ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [6 April 2009]

30^th 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 21^st 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.

# 2 [7 April 2009]

Feb 09- South Africa

Katy 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 19^th 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.

# 3 [6 August 2009]

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.

# 4 [10 August 2009]

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.

# 5 [1 October 2009]

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.

# 6 [1 October 2009]

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.

# 7 [1 October 2009]

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.

# 8 [3 November 2009]

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.

# 9 [4 November 2009]

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.

# 10 [16 November 2009]

Bread from Starter Culture: Mark II

Katy's first attempt at making bread..it seemed to have a life of its own..