ARTISTS TALKING

# 27 [19 January 2010]

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

# 26 [19 January 2010]

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

# 25 [19 January 2010]

Arrival

On Sunday 10^th 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

# 24 [19 January 2010]

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

# 23 [12 January 2010]

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

# 22 [12 January 2010]

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

# 21 [12 January 2010]

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

# 20 [12 January 2010]

(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

# 19 [12 January 2010]

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

# 18 [12 January 2010]

Sea Observations Part 2

1^st January. I saw flying fish shimmering over the sea like giant dragonflies.

 2^nd 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.

4^th 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.

5^th 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.

8^th 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