ARTISTS TALKING

# 47 [12 July 2010]

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 20^th 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

# 46 [12 July 2010]

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 19^th 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

# 45 [15 April 2010]

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

# 44 [8 April 2010]

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...

# 43 [24 March 2010]

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 5^th 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

# 42 [24 March 2010]

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

# 41 [16 March 2010]

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

# 40 [9 March 2010]

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.

# 39 [8 March 2010]

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

# 38 [2 March 2010]

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