ARTISTS TALKING

# 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

# 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

# 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

# 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...

# 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

# 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

# 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

# 48 [12 October 2010]

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 10^th 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

# 49 [8 February 2011]

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 

# 50 [5 May 2011]

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.