covering the gallery floor. The light reflected off the salt is incredible, and the gradual shifts in colour and changes of shape as footprints appear make us want to stay there all day, just watching. On Wednesday night we are up late, making bread, and I spill half the starter culture on the floor by accident. We talk about how perhaps this is a fortuitous event – the culture needed renewing, it had got a bit stagnant. Is this accidental loss of culture necessary to create the space for new culture to emerge? The next morning, we bake a second batch of bread and the texture and rising time has totally changed. Later that evening, before the exhibition opens, Kathryn Smith gives me a text called “Graft” by Colin Richards. He discusses the much overused idea of 'cross-cultural osmosis' and how in fact, the reality of historical cultural change in South Africa is much closer to grafting- that is, a violent and forced transition from one culture to another. In many ways, a residency is a graft. Its a sudden, intense period of hard work; a sudden adaptation to a new culture, climate and way of being. Grafts can be successful, but they can also fail. Maybe its a risk we take, as artists and humans, to experiment with mixing, forcing change – because it can also produce unexpected and wonderful results. At the exhibition opening on Thursday evening, Kathryn reads a speech about our work which weaves together so many ideas and thoughts, from the genealogical to the botanical, and talks about the success of our 'marriage' as artists; that our collaboration has enriched both our practices, and we have carefully nurtured the relationship, allowing it to grow. I think she is right, this has been a slow grafting, a whole lifetime of working together and this time here has given it the opportunity to flower. We serve our bread and salt to the audience and explain the ritual of Khlebosolny – the blessing of bread and the salt as preservation of the blessing. One is nothing without the other. Katy Beinart     References: Graft, Colin Richards, in 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Catalogue. 1997  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Cabin Fever For the exhibition at Greatmore, we decide to transform our studio into the cabin we spent 26 days in on the ship. It is an ambitious plan after the Stellenbosch show as we have less than a week to gather all the materials and install, but it feels like the right thing to do in this space. In some ways we have had a similar relationship with our studio as that we had with the cabin: it has been a home but also a place of confinement; it is stuffy and airless, we can never really control the atmosphere; it has been both enabling and limiting. We have occupied it and made it our own, but we also know that once we are gone this space will be moulded to the personality of its next occupant. It has been a space the two of us have shared, at times desperately wanting to escape each other, and at times dreaming up wonderful schemes together. This particular scheme leads to another week of peculiar activities in the name of art. We build benches, upholster them in a wavy 1980s pattern, cover the walls in a drab beige fabric, and go on an unexpected adventure. Katy has tracked down some carpet tiles in an area called Grassy Park and we drive out there to find the guy who is wanting rid of them. We spend about an hour driving in circles around an area that goes from an industrial main road to rural fields, with tarred roads turning into dirt tracks, and grand houses rubbing up against shacks. Eventually we find the place and load the rather stained carpet tiles gratefully into the boot. Then commences a day of laying carpet, covering the cupboards in fake wood veneer and adding all the details of our set. Halfway through this process I wonder what we’re doing… we work up until the last minute, literally finishing in time for the opening. But once we’re curtained off the installation and switched on some dim lamps, it suddenly works, and feels like a bizarrely accurate recreation of the cabin. People arrive and during the evening we spend a lot of time in there, sharing vodka, sourdough bread and stories with the visitors. I am struck by the theatricality of what we have made. If you look closely it is a shoddy pretence, and yet people are willing to suspend their disbelief. For that night it was the cabin, and in a giddy state induced by exhaustion and vodka, I felt for a few hours like I was back on the Green Cape. Surprisingly, no one was seasick. Rebecca Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Alien Registration At the opening of our Greatmore show, we meet long-lost relatives Stella Kitay and Eda Gawronsky, who are descended from brothers of our great-grandfather, Woolf. Stella had seen a picture of her grandfather Philip's tailor shop in Darling on our blog, a picture she has never seen before. She invites us for tea at her flat in Mouille Point, and we get a call from another Beinart descendant, Craig Meltzer who comes along too. In their light, artwork-adorned apartment we crowd around photographs, family trees, and documents, trying to figure out who is who. Yossi arrives, who is descended from Haidee, another Beinart sibling, and brings along an amazing document – it is the passport and 'alien registration' stamps of our great-great-grandmother Sora Beinart (nee Glick), who made the journey from Lithuania to South Africa in 1921, aged 75, with her grand-daughter Haidee in tow. I try to imagine this old lady getting on a ship, leaving behind the place she has lived all her life, and departing for a new country, knowing she would be unlikely to ever see her home again. I think she must have been a strong and determined woman, to embark on that journey. I start to realise that some of the qualities I most admire about my ancestors are their courage to leave what they knew and start again, to make themselves alien, and (perhaps inadvertently) to open themselves up to new landscapes, to new influences, to learning. As we near the ending of our residency, we decide to return to the site of arrival to make a new piece of work. I enter the immigration building at the docks, wearing a coat and carrying a suitcase. I go up to the 5th floor and talk to the man behind the grille. He examines my passport. I leave, and in the lift I am transformed into my new identity – my new suit. I belong, I have a place here. Identity Suit is about acceptance and unbelonging; about attempts to fit in, and how these attempts may be mis-read. Carrying out this performance, I am acutely aware of both my freedom to remain or leave, and of the full circle, returning to the site of the beginning of our stay here. Perhaps beginnings and endings are not so dissimilar; a moment of leaping into the unknown, deciding what to leave behind and what we will take with us. And understanding that sometimes things are durational, they have a time-limited part in your life story, but that this does not make them any less valuable or easy to say goodbye to. Katy Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 The last supper It’s our final weekend in South Africa and we are hosting an event at Malmesbury Museum: the old Jewish Synagogue where our family used to worship. We spend Saturday evening preparing borscht and black bread for the performance. Dad is in Cape Town for a few days and we keep him busy chopping vegetables and making almond biscuits. A group made up of family, members of the Museum’s management committee, and artists from Greatmore studios join us for the event. We set up a dinner table at the far end of the museum, where a board displays information about the Beinart family and the rest of Malmesbury’s once-flourishing Jewish community. There is something very special about being able to perform an event in this space: it is a site that is so strongly connected to the stories we have been hunting, a space at once familiar and strange to us. Katy and I read texts taken from our letters to each other. The words feel particularly resonant in this place, and frame the conversations that follow as we share borscht and black bread with our guests. The simple act of eating together and asking each person to propose a toast to one of their ancestors forms a ritual in which significant fragments are shared. It is a moving and meaningful way to close our time here. http://www.malmesburytourism.co.za/malmesbury-hist...  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Salting the Earth So our time in Cape Town draws to an end, and we start to pack up our belongings, take down our studio, say our goodbyes. It doesn't feel like we are leaving never to return, although we both know that coming back would be different. I see this text in the Malmesbury Museum: “May your gates be open always. Day and night. May they never be closed.” I realise that endings are never full stops. Instead we leave doors open everywhere we go, possibilities of return, possibilities of friendships and relationships left behind to be re-established, ideas still to be  explored; but the context, the time, will never be quite the same. Unlike our ancestors, we are going back. We can return to our lives in Europe, but we have changed, subtly. I think about the redpill/bluepill choice in The Matrix. Having taken the risk, explored the possibility of other lives, is it impossible to go back to familiar, comfortable, known modes of identity and existence? On our last day in Cape Town, we drive out along Chapmans Peak Drive. It is a stunningly clear day, endless blue skies and ocean stretching out into the distance. We stop at the highest point and ceremonially throw the salt from our installation out over the cliffs and the ocean. It feels like a goodbye, but also like investing ourselves into the earth. A little bit of us belonging here, remaining here. Salting the earth. Part of leaving is having to get rid of the material possessions we have accumulated, and at the airport we discover that we have to lose some of our baggage or pay the excess. So we offer up our possessions to the airport, to whoever might find them. We leave “Romeo and Juliet” at La Senza, take “Great Expectations” to the World Cup souvenir shop, donate Isaac Bashevis Singer to the Esoteric section of the bookshop and leave the rice paper on a café table. Our final activity as they call for boarding is to eat the remaining black bread from the Malmesbury event with salt from the pans, and leave Woolf's name on the table. Travelling from England to South Africa took us 26 days, and travelling back takes us less than 26 hours. Rebecca tells me that there is a Native American Indian belief that your soul only travels at walking pace, so if you travel faster then it takes a while for your soul to catch up with you. We travel about 6000 miles in a day and I arrive feeling like a part of me is definitely still somewhere in Africa. England feels grey, white, cold, disorientatingly familiar. Home doesn't feel like home. Is this what it is like to be a migrant, to not belong anymore, in the new home or the old? Gradually I settle back in, I listen to the radio, read the paper, walk in the muddy green fields. But I am carrying ghosts within me, not just ancestral ghosts, but the ghosts of place – I dream of the mountain, of dusty red earth, and razor sharp light striking through the curtains in the morning. I understand now our rituals as we left. They were funeral rites, acts in anticipation of mourning. Katy Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Hull “Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions; to imagine it as a physical place is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached. That is to say, if memory is imagined as a real space...then the act of remembering is imagined as a real act…”[1] We have installed our exhibition at Artlink in Hull, a gallery on Princes’ Avenue, in an area of town that still has remnants of Edwardian finery. Walking up the avenues with their spacious houses and ornate fountains in the middle of the road allows us to imagine the Hull where Great-grandmother Edith spent her youth, a wealthy town with a busy harbour, through which many migrants passed en route to America and South Africa. In other parts of town it is harder to see Hull’s past: it was one of the most severely bomb-damaged cities in the second world war, has lost a lot of its traditional industry, and has suffered a lot of redevelopment, including innumerable concrete shopping centres and car parks. Travelling up to the north-east over the past few months, peering behind the concrete, we find clues about our ancestors. There’s a fantastic history centre where we look at maps of Hull from the 19th century, and see the plans of a long-disappeared Botanic Gardens. We find the 1901 census that record the Pearlman’s lives in Hull. We visit the neglected Jewish cemetery where Great-great-great-grandfather Filaratoff is buried. And using Edith’s post-card collection, we find what remains of the places that have entered out imaginations through the faded photos and looped handwriting of messages written over 100 years ago. At Artlink we show some of the work we created in Cape Town, reconfigured for this environment. We have also produced new work, drawing on Edith’s life and local histories. Adaptation is a travelling plant case, based on the Wardian case used by Victorian plant collectors to transport rare finds to a new environment. The case contains four South African plants, whose names combine to make a ‘living letter’. Floriography, the Victorian ‘language of flowers’ designated particular meaning to specific flowers, to create coded messages of love and longing. Ghost writing is an installation that develops an idea that we explored in South Africa: the physical act of writing by hand and the traces left by the letters and postcards of a generation of migrants. Farewell Concert refers to Edith’s skill as a concert pianist, and the concert she gave before leaving Hull for South Africa. We often select certain pieces of music to act as markers for moments in our life, or as requiems for a particular time or a person who is no longer with us. Much of the work in this show can be transformed back into luggage, ready for a continued journey. We project the film Offere in a suitcase, a small mobile cinema that can be folded down and carried away in a few minutes. More than a century ago our family unpacked their bags in Hull and made it their home. Then after just one generation they packed up again and left. We return, looking for a place to touch, a place to locate memory. Rebecca Beinart [1] Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust-  A History of Walking    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Though I have missed you so very much I am standing outside Hull Paragon Station, holding a sign in my hands. Slowly people gravitate towards me. A gentleman in a straw hat walks up to me, and not looking at my face, says haltingly ‘Though… I have missed you… so very much’. This is how it begins, a walking tour of Hull, animated by fragments of lives played out in these streets at the turn of the 20th century. A group of sixteen has gathered for the tour, and luckily a woman in a floral dress hears the phone box next to us ringing quietly, a summons from Katy to come and meet her on platform 4, the original "emigrants platform". For two hours we explore Hull, asking each of the walkers to carry an envelope, which is addressed to a particular location. At these locations, they open the envelopes and discover one of Edith’s postcards, a photograph or artefact relating to that site. Katy and I weave together the stories of our family and these places, in the context of the 2.2 million emigrants who passed through Hull from the 1850s – 1910s. As the walk meanders through the city centre and down to the docks, we become increasingly involved in the tales of Edith's and her best friend Dolly's lives, and separation through migration. We encounter ships, waiting rooms, concert halls, a music box, a lost locket, lost gardens, a drowned synagogue and a forgotten brother. There’s a profound sadness that emerges from tracing vanished lives in a contemporary landscape. But there is also a humour as secrets are revealed and interpretations of the missing facts are offered. Most of the people who join us for the tour are of our parents generation, or older, and the readings we include about memory and forgetting seem to resonate strongly for them. We end the tour at the docks, looking out at the murky Humber and the wide open sky. I pour everyone a shot of vodka, and as we raise our glasses to ‘all those who have passed’ Katy reads us a quote from Sebald: ‘Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and a giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.’ The Emigrants, W G Sebald.   Though I have missed you so very much was part of Humber Mouth: the Hull Literature festival  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Dis-orientation Over the summer, we continue to explore cultural transference, and migration. Rebecca's work in Loughborough for Radar consists of creating a new starter culture, one made from local yeasts and distributed amongst residents who keenly take on the task of baking bread. The project, Exponential Growth, begins to snowball, and requests come in from people outside Loughborough itself, so that our cultures are now spreading beyond the UK, to Germany, South Africa, USA and elsewhere. An article about Starter Culture features on The Fresh Loaf, a blog about bread making, and brings further encounters from far afield. Meanwhile, I experience a literal migration, leaving home and moving to London, a process of letting go but also returning – to Bethnal Green, once the home of our grandfather Michael, his parents Moishe and Sarah Schreibmann and their 8 children. In coming back to a place that was once our family home, I become a revenant; a returnee, but also a phantom from another era trying to superimpose myself on a past that has all but vanished. Derrida writes of the duality of 'revenant'; meaning both coming back, returning and also a ghost or phantom (The Work of Mourning, 2001), and I wonder if a ghost from the future can haunt the past. I walk to Grimsby street, off Brick Lane, on the day of the 10th anniversary of my grandfathers death. The house he lived in, a Victorian terrace slum opposite the railway arches, is gone, as are the railway arches, conquered by a monumentally concrete overland line that seems to hover ominously over these huddled streets. I leave a bunch of flowers tied to the railings and a card in memory of my grandfather, and am disorientated by a sense of immanence, a momentary feeling of time being very thin, almost immaterial. Coming to live in London, I am constantly disorientated by this feeling of familiarity and yet strangeness, of belonging and not belonging. “Disorientation is a change of the relationship between time, place and person. Throughout history, people have been consciously engaged in inducing a state of disorientation. … We seem to need times of disorientation, whether self-induced or as a consequence of situations where disorientation is embedded in the event. (…) The disorientation of the liminal process involves place, time and self to be open to new experiences and new knowledge. Disorientation is a condition of the self that can allow new links to be considered; a kind of bridge that slips between seemingly unconnected experiences and events.” (Newling, 2007) My new flatmate tells me the German word for arrival - ankommen – which means “the time it takes for you to arrive”. Perhaps my disorientation is due to being in this liminal period, having left one home, and not yet feeling fully arrived in the next. I imagine this is akin to the feeling my great-grandparents experienced upon their arrival in London, and yet for me it is at least a known place, a known language, a known culture. There is a continual pull back and forth between homing and disorientating, between finding a source or place of knowledge then shaking it off to face the unknown again, to begin the search again. The idea of homing in on a truth or an idea, is one of searching for specificity. It is an act of orientation. We associate home with a certainty, a knowledge, a source. Homing is the opposite of exponential growth, of expansion. In a sense this mirrors the activity of genealogical research, and of family, in both directions: searching further and further in the past towards a place of origination, or going from that point of origin into the future, the gradual expansion and scattering of family from a place that was once home. In our present, we are like a lens, a focal point from which this past and future expands infinitesimally, the point of connection between these myriad lives and dwelling-places. Katy Beinart References: John Newling, An Essential Disorientation,  2007 Derrida, The Work of Mourning, 2001 William Goldman, East End My Cradle, 1940 The Fresh Loaf blog Exponential Growth  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058   Market Research We just found out that our grant application for the next stage of the 'Origination' project was a success. We will be undertaking a residency in Brixton market this summer, working with local communities to explore Brixton's rich history of migration, and generating new work for an exhibition and series of events at 198 Contemporary Art and Learning. Yesterday we had our first planning meeting, and the ideas began to fly. We wandered around Brixton market, and came upon answers to many desires – from exotic food to eyebrow threading, popcorn to cobblers, and 'Jinx Removing' salts, to rid your home and body of evil spirits. 'In the Middle Ages markets often provided opportunities for liminal encounter. Not only were they the territory of commercially minded merchants selling the essential requisites of life – but they also provided a fertile ground for the peddlars of mystery; the relic sellers who proffered a glimpse of saintly bones, or the chance of touching a fragment of the true cross...' (Introduction by Rev Dr Richard Davey, in Newling, 2007) The idea of 'relics' is intriguing, as it touches on ideas we have already worked with around trying to capture ghosts, or create presences of something absent. Hetherington (2003) writes about 'praesentia', an encounter with the presence of an absence, as a way to explain the power of relic. He also writes about relics as forms of translation, bringing the far (in time, or space) to the near – but also a way of translating between cultures as migrants settle in new worlds. Our intention for this new phase of Origination is not to leave behind our own family story, but to move outward from it – by collecting and translating between our own and other's histories, finding new ways to represent migrant histories, and migrant ghosts, that all too often vanish into the complexity of the city. For ghosts are not just specters of the past, they can also refer to the present: as Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen write, “ghost has become an increasingly appropriate metaphor for the way marginal populations haunt the everyday, living on the edge of visibility and inspiring a curious mix of fear and indifference.” The market stalls full of magic spells, healing plants and herbs and strange relics provide a starting point for contacting these ghosts of the past and present.   References: Kevin Hetherington (2003) Spatial Textures: place, touch and praesentia. In Environment and Planning vol 35 John Newling (2007) An Essential Disorientation Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen (2010), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Technicalities After months of planning, we met again in London to begin work on the next stage of Origination. Day one of our intensive week saw us heading down to Brixton to the Market Office, to register as market traders, and entangle our selves with the complex bureaucracies of Lambeth council. We learned the art of patience and ate oranges as many forms of identification were taken. Eventually we were sent to the next office in Shakespeare Road for further verification, and were then sent out with a promise of an official ID card to follow.   After this testing experience we ventured to the Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, to discuss our plan for a dinner party in the greenhouse. There we met Fabrice, the site manager, who explained the diverse range of plants grown on site from all over the world, and then invited us to pot up some tomato seedlings.   Day two and we set off for the Bartlett workshop to start on our translation machine, with help from artist and musician Stephen Cornford. The work was challenging, involving taking apart machines and gently adapting mechanisms through a mix of persuasion, will and pillar drills.   Later on we visited the Andrews family in Woodford, and met Mr Andrews, a clockmaker extraordinaire who showed us his amazing collection of clocks and advised us on possible mechanisms for one of our artworks.   Day three we headed for the studio to assemble materials for our market stall residency, which starts next week. We painted up a sign, found jars for our 'product', ordered backdrops and discussed systems of recording and archiving materials.   Over dinner we debated different kinds of intelligence and thought processes. Having spent the week encountering different processes of thinking and making it seemed apposite to realise how much we had strayed outside our usual comfort zones or patterns of making art to tread into new territories, ones we are certain to delve deeper into in the weeks to come.      ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Trading Standards Getting up at 6.30am, we begin the day bleary-eyed but optimistic. Before heading down to Brixton, we have to pick up all the tools of our trade from Katy's studio, and visit the post office to retrieve an all-important envelope that we believe contains our precious Market Traders ID cards. After waiting in the sorting office for half an hour, Katy discovers that the envelope has mysteriously been re-entered into the postal system and is in a postman's bag somewhere in Hackney. Frustrated and late, we begin our drive south, and get ensnarled in the morning rush hour. Finally we arrive at the Brixton Market office, and after quite a lot of sighing and humphing, the gentleman at the desk says that we can go ahead with our stall. But then he asks if we received a message about the Assistant’s papers. It takes me a minute to remember that's me – Katy registered as a trader and I am her assistant. After three weeks of form-filling, phone calls, and pestering Lambeth Council, it is only now that they tell me I was supposed to present them with various forms of identification before my application can be processed. So I am told that I am strictly not allowed to trade. I ask if I can hang out at the stall and he says yes... but NO trading. The next challenge is getting a stall set up, which involves finding someone called George, who piles various bits of metal scaffold onto a cronky old cart and then assembles them on our pitch next to Stuart the Watchman. We begin to set up our stall, excited to see it finally coming together. As we lay out the empty pots Katy asks – where's the salt? And we realise we have left it back in Hackney. So Katy embarks on a two hour trek back across the city whilst I guard the stall, hoping that no-one official uncovers me as an illegitimate assistant. The Market officials who do come along are more concerned that we use accurate scales to weigh out the salt correctly than about checking my status. By lunchtime, we are finally ready with our currency of Darling Memory Preservation Salts, and various strange pieces of recording equipment. Our Latin American neighbours feed us coffee and empanadas, and Stuart gives us lots of useful advice on how to improve our stall aesthetically and practically. And although it feels slow, we end up having a series of very interesting and occasionally bizarre conversations, and collect seven stories in exchange for salt. We hear memories of jasmine-scented courtyards in Damascus, a navigationally deft two year old riding a donkey in Jamaica, the man who used to guard the market at night and scare off thieving pigeons and a Nigerian healer whose powers have passed through the generations. Finally at 5.30pm, we pack up our stall and trundle our wares back to Hackney through yet more (never-ending) traffic. It's been a long day.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Exposure and disclosure Our first five days at the market have been wonderful, challenging and exhausting. We had a multitude of hiccups, largely involving the Lambeth Council bureaucracy – and us forgetting things. But actually being in the market and talking to people has been good, and we've heard an amazing array of stories. The experience of being on the stall all day, being so explicitly public, has a particular quality. It feels very exposing – it reminds me of the way I feel doing political campaigning and protest – you put yourself into public space and open yourself up to critique, conflict and rants, as well as incredible encounters. It's not an easy thing to do, but there's nothing quite like it and what comes of it is very unpredictable. Having our stall, our salt pots, and offering an invitation to people to contribute something particular gives the experience more structure – a framework that the conversations hang around. But there's still an enormous variety in the way people respond and interact with the project. I've had one conversation so far that felt contentious. It was interesting, and it was a subject that I had expected and hoped would come up. It was slightly marred by the fact that the guy who was talking with me seemed a little pissed, and was not entirely interested in listening. But he highlighted a few questions that are at the core of this project: how personal histories bring to light political histories, and overlapping stories of privilege and oppression. He took unction that we were using salt from South Africa as our currency – suggesting that our White European ancestors stole land from his African ancestors to acquire their wealth, and that this was a huge affront in a place like Brixton. The stories are so much more complex than that, and he wasn't prepared to talk about Jewish migration within this context - but issues of colonialism, race and power have to be confronted when we talk about migration. This conversation also highlighted an issue we have worked with throughout Origination, particularly in the piece 'Don't Look Back'. Delving into family history can raise things that make us hugely uncomfortable, or things that are painful and we'd rather not know. It can also raise questions of whether we are responsible for the actions of our ancestors. I think the project we're doing here in Brixton acknowledges the problematic nature of looking at our personal connection to history and politics. It is not an attempt to merrily 'celebrate multiculturalism' – it touches on raw points. There are tensions and frictions in talking about the past. There are wounds in family histories, and it's deeply personal and sometimes painful to ask people to share these stories. Migration and cultural adaptation can often mean that people leave unwanted baggage behind. So far, forty people have stopped to share a story with us – each of these stories have involved disclosure, and the generosity of sharing something personal with a stranger. It's a huge privilege to listen and also a lot to digest.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058     Confabulating... On Wednesday 15th June, Origination opened at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, the next chapter of our project. The work on show translates and re-presents the material gathered during our month-long residency in Brixton Market. Installing the show transformed the gallery into a carpentry workshop, an electronics lab, a nursery (of plants) and a salt repository. Gradually from these various productive (if messy) areas, clarity emerged, with the work still 'in progress' but contained within distinct stations. As the exhibition took shape, we responded to the idiosyncrasies of the space, whilst the work once installed changed the gallery, giving it the feel of an experimental laboratory. A week later, on 23rd June, invited speakers John Newling and Paul Basu came along to talk to an audience of project participants and others. Reflecting on the themes of the exhibition and the market residency, John spoke about the possibilities of markets as spaces of mystery, and fluidity, which he had explored in his Preston Market Mystery Project: “Markets for me are places of transaction that belie the shininess of the mall and the high street, giving instead a visceral sense of the community chatting and moving through a space that is at one and the same time both ancient and contemporary. It is a fluid space, where the permanence of the architectural edifice seems to be disorientated by the transitory events it houses. It is a space of risk and mystery. In a society which has profoundly moved towards an audit of our activities, the marketplace seems a fine context in which to sell insurance against loss of mystery.” The place of mystery, like that of the detective novel, is familiar to artists as we set out to observe and understand the world around us, to solve its riddles and puzzles. The detective work of family history, creating a series of meanings around absences, around journeys to places where nothing may be left except ruins, is a means of constructing identity, and of creating origin myths. Our work has given salt an importance as part of our origin myth, and both John and Paul talked about the properties of salt, John mentioning its power to both protect and corrode, which seems so potent in the context of memory. Paul suggested that salt acts as a relic – it contains the substance of the place, the salt pan becoming a site of pilgrimage. In this sense, the artwork/ installation Confabulation1 is a collection of relics, each representing (fictionally or actually) the substance of a place, or a journey. In a Handbook of Material Culture, Chris Tilley talks about how our personhood is created through objects/use of objects, and how things provide a way to understand ourselves and each other. This collection of objects is a potential starting point for a creation of shared meaning, between these 54 different histories. Paul suggested that with the archive as place of absence, the creation of an archive or a journey towards one's roots becomes an act of fantasy. But these profound emotional journeys, akin to pilgrimage, can fill the unknown. As Paul said, looking at our family tree, it has multiple points of origin and departure – a “complex of journeying”. This defies the idea of singular roots – and suggests rather the tangled roots of belonging (like a deleuzian rhizome), the implications of which might be to question what legitimacy roots give us..but also offer up opportunities for a more collaborative approach to the mythology of origin.   With thanks to John Newling and Paul Basu.   The exhibition runs from 16th June - 5th August at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, 198 Railton Road, London. www.198.org.uk   1the confusion of imagination with memory, or the confused application of true memories    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Pattern Language   In March and April I took up residence in August Art, a gallery on Shoreditch High Street. I had researched the history of the area, investigating the Huguenot silk trade and lace-making, and visited the national archives at Kew to look at Huguenot silk and lace samples. I wanted to explore ways of re-translating the patterns made in previous works, Confabulation and Aurophone, using the idea of lace-making from a previous work for the Gift exhibition in 2008 (OVADA Gallery).   In design, a pattern language is a language applied to some complex activity other than communication. In the same way that language provides a structure for communication, pattern language provides a series of structures for design. I used these ideas to develop a new work, Pattern Language, that plays with the idea of language, communication, translation and migration. In this combined map/lace work, the routes of individual migrant histories are plotted using the patterns generated by the Aurophone, and as they cross and interweave new patterns are formed.   Through the process of making the work in the gallery, I invited passers by with a connection to the area to come in and tell me their stories of migration and family history, trading these for the Memory Preservation Salts we had used last year in Brixton Market. Collecting the stories as the work grew gave me an insight into this area and its many diverse connections. Shoredtich and Spitalfields have long been a crossroads and point of arrival for different migrant communities from the Huguenots in the 18th century, to the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and more recently the Bangladeshi community.   The physical process of making the work was painstaking and time-consuming, involving hundreds of tiny knots. As I made the work I thought about memory processes, and the use of knotting in many societies as a way to 'tally' memory, to exteriorise and make physical a mnemonic aid, so that as the 'narratives' grew on the table I was literally and metaphorically weaving a story onto the map. Meanwhile, recording oral histories of travel brought me to thinking about how in the telling of narratives, each time a story is told it is re-translated, altered slightly, for audience, context, and as words are passed down and lost or changed.   This relationship between the physical and the oral recording and translating of memory seems to meet at the point of a 'pattern language', finding ways to decode, translate and understand a structure of how we tell and understand memory of place. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Hamburg-Veddel We spent Saturday roaming the streets of Hamburg, following the very faint trail of our Great-great-grandmother Ann Filaratoff, and her father Nicolas. We believe they came to Hamburg from St Petersburg in the 1870s and stayed for up to a decade before leaving for Hull (and eventually South Africa). Katy had scanned two portrait photographs of Ann, with the address of 19th century photography studios on the back. So we began our day searching for these addresses, negotiating a large triathlon that blocked many of the city centre streets. Opposite the Rathaus, we found the first address, which had a serendipitous advert for a photo service in the window. The second address was now a shiny clothes shop, and we took photographs at each location posed as Ann had, 120 years ago. We walked on to the Hamburg city museum, which had a small section on Jewish history in the city, but didn't find very much there to tell us about the experience of Jewish migrants. So we left the grand buildings of central Hamburg, heading past the river port where crowds of tourists waited for expensive boat rides, and got the S-Bahn down to an area called Veddel, cut off from the city by two expanses of water. This is the area that Jewish migrants from Russia and Eastern Europe would have been sent to await their passages onwards – to England, and on to America or South Africa. Emerging from the station we see that it is still a migrant area, with more cultural diversity than in the rest of the city. Its unglamorous, with crowded blocks of flats looking out onto the railway lines and busy roads. We head to the migration museum (wonderfully named 'Auswandererwelt' in German), sited in the old accommodation blocks built by Alfred Ballin's shipping company in the early 1900s. Sponsored by a US company, the museum tells a somewhat disneyfied story of the thousands of Germans and Jews who emigrated to America, via lots of old suitcases, wooden models fixed in longing poses, and a very scary full-scale horse that suddenly starts nodding at me. We didn't learn anything new relating to the Filaratoff's story, but it was interesting to see the point of departure for many of the migrants who would have travelled via Hull. It feels like we are very slowly piecing together a jigsaw of physical places, that give some sense of solidity to lives we can only imagine. We decided to walk back, past the container docks and industrial sprawl between Veddel and the centre of town. First we looked for the 'harbour museum' which we found on an unlikely looking unpopulated road, in a huge old warehouse. It was about to close, but the woman at the ticket desk let us have a quick look – a complete contrast to the previous museum, this was a totally unpolished jumble of dusty artefacts piled high on rickety shelves. Walking, we reflected on the way that certain histories continue to echo in the same sites in cities. And then we begin to talk about our practice as artists, and the words we use to describe ourselves, and how inadequate they can be – but how they can offer us a way into something, or a way to frame something. Perhaps in searching backwards for the evasive stories of our ancestors, we are also searching sideways and finding new ways to see ourselves, and one another. Rebecca Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Our First Day in Vilnius We arrived safely after a harrowing journey by sea from Kiel beset by singing German Jesus Army, Lithuanian lorry drivers spoiling for a fight, and grumpy waiters. What a relief then to met by the genteel Saulius, who took us to his charming apartment in Shnipishkes. Try saying that after a mouthful of vodka and herrings. Having settled in and had a good nights sleep, we awoke the next morning to begin our search for any clues as to our family's sojourn in Vilnius. Looking online, we found out that as well as the Beinart family in Rokiskis, on our paternal grandmothers side the Apter family had prior to being in Dvinsk (Latvia) descended from the Meisels of Vilnius. About 6 generations back, Moshe Meisels had been a Rabbi and spy and his father Moshe had been the Shamash of Vilnius (we're not sure what this is and although it sounds like a disco track, its more likely it is something religious). There was some information about where they had lived so we set off into town via the Jewish Museum. Thence we got entrapped by a fascinating display on rescuers and rescued during the Nazi period, how Jewish kids were able to be smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto by pretending to be Lithuanian and were adopted by Lithuanian families. The photos and testimonies were haunting, and it felt unreal when we stepped back out into the bright sunshine and tourist bars on the streets. We then spent a couple of hours walking the ghetto as was, now full of swanky cafes, bijou boutiques and discreet but no doubt expensive hotels. A few plaques and monuments told the story of its former life as a ghetto and prior to that as the Jewish quarter of town, going back centuries. At the Museum we had picked up some postcards including one of Jatowka street where the Meisels lived, but the streets we walked down were unrecognisable, brightly spick and span plaster and none of the stalls spilling out from buildings onto the streets selling all manner of goods. Walking back to Saulius's along a bustling street with shops selling typical tourist tack, we joked about setting up a stall to sell 'Ghetto souvenirs'. It might sound tasteless, but perhaps it would create a more living reminder of the silent ghosts of Vilnius than marble stones and bronzes. It seemed the history we were looking for felt only possible to access through imagination, and that only those who were looking for it would see it. Katy Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Ar pamenate į Meisels? (Part 1) (Do you remember the Meisels - Part 1)... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Ar pamenate į Meisels? (Part 1) (Do you remember the Meisels? - Part 1)... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 De-Ciphering   “A cipher is any method of encrypting text (concealing its readability and meaning). Its origin is the Arabic sifr, meaning empty or zero.”   In her text on Souvenirs, Susan Stewart writes: 'The souvenir is destined to be forgotten; its tragedy lies in the death of memory, the tragedy of all autobiography and the simultaneous erasure of the autograph. And thus we come again to the powerful metaphor of the unmarked grave...' As we attempt to locate and de-cipher traces of our ancestors, we hit many problems. We are having to negotiate multiple languages and translations, from Lithuanian to Russian to Yiddish to Hebrew and around and around in a never-ending circle of confusion. Names have been recorded in one language, translated to another, then another, through several scripts. We hit on using google translate in a playful advertising campaign around Vilnius old town, pretty sure that the mis-translations offered by a cybernetic interpreter reflect the truth of our search. In a short text published as part of Documenta 2012, Eyal Weizman talks about the ancient greek idea of prosopopoeia, or translating or interpreting the inanimate, giving a voice to objects, to cities and buildings. This idea of buildings/places as sensors/agents, somehow aware of what passes through them, is correlated in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's (Documenta curator) text in which she asks, do objects of art which observe traumatic events become themselves traumatized? If our role as artists is therefore to somehow read and interpret these objects or places, the fear that one can encounter is of the emptiness of the cipher, of the futility of the search. We seem to keep drawing blanks (literally), in following the official routes of historical source materials, museums, archives etc. Perhaps this is where as artists, we do have another mode of translation to offer, that of embodying the past in the present, which can offer another, richer, re-reading of these sites. As Anke Bangma writes in Experience, Memory, Re-enactment, 'Remembering is an act in the present...(it is) an ongoing process of mediation;...memory is not something we have but something we do, in an act that does not merely reflect past reality 'as it was' but acts upon reality by organizing it and attaching specific meaning to it.' We write our own biographies back into the places or ancestors lived, the autograph returns, the cipher is not deciphered, necessarily, but a new script traces over the old, giving it form and meaning, not emptiness and erasure.   K Beinart         refs: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/cipher Anke Bangma and Steve Ruston (eds), Experience, Memory, Re-enactment, Piet Zwart Institute, 2005; Documenta notes No. 62, Eyal Weizman, 2012. Documenta notes No. 40, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 2012. Brian Dillon (ed), Ruins, Documents of Contemporary Art series, Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Offere II Our sourdough bread culture - which will be three years old in October - has travelled with us from Oxford to South Africa, Hull to London and formed the basis for khlebolsony rituals at multiple thresholds. It has accompanied us on this trip, and we bake bread again in Vilnius, adding Lithuanian flour (miltai) to the cultural mix. We visit the Jewish cemetery in Obeliai, the shtetl where a lot of the Beinarts lived in the 19th century. The cemetery has graves going back perhaps 300 years, but stops in 1940 when the holocaust took place here. Some of the stones have recently been righted, but the site is very overgrown and has become a wildflower meadow in-between the graves. Our Dad, who has joined us for a week, attempts to decipher some of the graves, tracing the faded Yiddish words with his fingertip and trying to remember the hebrew alphabet. We soon realise that we are unlikely to find a Beinart grave without a translator and a thorough search. The novella 'It Has To Be This Way' follows the story of an amnesiac preoccupied with old photographs. One of the characters says of the photographs: 'They could not be indicative of memory, they were uncoupled from the past. Instead the photographs could only be memory in the making.' I feel like the sites we visit have the same quality for us – there is no living history, no personal memories to connect us to these places, we do not feel their significance except through understanding them historically. Katy and I bring our sourdough bread and Burgerspan salt to the cemetery. We make a performance in the graveyard, Offere II, meeting in front of the gravestones to share bread and salt – an echo of the film we made at the Salt Pans in South Africa. We don't know for certain if this is where Woolf was born, but we bring an offering of salt from the place he is buried. These actions we perform are a form of memory in the making. The traditional bread and salt ceremony marks the crossing of a threshold, often to a new home. But perhaps we are re-enacting this tradition in reverse: bringing with us the histories of lives that stemmed from this place but were lived out in an unimaginable future. A threshold between different timezones, different possible fates, diverging paths.  R Beinart Ref: M. Anthony Penwill/Lindsay Seers, It Has To Be This Way. Matts Gallery 2010 ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Rokiskis & Obelai The records we have found for the Beinarts lead us to the town of Rokiskis and the nearby village Obelai, in north east Lithuania. In Yiddish, these Shtetls were known as Rakishok and Abel. Online, we find a 'Rokiskis Special Interest Group' in the US, started by other migrant families with a similar history. We end up having a long skype conversation with the eminently knowledgable Philip Shapiro, in Virginia, who tells us all about the Jewish history of the area. Dad joins us in Vilnius and we hire a car to drive north. The smart city centre soon gives way to soviet era blocks of flats and older ramshackle wooden houses, and then the forested countryside. We pass storks nesting on top of telegraph poles, drive through the beautiful lakes area, and see lonely wooden farmhouses. It's not hard to imagine this area a century earlier. We are welcomed to Rokiskis by a large road sign, a defunct factory and soviet flats. The main street is a mixture of slightly neglected 20th century concrete buildings and the old wooden houses that only seem to get more picturesque as they decay. We visit the local history museum, housed in the grand old Tyzenhaus mansion. There's a small section on the Jewish history of the town. It confirms what we have read in our research, and in the holocaust museum in Vilnius: that Rokiskis had a large Jewish population in the 19th century – up to half the total population. In 1941, as carefully documented by the horribly efficient SS, 4,000 Jews were 'transported 4.5 kilometres before they could be liquidated'. It's even more chilling to read about this slaughter in the place where it happened. There's not a lot of information about the Jewish families who lived in the area before the wars. We meet one of the historians at the museum, Onute, and her husband Zigmas. He offers to take us to see the local jewish cemeteries. In the area beyond Synagogue Gatve, where old wooden houses are laid out along dusty un-tarmacked roads, we find Rokikis jewish cemetery. It is overgrown and neglected, mature silver birch trees grow out of some of the graves, the most recent of which date from 1940. The Jewish population ceased to exist here after that. The graves are hard to decipher, Dad traces the fragile letters with his finger, trying to make them out and trying to remember his hebrew alphabet. Behind us is a hill, overgrown with very tall grasses and wild plants. Zigmas tells us this is also part of the burial ground. We pick our way gingerly between old graves, buried in vegetation, and half expect to see protruding bones. As we drive out to Obelai, Zigmas tells us more about the countryside, which looks quite unmanaged. During the Soviet era, this was all collective farms and was a very productive area – particularly for flax which was exported to Russia via the railway. He sounds a little wistful when he remembers this – he says that now people can't afford to cultivate the land, there are no jobs for young people so they leave for the cities. It's another reminder of the intense conflict and change this region has undergone in the past century and more. We reach the windmill on the main road, and follow a small track into what looks like someone's allotment. Behind the vegetable patch is the Obelai jewish cemetery, marked by a wonky picket fence. It looks like a wildflower meadow. I find this place beautiful, but I wonder if we romanticise neglect. There's something alluring in a place that feels undiscovered (although it is of course discovered) or unknowable. In the introduction to 'Ruins', Brian Dillon writes: 'the cultural gaze that we turn on ruins is a way of loosening ourselves from the grip of punctual chronologies, setting ourselves adrift in time. Ruins are part of the long history of the fragment, but the ruin is a fragment with a future; it will live on after us despite the fact that it reminds us too of a lost wholeness..' R Beinart  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 Galernaya Street We arrive at our home-from-home in St Petersburg and notice the incredible disparity, walking from the Admiralty end with totally renovated buildings, to further down the dilapidated facades of communal apartment buildings, reflecting the history of the past century or more. Strangely enough we discover that the street was central to Jewish life in the city in the 19th Century, when we believe our great-great-great-grandfather Nicholas Filaretov lived here. At no. 20, now looking very run-down, lived Jewish banker Baron Horace Yevselevitch Guenzberg, the 'richest and most famous Jew in St Petersburg' (1883-1909). He founded the first modern-style bank in Russia in 1859, I. E. Guenzberg, was a patron of the arts and a philanthropist – many met at his house including Turgenev. At no. 25 was the country's oldest Jewish organisation, the Society for the Spread of Education among the Jews of Russia (OPE), with branches all over Russia, promoting the reformation of Jewish customs and culture, collecting a mass of statistics on Jewish peoples, and promoting educational activities. There is a plaque on the building, now owned by Gazprom, and nicely done up in yellow with shiny doorplates. No. 61 belonged to Horace Guenzberg's son Alfred, where he ran the Society for Hygenic Cheap Apartments for Jewish People. Also on the street lived the Polyakov brothers, Yakov and Lazar, whose interests included railway construction, banking and philanthropy. After the pogroms of the 1880s, the Jewish community began to fragment, and split between those willing to assimilate and others who were more orthodox. Some left St Petersburg, and those who stayed were subject to stricter and stricter laws, and persecution. Gradually the great involvement of the Jewish community in the social and cultural life of the city faded. Under the Soviets, these huge buildings were divided into communal apartments where families would live in a few rooms, sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities. We talk to family friends Olga and Misha about life under Soviets, who tell us that sometimes as many as 10 families lived in an apartment, taking it in turns to have weekly baths. There was an allotment of 4 ½ sq metres per person, so every centimetre counted. You can see the remains of this system in the layout of the apartments we are staying in, which have subdivided rooms and corridors which have sometimes been reconnected. In the new Russia, people try to sell their rooms but a whole apartment of families have to agree, which can create dischord. After selling their rooms, few can afford to stay in the centre. Companies are buying up buildings which then stand empty, or they rent them out to illegal migrant workers who pay over the odds, large numbers crammed to a room. Meanwhile, politicians have sold off state assets, so wealth is held in a few private hands, who then control the fabric of the city. Walking along on street level are a mix of some private hotels and restaurants who have renovated parts of buildings so you see glimpses of glamour, and food shops with little signage which feel like a remnant of Soviet times, with dusty shelves of vodka and sparse looking refrigeration counters. Olga gives us her soap ration tokens and tells us how they would have to carry empty bottles and jars around on the off-chance that the shops would have fresh food in – no jar, no food. Around the corner, New Holland island was used for shipbuilding and contains fantastic warehouses, built at different heights to store timber vertically, and a grand arch by Jean-Baptiste de la Motte. It is currently being subjected to 'Urban Regeneration' after being bought by Abramovitch, following the collapse of a competition won by Norman Foster. Walking into the high-security gated area, we could be back in London – there are containers housing trendy bars, and gallery spaces, a 'rent a box' communal garden, table tennis tables and big plans. I can't help but feel that this new 'cultural urbanism' as the website calls it holds little reflection of the complex and multiple histories surrounding it.   Refs:   The Jews of St Petersburg, Mikhail Beizer, 1989   http://www.newhollandsp.ru/   http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/11/19/35299165.html            ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058 The mysterious Филаретов On our first visit to Olga and Misha's house, we tell them about Nicholas Filaratoff, our great-great-great-grandfather who's faint trail has brought us here to St Petersburg. We have very little information about him - the only physical item remaining from his life is a Russian medal that we were told was from the Crimean war. When we were working in Hull in 2010, we also visited his grave, which showed that he died in 1903, aged 89. We believe he lived in St Petersburg before emigrating with his daughter Ann. Misha confirms that the medal is from the Crimean war (1853-56) and is a common medal awarded to all soldiers who fought in the war. They also tell us that Filarefoff (Филаретов) is a Russian name, which raises questions about Nicholas' Jewish identity, and yet again reminds us how names get altered through migration and translation. Olga kindly offers to take us to the National Library, to see if we can find any more clues about who Nicholas was, and what he did to eventually be described as a 'Gentleman' on his daughter's marriage certificate. The trip to the library is quite an experience – it's a grand building, commissioned by Catherine the Great as the first public library in Russia. Gaining access isn't easy – you have to show your passport, fill in a form, enter a booth to be questioned and photographed and then finally are issued with a library card. Olga leads me upstairs into a beautiful reading room, lined with old books, with strict looking librarians sitting at various desks. She talks to one librarian, who gives us a form to fill in, and we take it to another who finds two huge volumes for us. These are directories of directories, which Olga searches through. Eventually she finds a reference to something promising: street directories from the 1860s and 70s. We return to the desk, and are sent to another room, where a large, grumpy librarian looks annoyed at being disturbed. A long conversation ensues, of which I understand nothing. It turns out that to look at these books, you need a special letter from an institution. So after several hours of searching we drew a blank, but Olga said that she will return when she gets the chance. Katy's book about the Jews of St Petersburg gives us some idea about the areas where the Jewish community would have lived here. But we have nothing specific to go on, and even less certainty about the Filaratoffs movements than we had about the Beinarts in Lithuania. This trip has involved a good deal of searching for something we can't find. We both expected this to be the case, but perhaps we harboured a secret hope of uncovering something new. Wanting to mark our ancestor's presence in this city, and our own week of walking these streets making our own memories, we perform a departing gesture. Leaving the apartment on Galernaya Street for the last time on Sunday, we use our remaining South African salt to mark an Ф on the pavement. Filaratoff's initial is also the symbol for the golden ratio – a mathematical problem that intrigued and mystified great minds for centuries. R Beinart... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/520058