The Wandering with Ivan Erland

Bel far niente…. Really?

2010-11-03T16:33:00.006+01:00

Markus Lüpertz says this week in an interview somewhere: The general opinion of my art is that it is rejected. I attribute this to a lack of intelligence among the people.

This family is in Italy for two months. We are just outside a village not far north of Rome. The house is on top of a hill with views but Rome hides behind some bushes and trees.

Our times: after contemporary does not automatically come post contemporary but rather temporary. After minimal comes obviously minimum. After conceptual comes emotional? Hmm… for the moment I will have to be a temporary minimum artist.

What is private and what is public domain? I listen on TV to: Salman Rushdie just finished a book for his second son and now it will be read by millions. His best known book he wrote for his firstborn long ago. I never read any of his books but think I know him very well. He could be a friend. Facebook informs me what my other 313 friends do daily. My private life is public, even if it is unnoticed or unread. My phone is long empty but I walk the streets of Rome from one camera into another. I say ciao to the neighbours and one man in the local supermarket called: Elite. I imagine the man is called Marco.

Pretty bambino! Is it your son? Yes. What’s he called? Does he have a brother or sister? Well, yes but…

When I was in Rome and stood on the terraced roof of the Norwegian Institute I was overwhelmed by the view. There was just too much of it. Got annoyed. Too many roads lead to Rome. Now I hesitate to go again. My temporary home in Fonte Nuova has a large terrace too: I can just cope with this one: the olive and wine fields the odd old towers, farms and villas, the towns afar and the mountains and the sky. The sky is amazing here. The endless sky is amazing everywhere!

Which views do I miss? In the same newspaper I read that 70 million Christmas trees will be sold in Europe this year. More east Europeans can afford to buy one. I try to imagine the massive field they grow on together with the trees for the Christmases to come. It must be a mountain as big as I can see from my terrace behind what must be the pretty town Palombara which I have not visited.

I drank a glass of wine once with Markus Lüpertz in a private club. Now this is public too. It is November and we sit outside in the sun while the little bambino sleeps. I am a lucky person.

more views in lazio natland sb galleria

My Lillehammer Affair.

2010-09-01T23:08:00.011+02:00

This summer i got myself involved as an assistant in somebody else's photo project. HH Capor is a friend. He lives in Vienna and is older than i am. Hermann is a portrait photographer and often in his works shifting borders of tolerance and questioning norms and tastes, including his own and mine, definitely.

He usually likes to capture young nudes.

This time his project is a little different so i can be in it. In short: Hermann is visiting within a period of 2 years about 30 towns he has never been before in as many trips and all over the world. He checks into a hotel and does not leave the premises for as long as he is there. He invites an assistant to go for a walk into the city and make pictures for him instead. When he returns to Vienna the proof of his visits are the images made by someone else. He says that it is about the reflection on the behavior of tourists and how they capture images and remember... or do not. I am willing to follow the thoughts.

So, I am his 12th pair of eyes and the town is Lillehammer (18 August 2010). The town is new for me too. It is about 10 hours to get here by train from Bergen. I read books about Rome up and down. While i walk out of the train station i can not prevent myself cursing loud. I instantly do not like it here. We meet in the hotel room. I get his camera and a film with 8 b/w exposures. Why Lillehammer i ask (shout?). He had an uncle who went missing here in 1943. If this is a town get it off the map! The grey rainy weather does not help. Will i be touching the clouds today?

From the room we can see a ski jump station. Hermann's horizon. So i decide to walk up there to have a birds view of my hunting ground. First to the tourist information center for a map. She says it is not far, maybe half an hour walk and i am lucky a (the?) German team is practicing. Not on snow but artificial grass. I hesitate so much making that first photo. I am surrounded by other tourists who endlessly shoot all that moves and flies by. The rehearsal of jumping is over before i... clack 1. In my mind i try to recall other cowardly events.

I descend and decide to follow a little stream through the forest. There is no path but it goes, according to the map, eventually along the hotel so i can not get lost. The stream is a postcard! I HAVE to make a shot of these waters for Hermann! Clack 2 Das Nordische Wald! Is that Hermann's uncle in a blue sports uniform on the bridge? And clack again 3. I see some questionnaire list in Norwegian on a tree next to the bridge. clack 4 is made! I am in a euphoric mood. Shall i go to Hermann and say: It is so beautiful out there and demand more film ?! Oh, I am not doing very well, I need to be an artist, oh, my inspiration is leaving me, creative guidance is needed, sunshine is not enough anymore, where is confirmation of my brilliance, HELP.... help...

So I go to the library and ask what there is to know about the first Lillehammer affair. Not much. But they (2 ladies) take the time to search. So kind. While I am waiting a Somalian woman who is with her pretty teenage daughter starts to talk to me. Obviously she can (also) see i am in despair. She hears my story and replies: Why don't you take a picture of me? I clack 5. She also asks me out for a coffee. Hermann, do you believe this? I turn the offer down knowing i hurt him. She wishes me a nice stay in her town. I am no good, The librarian returns with visual documentation and address of the exact location where the first affair happened. Could you please copy all!

The town is small but the walk is surprisingly long. Or is it me telling myself that i missed the chance just right there to make THE shot for CAPOR. The extensive directions i have received make it easy to find it. I try to imagine what silliness happened there that evening but fail. A passerby makes clack 6. I act in the picture. I think i did the job. She was pregnant back then.

Back in the centre i clack 7. Only now i know why. Before i return to the hotel i take coffee in a park and watch some local ladies rehearsing their dances. I hesitate taking the camera but have already decided what to do with the last exposure. The window of the room is open and i shout into the town: Hermann!! Clack 8.

Back in the room i describe him the day. I have trouble describing clack 5. There is a smile. In return he tells me what he is going to do with my images. There is unbelief and i ask him for copies.

I do recall more than i type above but i select, copy, shop and paste, polish and turn like always. Time will do the deleting of the rest. There is no way for me of capturing that passing day, that past. I mold the memory conveniently and that is ... so fortunately good. I could not bare the weight of it otherwise. Thank you Hermann.

Can I have a little bit more less tits

2010-05-27T09:23:00.007+02:00

Of course I forgot the details but there was a time that the biggest library in the world (Europe?) had about 1300 books. That is not much you might think but on the other hand it would be a library where you could say one day: I have read all of them and now i go and do something completely different. What use has a library so big it looses the human scale. How much less text is more?

Made a facebook page for Natland SB a day ago and asked everybody i know there to like it. So now 44 people like it. There are now 400.000.000 facebook people and i am sure 444 more or less would like to like Natland SB. So now I got a calculator and started to ... and got stuck and worried.. How much less is Natland SB liked now and for how long will that go on? Yes it was the Dalai Lama himself who said there were more than enough Buddhists on this planet.

Speaking in my hometown dialect (Enschedees) the windows are not opened but loosened: doo t raam is løs. Does that create more or less view and does a view actually help to see more?

The best movie lasts one second i used to claim in the times i was still into making art films and experimented in withholding actual frames in a movement or use repetition as a follow up. How much movement is needed to stand still? I know, old story, but does a tree stand still?

Less is more comes from a poem by Robert Browning about an Italian painter who was acclaimed in his time, now considered kitsch and forgotten and worthless a thought. Architect Mies van der Rohe was the person who picked it up to describe his ideas using minimalism during times when the sky was not even touched yet. Jump:

Now we are running out of practically everything we humans have quickly been learned to depend on. We have no idea what is ahead of us and are surrounded by speculators selling the leftovers of a present. Around me i for instance do not see any decrease of consuming. I witness just a new habit to separately dispose the deep freeze pizza plastic cover from the deep freeze pizza cardboard box. But how much less pizza is more grandiosa?

My precious time consuming web tracker shows that the average time of a visitor spend on a site i fill is just enough to read the header of one article, so that explains the tits in the title but not why i do not start to wake up.

Wanderings before the Natland SB how much less is more Seminar 2010 Bergen.

how much is that view?

2010-05-26T08:48:00.005+02:00

'Dobler du høyden, tredobles utsikten'

That is what is printed on the ticket for a ride up to Ulriken mountain (624m). Can it be true that if one doubles the height one triples the view? Is there a scientific formula for the size of a view and where is the limit? Can I have unlimited view and if not where is the exact turning point where more becomes actually less? Everybody knows there are limits to zooming in or out and that there are just dots of pointlessness. Like struggling with Google Earth but also like washing powder bringing back the colors. No that last one is different but you get my point.

Well, it kept me busy the last few weeks. Found that used and disposed ticket on the street and decided to re-use it as a postcard for my sister's birthday in the first week of May. The card was posted but the slogan got stuck. I did bother everybody with it everywhere days on end and still do.

Stood on chairs and tables. It was in the communal garden. Jehovah witnesses went door to door in the background. Some neighbors, masters in mathematics and logic, were convinced it might be correct and truly believed they could convince me of it and used me as a guinea pig:

'Stand up, you have to focus on one point. Do you see my hand? and now? Yes or No? Here? No? Good, now stand on that chair and look at the same point. Focus. Not not on my hand you... on the point! See my hand? and now? Still? Now. No? OK, climb on the table. Again focus. See my...?... '

And then they would explain me that i saw more while going up. It was extremely hard for me to focus on one point. My view tends to be distracted very easily. Is that allowed? Does that influence their formula? I saw more ground staring from a higher point. But do we all stare all the time?

Go all for a walk! A view is unique. You can not put it in a box! People can not have the same view!

Ha ha, to share a view: Ridiculous!

Natland SB art Galleri organizes Saturday 12 June the Natland SB how much less in more Seminar 2010 Bergen.

Wandering on eggs

2010-05-15T09:01:00.003+02:00

This photo is made last year. That day is getting closer and closer again. It is strange. It is an odd thing to do. Ha, am i going to publicly embarrass myself. I have no idea what i should talk about. I suddenly have an urge to write the manifestation down. On a hidden note so to say. But every time when the mind seriously stands still at the approaching event i kind of get stuck in an absurd opening scene: Me, King Coolrabi of Natlandia, Queen Carotta de Pomodoria and little junior Duke Bacon waving at a silent crowd of non believers From there on the tone is set and it gets even more a bad dream and close to a nightmare: I shout like Bibikov sentences of no sense towards them through a megaphone. I bore them? Or they are not listening anyway. I do not understand that either. I loose the words and have to ask the audience what i suppose to talk about. They are just staying silent.

I am the orator and it rains that day, starting exactly at noon and just the minutes i talk. Although not one word is understood by the crowds gathered under umbrellas to protect them from the pouring rain. they applaud, smile and commence to the food and games. Some say to me: Gratulerer med Dagen!

Grunnlovsdag (1814), the National Day of Norway is a yearly returning event on the 17th of May. Everywhere in the country the day starts with a children parade. Ours goes to the supermarket (Kiwi) down the hill and back. Then there is the speech and the national anthem followed by food for all and games afterwards. Since yesterday i am two things wiser about the last category: the food will be Iranian rice with chicken and for a game they need our coffee pot. I promised the feast committee to do the talking and decided without mentioning also to take care of the song. On all You Tube versions the anthem is one key too low for my flute. I break my fingers. The Duke however is very good in covering up my failure by banging extremely professionally and loud a wooden spoon on the lid of a pan. I am covered.

Rumor goes i will speak 15 minutes or so. That is an eternity. In case it is dry that quarter I might have to juggle with words like solidarity and unity, friendship, tolerance and acceptance, future generation's progressive understanding, global peace and awareness, natural environmental respect, exchanging views and visions, trust, sharing responsibilities, equality, love, common sense, human strength, committing communities, recyclable history, maintenance, sincereness and introspection, sharing national pride and becoming true globalists. If it really rains hard enough i can add some words and act a hero by calling for a revolution or just put in some gossip and prejudiced thoughts i have about my neighbours.

Duke's grandparents are coming. They want to hear the speech. It should be light and uplifting! It will be personal. I do not know otherwise. It has to be a little funny and i should not forget the children. Maybe throw some sweets and balloons from the balcony? The flute will also do the trick. I am seriously getting better at it. I hope Carotta's spare dress will fit me too.

I know now what i am going to talk about! Thank you Barbapappa!

Eggs

2010-05-04T09:54:00.006+02:00

First things first: FC Twente is since this Sunday, 2 May 2010, National Soccer Champion in the Netherlands. That is the first time in the existence of the club. Born in the center and grown up on de Velve and de Wesselerbrink makes me one solid piece of an Enschedeër, and my team is FC Twente. My first visit to a stadium ended with a 3-2 win against DOS in 1967? I am a tribal member and devoted disciple. I have seriously longed for the moment this would happen. It almost happened in 1974 and i remember. Back then I followed the Sunday home matches from a toilet seat. Somehow the ventilation pipe in that tiny room amplified the sounds from the nearby Diekman stadion perfectly and I would know the score almost live.

I have been listening to along the lines radio reports in the weirdest places since. I am a radio watcher and i scream and i yell and i get really upset and unbearably grumpy and unreasonable when We loose. But this season we did not loose. We just won and won and won and won! The world will never be the same. I noticed today already this might need tiny adjustments finding out some people around me have never heard of FC Twente. I insist that everybody knows on this planet that Twente is the closest to heaven on earth. Epi Drost and Theo Phalplatz, forgive me but now i think Blaise N'Kufo is the best player in the world. And furthermore i want Sander Boschker at the gate when the time comes. (And now it is time for that bottle of beer i found and reserved for this occasion).

I am asked to do a speech. No not to lecture some students or to fool art lovers but a speech! The yard i live in has decided there is no better man than me. It fits; estimating i am the oldest on the estate but they do not know that, do they? I did warn them and told them to reconsider. Gave them a few nights. But they insisted still. I told them i know nothing of the matter and that i might do the opposite of what is expected or traditionally the custom. I did also explicitly tell them i do not even speak or even like the language. I said that i could be rude and easily misunderstood, that my senism could be mistaken for humor and my humor could be taken seriously and my sincerity questioned. But the feast committee insisted so i said: yes. Also because i can escape from other tasks by doing this.

So now when I see them on the street or in the supermarket they ask me if i already started writing things down and ask me if i have already an idea what i will talk about and i have to explain them that i never write things down when it comes to this and that i just improvise and jump from one thing to another and wander along with thoughts hoping to stay on track. They smile and do not believe me but tell me they are confident it will be great! I confess that since they asked me it is in my head. I come up with these ridiculous opening sentences like: Jeg har en drøm, jeg vil være Norsk or Norge, Jeg Elsker Deg! I proclaim them loudly while doing the dishes and i also practice on a flute. Hilde helps me with the tune and Thor accompanies on the mouth harp. I fantasize that i am the Mayor of the city and master of the hill! The gathering is on the roundabout just behind my house. I only have to open the kitchen door, step on the balcony, raise my hand like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and start: Listen to what i have to say dear dear citizens of Natlandia. My flock! Again the world will not be the same after 12.00 noon 17th May 2010.

Stop complaining (not about snow)

2010-03-19T10:55:00.010+01:00

He pointed up the road towards the smith's house and said: This way! This is the shortest. No, I answered,it is shorter round by the quayside.

Knut Hamsum - from the novel Pan (1894)

This winter in Grimstad i went shopping on a spark! Snow is temporary dry white rain. No, snow is sometimes not white, not white at all or not white all the time. Snow is reflecting the surroundings, a mirror as much as a blanket. (wow says he). Snow actually eats color and makes other things turn black. Some snow turns black itself. Snow can not choose where it falls. There is enough space in Norway for a flock to fall decent and look good for a long time. That is nice but when you happen to be a flock hitting the town you do not lie around long before you quickly loose that pretty innocence and get real mean. Touched snow is really something else. Urban snow rapidly collects traces of footsteps and car tires, urine tracks of walking the dog. It covers but in the mean time accentuates. Snow is moved around and pushed aside. Complex landscapes appear and mountains are included. New borders are formed. Alternative routes are taken. Common places become no go areas and mini war zones. Entrances disappear and exits blocked. Suddenly we do with less space. It will all dissolve. I like to see it melt now.

Wonder which hill in my garden will melt last. This winter i have mastered the craft of catching snow right. (i say). Some snow is very loud. Today it is exactly three months lying around the house without a days leave. This is a local record. And then Glahn writes ... I roamed about and noticed how the snow was turning to water and how the ice was breaking... and rain and wind did their work and melted away the snow... yes, yes, i think, go and feet your dog, and shake my head like a vacant Bulgarian taxi driver. One more look outside: Hey, it's raining like in Mumbai!

I want you to come to my birthday (i too want to) I want a fish for my birthday ( what kind?) A dolphin! (you mean... ) And I want you to dig a hole in the garden where it can swim and I can look at it and play with it. (but... ) I have money from different countries. I can pay. I even have Dutch money.

It is just not true that nothing is impossible? What did Wolfram learn me this winter? Ah, yes: here after is here now and you just give the horse free rein and God will lead that horse (with you on it) towards the Good. The Horn of Plenty! Is that so difficult? But then? What happens then? I can get a dolphin somehow. I can dig a hole, i guess. But then, what then? Or is that just the point why Parzifal rode his horse for years and years through the forest before he did give it free rein... I am a coward now. (who says). I apologize but i am simply an ignorant who gets the wisdom from listening to Cash songs. Not more not less. Judge me. Oh boys, you will sit around a table one day and tell each other: he was not too bad. I make sure of that. But let me sit here now for a while and be patient with me. I wish i could assure you i take my hands off the reins one day. Parzifal has Feirefiz. Did Glahn really have to shoot the dog? Only in fairy tales snow is innocent... and in Disney films.

A talk about Parzifal in Hordaland

2010-02-19T14:06:00.013+01:00

BEK in Bergen invited me for a public lecture Thursday evening 19.00 4th March 2010 at HKS in Bergen. Usually some 10 or so people show up here but i like a full house and aim for 20?

I will avoid to talk about older work, the amazing revival of my pop career, my slides collection, Duinkerken or Duchamp, the networks i am still using, my neighbours, my love for Norway, the work for money, Carla, unstable urbanism, the club and my future plans.

In stead i will explain why i've been looking around my house for clues and trails, tracks and traces of PARZIFAL... purely because i want to believe that the hereafter must be here now! I will illustrate my talk with loads of pictures.

This invitation is compulsory for some who read this.

a holiday i try to call a crusade

2010-01-26T14:45:00.015+01:00

Von wazzer boume sint gesaft.
wazzer früht al die geschaft,
der man für crêatiure giht.
mit dem wazzere man gesiht.
wazzer gît maneger sêle schîn,
daz die engl niht liehter dorften sîn.

Wolfram von Eschenbach from Parzifal (circa 1220)

17th of December 2009 the snow came to Hordaland. It is the darkest period of the year and its habit to reflect was welcome to substitute the lack of daylight. The locals told me that snow is not uncommon for this region but it is never staying around long and eventually turns to rain. But not this time. The snow got the chance to age and turn icy and hard and alter color from bright white to grey brown dirt and black. It got to me. I do not like snow much except when it is fresh and i slide down a hill on a sled. Things have not been so bright lately. The snow became unfriendly, loosing the enlightened smile, so I decided to take a leave and asked my little family to join.

Some flying tickets are dead cheap. Nobody can explain that to me in times when all things run out. It is no good and still we took it.

more island snaps

So, circumstances lead the way to the island La Palma in the Atlantic Ocean. The most north western of the Canary Islands. The name frightened me. I just pictured one big endless holiday resource full with fat people under a palm. We were not going to stay in one of those places but on a sailing ship instead. That pleased me as much. This vessel was anchored in the harbor of Santa Cruz de la Palma. Sometimes i dislike myself. I do not like sun much either but adore the shadow it creates. Am i not easy to please?

Do not worry: i will not share the holiday snaps and there were no videos made. Unlike the other 6 this island is green and full of trees. Just good green with us walking on it half naked in hot January. I do not advertise island hopping. Never been outside of Europe. Did i cross the line this time?

South of La Palma lies El Hierro, the meridian island. Already known by the old Greeks and Romans and considered the end of the world (in the west). After that there was just an endless river and finally the end of the world. One just can not get any closer to Paradise than here. Oh so cautious I did not go there but was close enough to see it sticking out above the Atlantic clouds.

My habit pops up again to make all things fit whatever the curves or jumps or consequences: some weeks ago i started to construct, mainly for myself, a modern version of Parzifal and how he tries to get hold of the Grail. The gateway to a better world or key to percept religion as a natural phenomenon. And how Parzifal eventually kind of manages with the help of his older half-brother Feirefiz... obviously i still am working on the first drafts...

After the empty handed return from this crusade the snow was still lying around. Dark ages are here. No, my name is not Gahmuret and Yes, i am aware i have opened (with Senis and some others included) within a year about 70 blogs and dare to ask: will you look at PARZIFAL IN HORDALAND? I promise not to show you my 1001 holiday snaps.

Hey, it's raining!

2009-09-24T19:25:00.006+02:00

Simple things are complicated and keep me away from my sleep. I think that is sometimes good although I continue disagreeing. I was also thinking of course about a quote above this text because it looks so good and sophisticated and academic. I usually take it from a book I read or recently did or I find it online and claim. I have one now but it is kind of too long. Longer than my own text will be. It is not in proportion. But in the mean time it just adds a touch I will not be able to describe myself in this text properly because it is about the American Dream. A thing which is so seemingly common but equally alien to me and in the mean time what it is all about, kind of. I would like to ask you (if you want and please ignore all the drugs they are not so relevant but just a time-based thing of the early seventies) to read the ninth chapter of the second part of Hunter S. Thompson's famous bestselling very American book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I guess you have read it already years ago. I just recently did and was taken by this chapter called: Breakdown on Paradise Blvd. It just fits, dammit!

Thor, let's share the cookies. You one, i one, mama one, i one, you one, i one and mama one. How big is Norway? Well, if you take a plane from Oslo north to Kirkenes you might as well fly from Oslo south to Rome. How big would Norway be if it was as flat as the Netherlands? Haha, yes... how much space would the Alps take of middle of Europe if they were flat? How much space does it take of the Netherlands to put the Ararat on top of it ? And if all countries in the world were flat would there be enough space for ocean number 39* or for any ocean at all? We could photoshop it! So, are we equal? We are, but some have peaks and valleys or just valleys or just peaks or one peak and many valleys or... Do i have peaks? YES! Do I have valleys? ... Does Bamse have peaks? Bamse is a bear. So? Bamse is a teddybear! So?? We are all unique? Yes. Are we all equally unique? Go to sleep and let me be. Do I get a kiss?

Thinking as Heidegger says, may be much the same as wandering.

*since the 9th of August when a video was made while Thor was bathing all following sessions were numbered. The moment this text is written we are close to 40 sessions of bathwater.

I want to be

2009-09-05T12:09:00.004+02:00

... a musician, cosmonaut, guitar player, fireman, writer, in a rock team, and ... a seller.

When I was your age I wanted to become a pilot, a fireman, a painter and an Indian, Sioux or Cherokee!

I also want to be Indian and underwater man and even a knight!

Wow, a knight!! With a horse: black or white? Yes, like King Arthur or Ivanhoe!

Look Vanja,
I used to watch THIS on TV when i was as old as you:

Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe,
Side by side
Were proud to ride
With Ivanhoe.
At his call we spring
To help him ride along,
The song we sing
Is a free and joyous song.

Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe,
Far and wide
Throughout the countryside
They know
There is freedom on his banner,
Justice in his sword,
He rides against the manor
Where tyranny is lord.

Rich and poor,
Together we go,
Forward with Ivanhoe,
With Iv-an-hoe.

Email conversations with Vanja, August 2009.

I self reflect as twitter as I can

2009-08-23T14:10:00.009+02:00

I had the strong need to put some things in order for myself lately. So I wrote it down. I put the text here knowing it might interest some angels who have been looking over my shoulder for awhile and like to do so in the future. Furthermore it might help the passerby making any sense of the things I have been writing on this blog or the other 29.

From the moment I had to kind of leave Vanja behind and Thor came into my life I thought I had to go steady and secure. Settle down and get a longterm contract job at an academy for instance and share my knowledge and beyond and around. So the two beloved sons would at least be safely supported with coins by a hardworking father. Shuffle.

Early 2008 I started teaching at the school for architecture (BAS) in Bergen. I enjoyed the work very much and I actually thought I had pretty much an agreement to expand the activities but there seems to be a misunderstanding and there won't be anything for me to do before at least early 2010 or something like that according to them and maybe. I say nicely now that I am disappointed with these developments. Breath.

Having the habit to check the backside of pictures in hotel rooms make my disappointments slowly turn into relief and learns me again the variability of trust. Yes, you too helped me out, Hammons and Hamsun, but don't start bragging it around! And a longterm steady teaching job? Was I not warned some time ago by some of you? Yes, I am the kind of type students and colleagues endure with a totally different expiring date. I finally am starting to listen? Hear me!

Living in Norway had another consequence too. In my Dutch period I really tried to make a difference as an artist. Not all was so contemporary but I discovered (with /K) new directions, crossed and moved boundaries. No, not totally hopeless. I could actually do the tricks, did many exhibitions, made it into history books and museum collections and got well granted and awarded and made my parents proud once in a while. Hurrah! Yes, it was a nice exposure time which lasted long enough and peacetime followed.

The following 6 years in Moldova I was pioneer or colonialist (you choose). But here in the dark North the Vikings do not need other explorers than themselves so about a year ago I thought it would be good to anticipate this and change my profession and become a former contemporary artist and started to write down the consequential explorations of small man online. Eden.

But natural resources have run out. So much that I have decided to sell some soul again. You find the advertisement which my temporary art consultants came up with attached in the comments below.

You may laugh or wonder but thank God for the loads and variety of berries everywhere at the moment. They are so healthy full of anti-oxidants and vitamins! While eating them with the home made bread I talk with my girl every day every hour every minute about what to do and we agree. We are going up the mountain soon, here we come!

Billy comes in 6 colors

2009-08-18T11:30:00.012+02:00

It is a Sunday and rain is endlessly pouring down. Not drizzling, not just raining but really endlessly pouring down. And not just now but already for quite some hours and according to the weather report in the local newspaper BA it is going to continue for days to come. The report is accompanied by a map of Hordaland and Sognefjord with just little black clouds drawn in. Very Norwegian clouds, pouring, not raining, till at least the next Sunday to come. Outside I see Norwegian girls passing as two waterproof pink dots in grey. It is a black day, I guess I should start saying goodbye to the summer earlier than I am used to... It is for many years now that my father calls me on Sunday morning, to compare how our weather is. Lately he wins when it comes to hours of sun. He lives in Twenthe where I was born.

My first summer memory is from there. Or maybe it is constructed through the countless recalls of my family members. It happened just like I will write it down now.

Father worked on an airbase and for us children this had some really nice advantages. One of them was the access to a military open air swimming pool. A large pond with a thousand frogs and beautiful green meadows and a kiosk for ice cream, surrounded by old pine trees. That is where it happened in the summer of 1963. So I was a little more than two years old when I saw for the first time a black man. He was huge and round sitting in tiny shorts on his towel and enjoying the sun. I picture him now like a smiling Buddha. He was however an American soldier. My mother just gave me a handful of some sweets so I went up to him and asked: Wil aap ook snoepje? My good father, always in the neighbourhood, was willing to translate without censorship: Does monkey also want a sweet? The man laughed and took one and strokes me kindly over my red curly head. I liked that. Some years later I became a huge fan of Eusébio da Silva Ferreira , legend football player of Benfica. So now the soldier looks exactly like Eusébio, only much heavier and rounder. Memories are always colored and black American soldiers are now called Afro American soldiers.

Just before this period of rain started I was a little wandering around the house and sort of repeating loud what I had read in the newspaper that morning. I do that sometimes. Boat goes missing in the Baltic Sea and 350 animals discovered in the Himalaya! Amongst them the Macaca Munzala, a new monkey with not much tail!! Behind me passed, at first unnoticed, a neighbor. He is Afro African and he shook his head in resentment and walked on to the gym. Only much later I made the link that he might have put a meaning in some words which was not there.

This reminds me of driving through Amsterdam and waiting for a green light in Amsterdam old west a long time ago. Friend Calin was walking on the sidewalk and I opened the window and yelled something like: Hey, still not out of the country yet? And suddenly minimum 20 persons were staring at the vehicle. Gas, Gas! I said to the driver hurriedly, being sure I was not able to explain this quickly enough to a lynching crowd.

Oh, we are all prejudiced without exception. But racist is another thing. The first is just a question of ignorance the second however is based on hatred. What is hatred?

Monday: the sun has been shining all day until early evening the rain returned. At that time Thor Erland had to go to bed anyway.

the guilty camera

2009-08-10T11:18:00.014+02:00

The Yashica Electro-35GT is the space-age camera your family will love. Take beautiful pictures day or night. Automatically. Without any nonsense. Just aim, focus and shoot. The GT's computer brain and electronic will do the rest.

recycling an advertisement Susan Sontag used in In Plato's Cave - On Photography (1977)

Does not happen often that I fall for some gadget let alone a camera but I went into a shop last week to see the new Olympus PEN. The young assistant in the store was willing to open the vitrine with his keys and put it into my hands and I hear myself mumble: Got to have one one day! Just the looks of it! And I also said something smart like: this is the beginning of a new era and finally digital photography is getting mature. Haha, I was a walking advertisement for something I hardly know anything about or actually have money for. And still I want one. It is good it was not recorded. I would have looked really silly. Boy wants new toy!

Sontag wrote thirty years ago about the camera being a replacement of the gun in that first essay and it makes me think, struggle, question if we both still agree. Hands up and put the camera down!

It was in Croatia in 1993 along the Drava on a deserted industrial estate the same day I visited Nemetin. The place was heavily damaged of the ongoing war. Along the river were some tall freight cranes for unloading ships, partly burned, collapsed and hanging over the water. I had the bright idea of climbing into one so I could make a shot with my 8mm camera. A so-called pen. I thought it would not harm and did not bother to ask the guides for permission. The other side of the river however (Baranja) was in the hands of the enemy Serbs or Cetniks. On the top, above an empty nest of crows, I caught in my viewfinder a speedboat with soldiers rapidly coming towards me. On the front some kind of machine gun. It took a few moments before realizing the camera resembled perfectly a gun too. So I canceled the shot and instantly tumbled down to the safe ground. Where Blanka said: now we earned a drink!

This week I read two peculiar and in the mean time deeply sad articles in a newspaper. The first one is about a young Dutch family on holidays visiting some French coastal town. The woman was pushing a pram with a few weeks old baby and wanted to make a photo of the picturesque scenery so she let go of the pram which found it's way down the quay and the baby was heavily injured and later died in hospital. The second tragedy just happened around the corner. A Norwegian father and and 17 year old son were mountain climbing. On the top they made pictures. While the father photographed his son the latter takes one step back and falls off the mountain. Two dead children because of compulsory photographing.

Can a harmless camera kill or is it really just the tool of the user? It was all an accident but it would clearly not have happened if we all were not so occupied in photographing all we see and do. A holiday without pictures is for many not a holiday but what are these families going to do with these snapshots... Delete or frame them? Blame the camera and throw the whole machine away? Will they go on holidays or climb a mountain again? Will they ever make a photo again? Hey photo festival curator, I found a hole in the market! Would it not make a cool exhibition with similar shots like this? We could call it The Real Last Picture Show! Shoot now!

And another small thought on Sontag: In the book everybody has read she ends the same essay with: Mallarmé said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. In the 2009 version it can be re-edited in: Today everything exists to end in a twitter. So the circle is round and we are back to literature! Or it actually means that in a period of about 140 years we see a development from a whole book via one image to a 140 characters. Does that not sound hopeful? Are we not getting closer to the essence of things?

I will not put the camera down.

Fragment of the conversation from the middle of the world

2009-07-15T11:55:00.005+02:00

...There was this old man in the garden. He was really old: 94. And he spoke a little of German and English. He studied Theology in his time and I think he also was a teacher in it, later. But he already stopped decades ago, also bothering about that. He told me he was born the same day as ???? I never heard of this person and have forgotten the name now, but it seemed really important for him. I had to ask my Hilde later and she said it was some Norwegian hero from the 17th century. So I told him that I was born on the same day as Albert Einstein. He replied that he had been in his place of birth. He took a little thinking time and said: Donau – Ulm! When was that, I asked. Oh, I remember clearly he said, it was in the year of the world exhibition in Brussels, 1958 and I went there on a moped. During our talk a plate with slices of mango and kiwi were served. He ate it all. Then he said he was still frequently swimming in the fjord near his house and that it got him into the local paper recently. I was not listening anymore. Too busy thinking about the year Einstein was born. I went inside the house and looked it up in Wikipedia. When I came back in the garden the moment had passed to continue the beautiful conversation we could have had...

From: Sluik self interview 1.6

Visiting Equal Mountains

2009-07-13T13:15:00.006+02:00

It is evening and close to eleven. When I look outside, through the window on the frontside of the house facing north towards the city of Bergen, the sky is red. A deep red like ruby wine. Or is it a kind of purple like a Cardinals coat? It is actually more pink, old pink I would call it. I go outside and try to make a picture. Of course that does not work at all. My little Lumix gets wet from the drizzle that softly falls. That is all. I start to write this down. Now I look up from the screen again and walk to the window to check the color one more time but it is gone already. It is all grey now. That is how quick things go. Sometimes it is just better to take all the time needed and just inhale it. It is something I have to learn or never will. Earlier this evening I shot some ball on a basket. The field is just one jump away. I like doing that and do it more often. Not that I am much good at it though. Most of the attempts I throw too hard because I want to score so much and so it bounces back from the board or ring into the field again. I should just let the ball do the work and let it loose and let it fly. I should not want to make a point. The moment I realized just that my score approved today. It is something I have to learn too. But first I really have to improve my knowledge of the Norwegian language. I can not let it fly. The process of learning is endless. We learn until it is our time to go. We do?

I had a dream a few nights ago. I do not think much of dreams and mainly enjoy them or just go with them. I usually forget the contents while waking up. I do know that I am practically always on a travel in my dreams. With public transport or somebody driving me through constantly changing and mainly urban landscapes. You see, even in my private virtual world I fail to get a drivers license! Oh, I am morally so stuck in correctness... Or I walk endlessly and from one scene into another. I find it highly entertaining and can be very annoyed, irritated and unreasonable waking up, not able continuing the wander. I remember two episodes: At the end of my dream I was sitting next to my father. He was driving a bus, fast and confident, and we past a secondhand market place. Along the road stood a huge sofa with in the middle and on the cushions sat pontifical an old but beautiful accordion in red and golden colors. Nothing else. We passed it and I caught it in the corner of my eye. I told him that I always wanted such an instrument. He turned the car. I do not know if he bought it. The scenery had already changed. Before that I met a men on the street, he was round and bold and dressed and behaved like Jack Nicholson in Easy Riders. He said he was a lawyer and he claimed to represent all from Equal Mountains. He pointed at the horizon where in the far distance I could see a rough inhospitable area where all mountains were equally high. I thought nothing of it at that moment but when I woke up I immediately checked in the atlas if there is such a place on earth. There is not.

It is a little strange to say but it seems that sometimes more people die than usual. Although not being close to a fan or admirer, like the rest of the planet I am in the spell of Michael Jackson too, haha. Today one of his sisters said he was the loneliest man on the planet. I guess she is a little late listening to herself. Do not let it happen again Latoya with all your other brothers and sisters! Last week Pina Bausch died. I remember seeing Cafe Müller in Carré Amsterdam. It was an experience of pure amazement and a lesson in how the movement of dance theater could get so close to real life and me. An American journalist wrote that some people seem immortal and that she was one of them. This week Afra died. I never thought she could die before me. Can I become the loneliest man on the planet? Do people mourn for the dead or the personal loss of the dead? Do equal mountains maybe refer to people instead of places?

(How much) should I read Simon Vinkenoog's work to agree with him all the time?

When I started this text I wanted actually to write something about the relation between cynicism of the moment and long term positivism and that moral obligations are individual but drinking water from plastic bottles is a global stupidity although being a compulsive collector of empty bottles with refund it is not really in my interest to discourage you of throwing them away everywhere. I guess it is too early and too late for these thoughts and remarks now.

I have decided to change the name of this

2009-07-04T15:31:00.008+02:00

For obvious reasons, but only clear to me recently, i have decided to change the name of this blog from The Wanderings of Ivan Erland into The Wandering with Ivan Erland.
Why this was not clear to me from the beginning must have something to do with my handicaps. It might look as a detail but it is a giant leap actually.

For those who can not get enough of me I can kind of recommend the writings of Carla T Hauser. Although I am not totally sure if I should mention her to you at all.

Diesel and self sustainability

2009-06-26T12:02:00.010+02:00

The days are at their longest now. The sun goes finally down some time after eleven and close to the north. I can not actually see it set from where I sit but notice through the window the old and tired golden glow touching the bare surrounding mountains before the sun leaves for a few hours to return with fresh bright early white beams around four in the bedroom on the front side of the house.

Slowly, really slowly I start to get an idea of what this is all about for me. Why I write this blog, not too many seem to read, like the other 30 blogs or so I fill and filled with my humble thoughts and complementing pictures being me or Clara T or Senis B. I managed to get so far maybe one or two persons a little angry and did realize from the start that not much earth would shake or move because of me but still I am hurt for some of the silence of arrogance or just neglect. Do not get me wrong and before I turn too much Celinean: some little sweet stuff happened due to this blogging too! Oh yes: hughughughughughug!!!

My dear sons, there are times your father seems to forget that the world is round and he falls into the easy trap... where he's convinced the globe is a pancake and he stands in the middle of it and he has the best overview or when he goes to the supposedly dangerous edges and he behaves like a cheap actor or idiot and clown... at these particular moments he expects you to kick his ass when he starts to pity himself . But not now... please, later.

So, look at this picture above, boys. I made it on my walk last Sunday evening and it is from the top of Løvstakken, a mountain in the middle of Bergen. It is around ten in the evening on it. And do you see how dangerously this mountain's shadow is moving towards the place I sit now! Taking all the day away. Just like that! SNAP! So, they all work together: sun and mountain and shadow. We can and should learn from that and do the same. We should all work together. I really mean all of us. Not just us but also our friends and neighbours and the other people in the street and opa and oma and the people in the news and stars and football players and ALL others not mentioned here.

I made another picture when I was up there. It is from a huge boat. There, right in the middle of the centre of town, that white thing. No, it is not Noah's. That story definitely did not happen in Norway. It is a yacht of one of the richest men in the world and he also did not call it Arc but just A. It is a boat of a man who even thinks more than papa that the world is flat and that he lives in the middle of it but his Russian is better. I actually think this man does not know at all that the world is round. But do not understand me wrong. Your papa has no intention to make anybody angry.

This Robert Walser, I am reading at the moment, starts a very short story about love (Eine verflixte Geschichte, 1916) writing that it is worth a whole novel but because of the nice weather conditions that moment he thinks it is better to go for a walk or to drink a beer in the shadow of a tree or to take a swim in a lake. I like that. He actually uses many more words than me and he is very good at it. He actually used many more words than me and was very good at it. It's asked many times: why don't you write a book? Well I guess Walser answered already for me. Ok, last time: Walser, Walser, Walser, Walser!

Little about the tolerance of angels but instead more about how intriguing a coincidence can be and also about Disney wisdom

2009-06-16T11:50:00.017+02:00

Hic occultus occulto occsius est - Here a mysterious one was killed in a mysterious manner.

Is, I think, the text on the gravestone of Kaspar Hauser but fits so good now on one particular wardrobe in Bangkok. I would like to write some more here but I can not now. Just that the following thoughts came to me only because I liked, LOVED, David Carradine so much when I was 12 or 13 and that I only realized this after I heard about his odd death. I almost cried, oh foolish me.

Sometimes I read a book and borrow it's wisdom. For that book I go to the library in the centre of Bergen, about an hour walk from where I live. My Norwegian is too poor and the Dutch book section is filled with scribblings so I read in English. They have loads of novels. They are all on the backside wall of the main hall. Well that is what I thought till I recently discovered on the right corner side some shelfs for W till Z. Hmm... So I got myself a book by a writer (and fellow wanderer) with the letter W: Robert Walser

There are so many books written and I am so often worried or even afraid I spend my time reading the wrong ones. I started late reading real books. I was 20 or so and felt I had a huge disadvantage and I asked my friend Mike Waite to make me a list of must-reads and he did. The list of about 30 titles I carried in my pocket around for at least a year or two until I had read all. It was some pretty good stuff, real classics. I have no idea today who was on it but it was all the important European left and correct writers who wrote a good novel in the beginning of the 20th century. One thing I am sure of is that my W was not on Mike's list but many on that list knew of W. It was a list made by and for Mike. I know now. I had and have my own books to read. But still I thank him for showing me the road system and drawing me a map.

I realize, as much as I want to force everybody around me and all others to read some work of Robert Walser, the stupidity of the wish. So, all I can tell you is: his words are and his live is often a kind of reflection for me and although he writes that he was thinking of a nice woman while he wrote I like to think it is me, ha! Hermann Hesse said somewhere: “If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place.” Well dream on Hesse and Yes why not?!? (I feel I am walking on a thin line now and I never read a book of Hesse, so he was definitely not on Mike's list).

Very very unexpectedly I went with my girl and son Thor to a holiday resort on the island of Crete a little more than a week ago. I took Walser with me to read.

Even this tablecloth has its own peculiar soul, so he wished to imagine, and every related wish came true, at once. Pale, white, enigmatically pure it lay there: he walked up to it, rumpled it. Amazing how it let itself grasped, exactly as the person touching it had desired. It may be that he spoke to it: “Come to life!”

In the living room of the apartment hang a reproduction I did not notice until I was reading this part of the last story called Thoughts on Cézanne. Is that not a funny coincidence? Do I know that it means nothing at all? What I do realize is that it is extremely significant for me which in the mean time makes it so futile on a universal scale. The least I can do is write it down and shout it out and think of some TV-Tao of master Ho, like: One needs eyes to be blind.

I wrote some words about David Carradine

2009-06-15T12:13:00.010+02:00

Just wait. The good will come. Goodness is always closer to us than we think. Patience brings roses. This old, good saying occurred to me when recently I saw snowdrops.

Robert Walser - from his story Snowdrops, 1919.

In life it is all about loving angels, the rest is insignificant. Can not say much about it but real angels got me out of trouble recently. Not that I make much of a believer but I have no other words for it. Thank you angels! I wanted to send a postcard but realized I forgot to ask their address. Today son Thor has his first birthday. Is it in Korea where they only celebrate the first and for the rest leave it as it is? This is (and maybe not) the place to write about the joy and smiles I have when I see him wander the world in his own way. So, do know that I do. I missed the 4th birthday of Vanja but made it up a little later. Somehow I managed and somehow I failed. This is also the place to write about that and I do. In Norway an angel has fallen: Egil Olsen lost his wings according to his fellowmen. Sometimes thunder black judgments appear out of cloudless blue skies. The Norwegians swapped Oslo for Minsk and stopped dreaming about Johannesburg? Angels have a funny and unpredictable life... Somewhere else I wrote about wanderer David Carradine who is now an angel too, I guess. Yes, (collective) memory is a weird thing: definitely selective and so incomplete...

And now it is time to light the candle on the carrot cake!

noisy silence, lost?

2009-05-05T14:00:00.011+02:00

You might have wondered why it has been so silent here on this blog. Well my temporary alter ego took over the last 2 months! Here is the post i have send around.

Invitation to visit a conference or online reading :

Ron Sluik, former contemporary artist and presently teacher at BAS Bergen Arkitekt Skole participates end of this week in the conference:
CITIES RE-IMAGINED: 1, Oslo, Norway, May 8th - 9th, 2009

For his presentation he specially created an online work of 20 blogs called I AM SENIS BESMEGENIS. It contains a large amount of visual material collected in the suburbs of Bergen during a 2month scan of the city. If you are not able to come to Oslo you are very welcome to visit this project online.

CITIES RE-IMAGINED: 1 is a two-day conference organized in collaboration with BUU: Bureau for Unstable Urbanism and Atelier Nord. The conference will be examining urban culture in relationship to artistic practice through a series of artists presentations and panel discussions. Speakers at the conference also include ex Mekons Robert Worby; architect and RCA professor Nigel Coates; sound artists Brandon LaBelle and Justin Bennett; hypertext author Scott Rettberg; media artists Bull.Miletic, Vibeke Jensen, Mark Curran and many more. The conference is facilitated and coordinated by Synne Bull (Artist, Performer and Filmmaker) and Jeremy Welsh (Artist, Professor & MA course leader, Fine Art, KHiB / National Academy of the Arts, Bergen, Norway).

The conference takes place at Kunstnernes Hus, (Akademirommet), Wergelandsveien 17, 0167 Oslo

Further Information about the conference available HERE.

... and Prague is a German town

2009-03-07T13:32:00.010+01:00

“... I wonder if the Missouri River is still there?” I said. “It is,” Trout Fishing in America said smiling. “But it doesn't look like Deanna Durbin.”

Richard Brautigan – from the story The last time I saw Trout Fishing in America (1967).

My last week of February was well spend in Prague. I gave a workshop at the photography department of FAMU. I decided to take as a starting point urban ready mades the students and I might find in the streets of the city. While walking through the centre the idea popped up again that one does not need to take a camera to a city like this to end up on a thousand holiday snaps. I should write an announcement in Japanese and Italian and Russian and Dutch etc newspapers or somewhere online and ask all tourist who were near Karlovy Most and cafe Slavia that week to send me a copy in case they photographed me (black hat), my girl (pink boots) and Thor Erland (smiling or sleeping). Our family album might be too small if I get my hands on them!

You can have a look at some of the visual results of the workshop HERE. My visit also included two lectures for students. One about the treasured notorious time I spend in the video-band Auto Awac. A rewarding feedback : these old men have balls! Is this REALLY from 1981? In the other lecture I talked about borders and included the video March Matria (S/K 1996) which opens with a sequence of Ararat mountain seen from the city of Yerevan. After the viewing a girl (my friend is Azeri) asked me how it was possible to see that mountain from Armenia if it was a mountain in Turkey. No, she actually accused me of lying. It can not be Ararat because that mountain = Turkish, she said. I really tried to reply seriously. Oh, idiot! It is still in my head, so many days later. It might never leave my head... I am going to ask landscapes for their passports.

It was snowing heavily in Bergen before we left for Prague, which is really rare on the west coast of Norway. So I made these night photos of snowmen around the estate where I live. After my return I wanted to visit them again and see how they were aging but they already melted away without a trace, except one. My eight workshop students where Belgian, Norwegian,Greek, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, ½ Finnish and Czech. I asked them how snowmen are called in their language: The best came from Vilma from Lithuania: senis besmegenis or translated into English: old man without brains. I should give more workshops and learn.

Mountain with half a view

2009-02-15T13:24:00.003+01:00

Egil Olsen is the new football coach of Norway. His nickname was Drillo but after the friendly match Germany – Norway 0-1 last Wednesday the majority of Norwegians consider him now God or at least a Miracle. I envy him for a totally different reason. Mention any country in the world and he will tell you the highest point in that place. For instance you say the Netherlands and he replies: Vaalserberg 322,7 meters... Turkey: Ararat 5137m... or Norway: Galdhøpiggen 2469 m etc. I know those too (including Twente: Tankenberg 85 m) but he also does the trick with Mongolia or Liberia. I have to google them and will forget it again within a second. Last October during the football match Norway versus Holland (0-1) the Dutch radio reporters, Jack van Gelder and another one, were discussing the issue. The game was boring, nothing else to do, and they thought Olsen must be wrong about the Vaalserberg. They estimated it at least 40 meters higher. Typical.

Shortly after the visit to Armenia I told the owner of my local bookshop where I had been. He answered that he too visited Ararat mountain recently, but from the Turkish side. I replied with great certainty: but I had a better view! So we went home to get our holiday snaps. He had to close the shop for it but did not care for this matter. So after an hour we returned and shared images. He quickly agreed. I smiled and felt support of a whole nation. I have to admit one detail though, shown to me by a local: in summertime looking from the direction of Yerevan the snow on Ararat remains as a perfect nude, tits up, legs spread and long hair down the slopes. He saw her in my pictures. I searched for her in his and did not.

In 1993 I attempted to visit the top of the Czech republic twice in a year to get a full view and failed, so for a long time now I have this urge to return. The travel started in June, it was during European Football Championships, in a monastery in Bohemia where I had an exhibition with Reinier Kurpershoek. We watched the games in local bars and hotel lobbies. A girl killed a wild boar with a didgeridoo one night by accident. We decided to make a slow drive homeward and explore the rest of the country. After visiting Lidice, Terezin and the Paradise we came to the foot of the highest of the Giant mountains: the Snowhead or Snežka (1602 m says Drillo). We found an old rusty ski-lift which could bring us up, us alone. A long ride swinging through forest and rocks. At the summit is a border which means half of the mountain is Czech and the other half Polish. It was the first time I would see that country. I was looking forward to look over the plains of Silesia and thought I might even have a chance to see the other side of it. I did not count on the border control. A soldier, Kalashnikov ready, ran up to us when we descended the lift and stretched our legs and asked us with force if we had visa for Poland. When we told him we did not he denied us to look at his country. No discussion possible, so we ended up having only half a view. I peeped a little though.

The same year in December we were invited to the video festival in Wroclaw. At the German-Polish border I changed at a Wechselstube caravan 500 Deutsch mark and got more than 3 million Zloty's in return. In my enthusiasm I made a little dance and sang: I am a Millionaire! The woman inside the caravan, and bigger than, stuck her fat head out through the tiny counter window and shouted: We all in Poland are Millionaires! I was silent and learned my lesson. In Wroclaw the snow came down yellow. The brown coal smell heating the houses got to our vulnerable Dutch throats. The organizers had kindly reserved us for a week in a hotel downtown. We decided differently and left for the nearby ski resource Jelenia Gora. A village on the the foot of the highest of the Giant mountains: the Snowhead or Snežka (1602 m, we know). Nothing could stop us now to walk up this mountain and enjoy a full view. The second day we left early. I guess we took some sandwiches with us and maybe a bottle of beer but no map. Like Marinus in 1931 crossing the Alps we learned the hard way that the higher you get the thicker the snow is. But worse of all we found ourselves just before sunset on the summit of a neighboring mountain... we returned late in the night to the guest house, half frozen but still smiling about our stupidity.

Today the Snežka is in the centre of Europe. No significant border on the summit. No gun waving idiots to protect a view. The moment is coming to show my boys and myself the full picture.

Searching for a new fisherman in Josipania

2009-02-13T15:56:00.002+01:00

So now we seem to have lost our fishing instructor I invited for the family Nemetin expedition this summer. He did not answer himself but his publisher replied for him: ... unfortunately our author hasn't got any time for this fishing trip as he will be busy for promoting his novel in several countries this year. Best wishes, also from Sasa, Yours... Oh, Modern times! Did Saša Stanišić get my message or does his publisher not want him to waste any time outside the market and decided to answer for him? I had the same with historian Geert Mak a few years back. I invited him to Chisinau, through his agent, for a reason as good as going fishing. Never heard a word although I am pretty sure he is a man of instant reply. Are publishers and curators of the same kind? Eerie and unworldly...

We live in cyber times and I can do the fast lane too so yesterday I stumbled on a hollow in my Nemetin roadmap. In a letter to my dear friend Aleksandra Sekulić I made up the term Yugoland not realizing it actually exists. But guess what: there is a theme-park in Subotica run by 73 year old Blasko Gabrić called YUGOLAND and this place is in Serbia but around the corner from Osijek! An exact replica of Yugoslavia is under construction in his backyard over three hectares of land with Mount Triglav as a 20-meter-high summit. He already had 2500 visitors so far. I should ask Egil Drillo Olsen if he... So, what is more fun than taking your kids to Disneyland after a boat adventure on the Colorado river? Blasko, are you a good fisherman? Is there loads of fat carp in your mini Danube, Drava and Sava? Do you have email or an agent? Saša, you can still join if you want.

Darwing, you got me the wrong shoes... they just don't fit

2009-02-12T13:41:00.003+01:00

... A gush of panic rose in me like gorge. How, I asked myself, how could I stay here? How could I have thought I could stay here, all alone? Well, too late now; I would have to go through with it. This is what I told myself, I murmured it aloud: I shall have to go through with it, now. Then I smelled the faint salt reek of the sea and shivered ...

John Banville - from the novel Eclipse (2000)

Really touched I was by the sentences above from a book picked up blindly from the library. The cover showed a half naked woman and the quote was on the third page. Did not get anything from what followed after that. Too many constructed difficult words and sentences. It is sometimes like that. You get triggered and hooked and greedy. Greedy... but then nothing comes after. No, not sometimes but often or always. Yes, always. Does not help to promise myself never to read any books again. And it is not just books. Same with pictures, films, food, life, places and many other things I do not dare to mention. You don't hear me talk dirty and that is my weakness. Oh, so conscious of my surroundings. I love the ones who I burden, whom I allow to burden me. There I go again! Trying to be honest means leaving out the truth.

Films and music make me easily cry. Romy Schneider as young Sissi, Bruno Schleinstein as Kaspar Hauser or Stroszek, Glenn Branca live in Carre Amsterdam 1983 and my Bulgarian girl students singing while descending Vitosha mountain in a bus still do the trick just remembering. A work of art only once did it but does it over and over again:

Me young contemporary artist is showing choreographer Karin Stefani through the exhibition of Anselm Kiefer in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 1981 and when she shouts looking at this huge muddy ugly brown canvas with names of long forgotten Pomeranian villages and recognizing one of them: Da ist meine Mutti geboren!!! I knew instantly I was an ignorant farting stupid self assured piece of shit as long as I would live.

I was doing research for de Duiveljager and visited the Krajina for the first time together with a Dutch cameraman called Arnold. It is a macabre place. The valley east of Gospic towards Knin and north of the Dalmatian mountains was 3 years after the ethnic cleansing still without a sound. Not even a bird singing. We heroes visited the booby trapped houses in empty villages. The war was thorough in these parts. Marian, a young former soldier was our guide through this deserted land and we stayed near in his family holiday house in Smiljan, birthplace of Nikola Tesla, a village that survived because it was Croatian. The first night we had a visitor. A farmer from across the road called Maizen. He came with his homemade rakia. Arnold does not drink so I drank for two not to offend our host. Tomorrow you come to have breakfast with me, Maizen said: I will make palachinken. My mother was Hungarian so I make the best. I'll do it with fresh cream and strawberries from the forest. He actually spoke in German with me, broken German through rotten teeth. He had twenty long hairs covering his huge skull and was a teacher in that language and philosophy in Zagreb before he joined the special police in the war, if I remember right. He was a farmer now and wanted to talk with me how to start a camping together. Although late in bed I turned up early, alone. I entered the farmhouse of the abandoned single man who was preparing already the breakfast in his blue painted kitchen accompanied by a thousand flies. Coffee? Yes. Milch Kaffee? Yes. He took the best Wedgwood cup he had and walked into the next room. From my seat I saw a cow next to his bed. I got fresh warm milk into my coffee. I did not ask what other purposes the cow had in that room. The pancakes were fine even with the flies. The coffee came with a glass of schnapps and after a while he said while leaving the room: I have something special. But do not follow me. He returned with a big shining grimace on his face and a plate. On it were roughly cut thin slices of dark red meat, like smoked dried ham from Parma. He sat down offering a piece and I took a bite: Was Du Essen? What you eat? I hesitatingly answered: a Serb? HaHaa, there are no more Serbians in Smiljan!! No, Shh, I shot a brown bear illegal! Don't tell anybody!

For those who do not get the message: this man was more worried for getting caught shooting one protected bear than for killing all his neighbors. More than a hundred... 127... I know. He told me and we were drinking pals. Friends! Later I saw the place where he prepared the bear. His toilet was a smoking room now. The bog as barbecue with the skinned carcass hanging from the sealing.

Arnold and I left after a few days by car back to Amsterdam. Driving through Slovenia and nonstop talking about the things we had seen, heard and smelled and eaten we found ourselves on the Italian border instead of the Austrian one. I have a friend in Venezia, Arnold recalled: let's go and stay with him. So we did. It was autumn and the last week of the Biennial. Also my first visit to that town and raining. I could not be bothered after the Krajina to see silly art-fairs but in a palace on San Marco square was an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer. All the works I had seen before and new. Mainly sunflowers, big sunflowers made out of sunflower pits. I went alone and was afraid. It was overwhelming ... but just that... until I entered a small room with one older painting from 1974: Maikäfer flieg, Dein Vater ist im Krieg, Die Mutter ist im Pommerland, Pommerland ist abgebrannt. My knees started shaking and I fell on the floor. The crying came and did not leave. I was all wet. A very old Venetian man entered, carried by a golden walking stick and his two ugly daughters of 60 wanting to look 20. He send them away and he lay himself on top of me. Caressing me saying softly: Cry, Cry, Cry.

Hei Sluik, I hear you consider yourself a former contemporary artist today? So what are you now?... Still no reply from Kirkenes or Saša Stanišić's publisher and I guess it is wrong to write in job applications why they should not take me and I am angry when they do not reply either. The rabbit died in the hat before turning into a hare and I found out that the amount of wood of kanskje the biggest tree in Norway is not enough to build a house from. Branko probably forgot to talk with the Dutch ambassador about my family fishing trip. Are mothers human and is Greenland on earth? Today I actually want to say: FUCK ALL!! But I don't because I am one of those men always dressed in black.

Most people are nice but some people are much Nicer

2009-01-26T10:53:00.003+01:00

Hei sons, privet. Grandmother Marietje is ill and your papa is worried a little. Well to be honest... a lot. I know the both of you only met her once till now, you were both around the same age, and neither of you will remember. But she does. She does it for you. Yes, you are more on her mind than her own children I have the feeling. Well, why not! She is in a hospital now in Portugal and she is really ill. I could give you the details but that wouldn't explain much, would it? She is waiting for a plane to bring her home tomorrow. I want to tell you all this because I just send her a letter by post and maybe I was trying to be in my writing too funny again. Your grandfather is with her of course. They are going to put her with bed and all on that plane. I wrote her that it is kind of cool: not having to leave the cushions and fly above the world. I guess you agree with me. But the thing is that she hates flying. She truly does, so there is no fun at all for her. It is not her own bed and when she comes back home they bring her to a hospital in a neighboring town. That is not really home. Your grandmother is actually a real ground person. She loves just that piece which she can call hers. She has two homes: one on the camping in Lagos in wintertime and the other in her hometown in beautiful Twenthe. Now that she is so ill she might have to give up going to that first one. No, she doesn't like traveling, but she does love to be in those places and the seasons put a distance in between them. There are a lot of wanderers who hate the traveling in between. Your grandparents take all the time in their mobile home camper, sometimes weeks, to overcome the distance. It feels less like traveling that way, I guess, and I inherited a little of that too the way I move around. Your grandfather however likes to be on the road. He likes the moving although also not too fast. I got some of his ways as well. It is not that black and white of course but it comes close to how I feel the truth. Your papa never said life is simple and all problems can be solved by just reducing CO2 emissions or swapping them with the neighbors! All people are unique. Not one is the same. And you should love all but in the mean time some a little more than the others, like me and your mothers. That is how it works. An extremely difficult balance we people haven't found the perfect fitting key for yet. Marietje is special, she is my mother and I come out of her belly. She is old now but papa is also old in your eyes and I am only 47. When I think of her I always see the big garden, we used to have on the military compound, full with flowers and vegetables. And she walks around in it taking good care. Her hands black of fresh earth and holding a little knife to cut the unnecessary or unwanted. It is a memory about colorful flowers and smells but also how she kind of rules the intruders and unwanted roots, weeds or nettles or slugs she gets rid off singlehanded. And she loves going for walks. Anywhere, but especially in the forests around her town and when you are with her and she spots something special, a mushroom, leaf or flower she will pick it and bring it to you and let you smell and share her enthusiasm. She won't leave the thing in piece or bring you to it. That is special, something which is a disappearing thing from our civilized world. A kind of closeness to nature which is natural and without guilt as if being part of that nature without any questions. She is born in that town. I never asked, or forgot to remember, but I guess her parents were born there too and the parents of her parents and the parents of those grandparents. Me? I was born in that neighboring town in the hospital she is going to now. It kind of explains why people love some place, even if it is kind of ugly or boring or poor or rainy, because he or she was simply born there. Yours will be Chisinau and Bergen. I suddenly remember those youngsters in arctic Zapoliarny last autumn and the way they all described the lovely nature around it while I had seen with my own eyes they live in one of the most polluted areas on earth... Hmm, this nice man Misha who told me he moved back to Nikel for health reasons... I kind of drift off now. My mind is not with the pen, boys. But I like to suggest to the two of you to wave at every airplane which comes over our heads tomorrow or any day we feel like it! I know she will not be in those but there might be someone else in it almost as nice as your own grandmother Marietje.

Trust the White Rabbit

2009-01-13T08:58:00.005+01:00

It is a very special day today which I earlier mentioned in Nemetin Revisited. It is a hundred years ago that Marinus van der Lubbe was born. He is one of the greatest borderless visionaries ever: In His world only GOOD exists. And I have been walking around thinking what I should give him this year as a birthday present... so I opened a blog-gallery for him realizing of course he will never see it but... a Marinus of the future might!

This morning I emailed 101 artists and photographers. I asked them to send me something visionary. Like a picture of tomorrow or a picture they already finished but could not put in the right context till now. A picture they never wanted to realize but did and it could be something completely different as well. An image or whatever that should or can not exist yet but can be seen online today. I came up with this theme daydreaming about when Ivan and Thor Erland one day will meet and shake hands for the first time. Me ready with the camera to capture that golden moment. It and I might not be there or in time.

I invited two partner-gallerists to help me and I also made some rules: the work should have no edges but be round and it should be child friendly or at least not child unfriendly. Because it should be suitable to be printed on a plate children can eat from. I might exactly do that and let mine eat spoon after spoon from a plate with a vision. The gallery has limited space. There is room for 33 views.

Before I invite you to have a look it is time for confession: a little white lie slipped into that email... to inspire my colleagues and to create a story really smooth and round I wrote the following:

... He was babysitting his little niece and explained her (in Dutch) that there are two koeien and one koei. She could not stop laughing after that. When she asked, before finally falling asleep, what tomorrow would bring he answered: Trust the White Rabbit!..

Well, the first part is really true. The niece herself told me this anecdote about ten years ago in a bus when we were going to bring tulips and a stone to Berlin. The second part I am however not sure of but I just imagined that he could have said it or something similar. Trust the White Rabbit is actually an English trademark for plate hangers. I recently bought 2 sets and kept the package. The proper way to hang your visions on the wall! The company also make display stands, bowl stands, cup&saucer stands, thimble stands and doll stands and tea set stands. So now that this is out in the open I invite you to become a frequent visitor of THE GALLERY or contact us if you want to contribute. Today there might be only a rabbit present. (Does it have to be a hare, Joseph?) On 12 January 2010 the exhibition will be deleted and I will have to think of a new present. Happy Birthday, Marinus!

Let me tell you about the trees on Greenland

2009-01-05T11:39:00.003+01:00

Hei sons,privet! I've been thinking of trees a lot today and that is not for the first time, ha ha! I was literally jumping from one tree to the other today, couldn't stop. Well you know how my brain sometimes works: I call it associative thinking. Kind of an old broken computer which starts linking random things just because they are green. But it all came together somehow this afternoon when I found something and I thought I have to tell you. But from the beginning. So, it's about a year ago when, just outside of Bergen, I walked into something peculiar. Not really outside, just on the slopes of Fløien overlooking the town, stands a tall pine tree with a neat text plate under it: This is probably, I really liked the word kanskje, the biggest tree in Norway. There are a lot of trees in this country so there might be one undiscovered by mankind, it is pretty correct, real Norwegian. I wrote it down on a piece of paper: diameter 1.4m, height 45,9 m and 25m3 of wood! Could we build a family boat with a cabin of this tree or even a whole house? You know what: directly next to this one is a pine which is even thicker! I measured it but did not climb to find out the height... Would be funny though if the neighbour tree is already questioning this human urge for labeling the biggest and oldest, hottest and whatever. So papa goes disguised as Heavy Decker one night and... Tímber!!! Just joking. I like that tree. I love trees, love the forest. Like in Twenthe, Roots und Boden. You can find really good woods around the Tankenberg. You've been there the both of you but probably too small to remember... And that reminds me of Armando's childhood story: during a world war in the forties of the last century he is wandering through the forest around Kamp Amersfoort when he witnesses a prisoner escaping, haunted and being shot by a German soldier. Nailed to the ground little Armando was. Not capable of moving, turning to a nearby tree, saying: why didn't You do anything? You are much bigger than me! I like that story, always did. Really makes you think. Everybody has that... if an old tree could talk what would it tell us and if it could walk would it actually go somewhere? There is a village called Vaquois in the north east of France. Well there is actually no village anymore, just a huge hole in the ground. It was situated on a hill and on the highest point stood a big chestnut tree. During the Great war the French and the Germans thought it was a strategic place so they battled for it until nothing was left of the village except for that tree. It survived all the bombing, mining and fighting but then they decided to knock it down, because it was in the way, so they did it with machine-guns from both sides because nobody dared to get out of the trenches with an axe! Till today you can not leave the footpaths there because of the bombs and mines lying around! Hmm, come to think of it, made a sculpture once which was called Monument for fallen Trees. It might still stand there on the roundabout in Leerdam. In Hammerfest I saw, from a bus which did not stop for it, Europe's most northern forest. I made a picture which is not worth showing. Maybe it is the picture... In Moldova I stood in a snowy forest where I could only hear my heart beat... nothing else... I got really scared. And when I first heard that you going to be born Vanja, I was in this very English town Withernsea, and they had, next to discount mountains, submarine forest off the coast on the bottom of the North sea! Did not go there either but it was marked on the map. So today I was googling for something completely different and I stumbled on this artist retreat in arctic Greenland. To be honest my first thought, with a smile, was that it would make a perfect reclusive place for writing a book about trees. But than I kept to the idea and realized that it is actually not so far off at all. A thousand years ago or more a viking called Red Erik was thrown out of Iceland because he killed somebody and not knowing exactly where to go he decided to take his whole family on his ship and move west. So he ended up on the south coast of this largest island in the world and called it Greenland. You might think he did that because he was afraid telling his friends back home it was merely a huge lump of ice they would not come to visit him. Actually in his days the place was not so rough at all and there was a little bit of green and maybe even a tree or two. He and his ancestors survived a few centuries with cultivating the land until the so-called Little Ice Age came and they all died because they did not like eating fish very much. Not so long ago scientist drilled a hole through a glacier, some 2 kilometers deep, and guess what: they found fossil plants and even spiders and butterflies! The scientists talk of Boreal Forest. So it isn't such a stupid thought after all to go there and look for a tree.

Nemetin revisited

2009-01-02T16:36:00.009+01:00

Do you know about Osijek, you young rascal?
I did know about Osijek.
Well, just you remember Osijek!
I knew about Osijek from TV. Osijek was burning, and there were things you saw there and couldn't understand, you saw them again and again, lying under blankets or sheets in the street, in farmyards. Boots. Forearms. Grandpa Slavko wasn't there to confirm that what I saw was what I was afraid of. My parents said it was a long way off.

Saša Stanišić – from the novel How the soldier repairs the Gramophone (2006).

Nemetin revisited is till now the third location in random order within The Wanderings of Ivan Erland. It is based upon an idea I developed in 2004 but never realized due to circumstances I can not exactly recall any longer. The basic thought however fits perfectly. It is triggered by a specific village somewhere in middle Europe where not long ago a violent border existed but also by a man I never want out of my mind.

A Dutchman visited Nemetin before I first came there and he would be 100 this 13th of January. In 1993 Kurpershoek and I were following in the footsteps of Marinus van der Lubbe, a man we reintroduced in the Netherlands as a hero to be proud of and made three stones of commemoration for in Leiden, Berlin and on his grave at the Südfriedhof in Leipzig. If artists can not write the future they can re-write history and that is what S/K did. Marinus left in 1931 Leiden by foot to join Mao Zedong. After Klagenfurt he followed the Drava and swam little bits towards China. His walk however ended on the Romanian border at the Iron Gate. A Dutch vagabond in those days was not welcome so he turned back. Two years later he burned the Reichstag, became instantly famous and was eventually beheaded three days before his 25th birthday. In between he was going to be the first Dutchman to swim the English Channel but everybody forgot that.

So in 1993 we took our car. From the start it was clear we would never get as far as he did. Osijek was surrounded by hostile territory and would probably be our last stop. We had however no idea what it would be like, and still don't actually till today somehow. I guess we imagined some roadblock just after Osijek or before Vukovar where a Dutch passport might do wonders. Blanka and Ivan Faktor were our guides and the real last stop was that tiny village along the Drava which had brutally turned into a front line enclosed by river and minefields. Croatian soldiers gave us binoculars to do some observing of the enemy. In 1994 we published the photo book Radau, Tatortfoto's en schuldig reizen. Last time I was in Nemetin the minefields were still there.

I have returned yearly to Osijek, well... except for 2008. Often taking Faktor’s oma bike and ride along the Drava to Nemetin. Slowly I started to realize that village had become a special place for me. A place of consideration and general recollection and I should do something with it.

In 2004 I wanted to make an intensive registration of the village involving local historians and witnesses, interviewing and documenting on all media which would finally conclude into a decent and correct publication and approved exhibition. Now I am kind of happy this whole plan did not go through. I see the weak spots so clear and the uselessness of it all. But let me go in his footsteps again and get into a little boat in the harbor of Osijek and let me float maybe as far as Apatin? Or at least a hundred meters passing and leaving Nemetin behind and let me take my sons with me! I promise Joseph it will look like an art performance.

Dear Aleksandar Krsmanović, I know it is not the same as the Drina but would you be willing to come along and learn my sons to fish?

Standing still looking back before wandering ahead

2008-12-30T14:58:00.011+01:00

I love the mails I get from Mkrtich in Yerevan. So far I had mails from 5 Croatians this week and next year I explain why I wrote that mail to Croatia in the first place.

Some days in 2008 I will not want to remember, some things I do not remember, most of the year is not relevant to write about but two Sundays I will never forget for the rest of my life. The first one is the 15th of June when Thor Erland was born.

For the last 4 or 5 years I am the first week of November in Bratislava. They invite about 25 specialists in photography and me for the portfolio-review. A thing I do with great pleasure but I think it was my last time. So, this second Sunday was on the 9th of November. I gave a morning lecture: Moldovan Playgrounds and Swinging Graveyards. It was mainly an explanation why there is not much of contemporary photography to be shown (yet?) from Moldova and why instead the visual presentation was an introduction to the 1600 children slides I photographed since 2003 in Chisinau. I have a strong wish to see the slides into some lexicon or book and it is always nice to take a shot in front of 40 colleagues, specialists and Sunday morning lecture-freaks mixed with some dear friends to see if they agree with me. Additionally I showed in the end something completely different, a treasure I found in 2001. I have the feeling after wards the whole audience forgot about my slides and merely wanted to know more about what I metaphorically call a real goldmine.

When I moved to Chisinau I shared a beautiful little house in the heart of the city. It was left behind by a Jewish Russian artist family who moved to Germany hoping one day to return. In good faith they went, leaving almost all their belongings behind. It was trusted into our hands and as far as I could imagine then: good hands. The place was, to say it kindly, quite a collection so a little bit of refurbishing was needed. While organizing the studio I stumbled upon a tiny little red plastic map containing 16 b/w passport photos. On the back of every picture was a stamp. I had no idea at that moment when the first foto automat was actually introduced. They show a young man who used it as a little contemporary theater of his time. He dressed himself up impersonating famous Hollywood stars like Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers but also the cliché image of the anarchist, capitalist or a greedy Jew and the Devil. Some of the pictures were colored in by hand. I was stunned! Not long after I found out the creator was the landlady's father who left Moldova in 1933 for Paris and later in his life returned to his birthplace but eventually moved to Israel. These were more than just personal jokes. They showed a whole era from 1902 pogrom in Besarabia along 1933 and Hitler and Stalin into our present times. Everybody should see them! So in 2003 I contacted the Holocaust museum in Washington with the question if they would be interested in a publication but they were only interested in buying them and asked me my price... I had nothing to sell: the photos are not mine. I wanted to contact the family though circumstances were against me. So when I left Chisinau in 2007 I decided to take care of them. I was pretty sure they were to be lost leaving them behind. I still thought ALL should witness these amazing little beauties. In my Bratislava audience was Krzysztof Candrowicz and he came up with the brilliant idea to exhibit the pictures exactly at the place where they were made and make a proper publication too. I was really happy and decided to tell the good news to the family of this great young man the moment I would be back in Norway. That afternoon was spend in good company and good moods. Some dear friends who came from afar strolled with me through the streets of Bratislava. I did not want that day to end. I was in real good spirits!

Getting permission I thought would not be too difficult... I was so wrong... I was accused of theft and trying to make personal profit instead... I was hurt and still am. I realize now that there is a big chance nobody outside this group in Bratislava will get to see these images. I will return them to the rightful owners. I tried to convince them but seem to have failed. I follow my heart and let it be or ignore the private and go public anyhow? What are my ethics? When does public interest grow above the private wishes? In 2007 I opened in Bratislava the exhibition Give me Your Image by Bertien van Manen. It is an astonishing collection of family album pictures photographed in private surroundings from all over Europe. Innocently enough you can find in her book exactly what I can not show you anymore. Only there...

I forgot something not far from Ararat mountain

2008-12-26T14:29:00.010+01:00

On the day of the Flood, those who got through, they walked out of the Ark again neatly, smartly dressed, bags under their arms…

From L.F. Céline's last novel Rigodon (1961)

Last week I applied at the A C S L in Yerevan for a longer stay in Armenia. Today I got a positive reply you can read in comments. Here is the reason why I would like to go and work on another part of The Wanderings of Ivan Erland.

I visited Armenia once before in the summer of 1995 together with my former colleague Reinier Kurpershoek and the Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez. We stayed ten days in Yerevan invited by the Union of Armenian Filmmakers and the Centre Pompidou Paris to participate in the first Armenian Video Festival. The town suffered from the war in Nagorno Karabakh. There was no electricity except once in a while in the hotel (were we stayed) and the main hospital. Large amounts of power were taken by mafia-types and they distributed it around for a 'special' price. There was no running water in the town either, except at two distribution points where large pipe systems brought it in from the surrounding mountains and where the citizens could fill their water tanks. The festival was planned to be an eight days event in an old cinema, Kino Patria. The lack of electricity however finally forced us to buy it ourselves and do the whole program in a kind of marathon one night session which was a remarkable experience. Not knowing exactly how long the power was going to last we started showing our own works first and had to go fast-forward through many others...

While in Armenia I insisted setting foot on holy Ararat which is actually located in Turkey with a sealed border in between. Everybody knows that. On my question at an exchange office why on all Armenian paper money a mountain in a neighboring country is shown the answer was: 'because we have the best view.' Misha Haroujunian was so kind and took Reinier and me in his car one very hot day on this foolish mission and we ended up at an electrified (!) fence with Ararat still 10 kilometers away. A young boy looking after five or six goats or sheep watched us from a little distance. Misha hooped the horn and soldiers spotted us from a watchtower in the distance. Two came by motor bicycle and we saw them slowly approaching leaving a cloud of dust behind. Once they arrived Misha was using all his imagination: 'Please open the gate, I am the vice President of the Union of Armenian Filmmakers. With me I have famous Dutchmen who want to make a glorifying film about Armenia and Our Ararat'. He also waved with some documents. 'Passports' was the short reply and they left with them and us waiting. No buildings or trees, no shadow. The boy did not seem to mind. I do not remember after how long, an hour maybe two, Misha started making noise again and we heard the sound of a bike. One soldier returned and opened the fence. Behind it was a little cabin not bigger than an outdoor toilet. I was the first to go through the gate which was immediately closed behind me. In the cabin were forms waiting in Armenian Sanskrit and Russian Cyrillic. I had to fill in the papers. But with what exactly and where?? We all three went through the same procedure before the guard left us empty handed again. Other hours passed. Misha did not feel like using his previous method again. The boy was still there. He must be at least about 23 now. We just waited and waited for anything to happen... and it was getting unkindly hotter. I guess we had a bottle of water to share. Finally one uniform was back again. He switched of the electricity and pushed our passports through the wire. 'No' he said and that was it. We just took them without questioning, got into the car and returned to Yerevan. We forgot to say goodbye to the boy. Too preoccupied with our own luxurious misfortune. Next year I want to return and find the witness. Not only to shake hands but to ask if he remembers and if so: what? And if not: I have to deal with all memories being doubtful. It is a starting point. Obviously I want to take my boys along to meet him too.

My memory of that day seems so clear but I question how the years and my brain have colored it. I wonder about the value and truth of memory and history, big, small, mine and others. I have told this story a few times through the years. How much did I alter it like so many other stories and not just my own. How do I tell anything to my boys and tell them it really is the truth? I listen to the news and what does it say? You can all go to sleep now, we will watch over you.

A man in cowboy outfit taking the same plane at Schiphol airport warned us not to go. The plane was hit by lightening above the Black Sea. Entering the country we had to declare our golden fillings. We were the first foreign guests in the Paradjanov museum! I drank tea with the Pope and his wife in a cave monastery. Reinier fell into an open sewage system and thanks to that we found the only working shower in the city and ended up drinking a more than 50 year old Moldavski Aist cognac. leaving Armenia we had to open our mouths to show if our fillings were not missing. All true!

The world is dying ... at least it already did just outside of Zapoliarny.

2008-12-24T10:51:00.003+01:00

One is next to me in bed, solid asleep, so small and peaceful the other one is far away but yet so close, yes, in my heart all the time and I guess asleep now too. And I want to talk and tok tok like I am running out of it: “Sorry sons, but we have to hurry... well I think... and in the mean time I am not so sure. Time seems to confuse papa all the time. For instance summertime: forwards or backwards, winning or loosing an hour. It is good they explain it every half year again in the newspapers. It gives me really sleepless nights sometimes, like now. Or when I am traveling... I had this atlas once, edition 1968, and it showed this map with times-zones all over the world. There was something odd: Mongolia had a question mark printed in it and I could not stop wondering why the person who made that map didn't call somebody in Ulan Bator and asked what time it is there. I was sure they had phones and watches too! Seems so simple. And you know, when I stood on that river last September and on the other side the time was different, not one but two hours, it really got me. Future, present, past. Is it later there, earlier, does time matter? Ha ha, your father here shares his birthday with Einstein. Yes, 14th of March, and you think that helps? Something else funny, just for a laugh and totally irrelevant: you can turn some years upside down and they still stay the same: 1691, 1881, 1961, my year of birth! And you know little ones when the next time is you can do that trick? 6009! And after that?? When I was 8 or so I got a watch for my birthday from your grandparents, Marietje and Eise. I picked it out myself in the shop and still remember the price: 38 guilders. Went to school proud as a peacock that day! But when I came home in the afternoon I gave it away to Annemari, your aunt. I told her it was too heavy. I think she still got that thing, might even still work. You can ask her one day but don't fight about it. It is just a watch. I never had one after that until I got a mobile telephone. They all come with a watch inside strangely enough. I never asked for it. You know that less than a hundred years ago time was just local, different in every next village or town you would wander through? It's Christmas tomorrow. A Sunday because Jesus was born. But papa actually read somewhere recently that we got the date wrong: according to the stars and a computer of some scientist it must have been the 17th of June, that's right two days after you Thor, 2 BC. You get that? Let's do something next 17th of June when it really matters. So tomorrow is just another Wednesday and it would mean I have to give seasonal greetings now saying... emailing... 'Happy 2011' ! The first time I celebrated New Year in Chisinau we did it it three times on the party: at 23.00 (big) for the Russians, prime time small for the locals and at 01.00 especially for me because I was from Amsterdam! What time should I call you next week Vanja? Hmm so, do You my sons gain or loose two years? Are you older than I think you are? Is your father going to die sooner because of this? Sleep boys sleep, I will look after you as good as I can and as long there is time..., but.

Seasonal Greetings to all the Croatians I miss

2008-12-22T12:31:00.011+01:00

This morning I send a group email: This is an OPEN letter to all persons I know in Croatia or of whom I have an email address in my computer. Some are dear Friends, some of them I think are dear friends or friends, others are colleagues in the art or somehow art-related to me or know me because I drank a glass Rakia with them. I do not intend to send a similar letter to any group of persons in any other country this year or next. If you have received this letter but can not (do not want to) remember my name then please do not continue and delete this post into the SPAM. The idea for this appeared to me as an obvious move when I recounted the events of the past year. I was writing them down for my new weblog I recently started and then I realized something: since 1993 I have somehow been every year in Croatia and sometimes even more than once. On occasions invited to participate in an exhibition or festival but most of the time just because I wanted to, because I missed You. I recall saying a few years ago in the newspaper Glas Slavonije that I considered Osijek my Korcula. Well.... I haven't been to Croatia in 2008... and I am worried... and it has been so quiet from your side... F, how is your health now?!?! J, sorry I missed the celebration! A, still single? D, new book? A, new girlfriend? V, still complaining? How was my year? Well, it has been a mixed one I will long remember: I swapped countries and got with my Love Hilde a beautiful son in Norway called Thor Erland and my little Vanja in Chisinau is doing well but I unfortunately also got to know to understand Knut Hamsum's most famous book better and better... I guess that explains that I lately started calling myself a former contemporary artist, haha! You might find this letter odd or inappropriate or over the top. For me however it feels very natural. It is almost Christmas and that always arouses thoughts of mortality, or not? So here I go with the reason of sending this:

I would LOVE to come to see You in 2009! Any idea how I will manage that?

I wish You ALL a nice New Year!!

Post which came in today

2008-12-21T15:13:00.003+01:00

The following letter was send to my email from my dear friend and filmmaker Julian Woropay who i still owe something big:

fascinating! i will try and follow your blog. congratulations on yet another son. a great idea to get the two sons together in the middle of the river - this should be a film for christ's sake - i think it's time you started talking on camera, i wouldn't mind making it, would be great to cover the journeys of the two boys, a kind of nordic fitzcarraldo meets torn curtain.

i had a lot of fun hopping from one side to the other of the Polish-Czechoslovak border when i was nine years old - here's a picture of me on the Czechoslovak side, August 1970. my sister is on the Polish side and my mother and brother standing right on the frontier. the other two guys are distant relatives.

good luck with the residency in Yerevan - i might apply for it myself!

Ivan in Thereland

2008-12-21T09:01:00.001+01:00

If I would bluntly translate Erland from Dutch into English I would get Thereland and that fits somehow too.

My explanation why Ivan is called Ivan is in short the following: when I was born the grandfathers quarreled if I was going to be called (after them) Jan Johan or Johan Jan. My father decided to call me Ronnie after the dog of his grandfather instead. Not long before my birth the dog died. He was called after one of the Canadian soldiers which liberated his farm in 1945. Subsequently I decided to call my firstborn son Ivan. One could argue he should have been named Ivan Ivan. He actually prefers Vanja but that is normal for little Russians. Vanja's home is in Chisinau Moldova where I lived from 2001 till 2007 and I miss him dearly.

In the Garden of Erland

2008-12-21T08:44:00.007+01:00

If there was a Garden of Eden there must have been a Garden of Erland next to it. The old Scandinavian meaning of Erland is stranger or foreigner. It has never been a very common or popular name to give to a person. It once reached the American top 1000 of boy names and that was in 1901 ranked 893 or somewhere near to that. When Adam and Eva were thrown out or left voluntarily they had to go to the neighbours. A book I like to recommend on that subject was written by Mark Twain. He suggests that paradise was situated at the Niagara Falls and I am willing to believe him. Consequently Europe is Erland so two Americans discovered Norway and the rest.

With a Rolleicord Vb I have been making for a few years multi exposures directly lightning the same negative, so there is no manipulation needed afterwards. Except for the beauty of it I never knew how exactly to place it but since that visit to the Jakobselv last autumn where the middle of the river draws the borderline between Russia and Norway I got an idea of what it might mean. Of course there are more rivers indicating a national border but nowhere on this planet it creates a two hour difference. So when I make a picture from the Norwegian side towards Russia I make a shot of two hours into the past that lies ahead of me. Romanian artist Cristina David actually made a nice videotape on the Spanish-Portuguese river border using this timezone phenomena as an explanation why people in the East want to go West. I am willing to believe her.

Friends and family know that it took Hilde and me more than five months to come up with a name for our son. We just called him Boy which Hilde's father in some ways still does. He calls him Ulaien which is Bergen slang for the same: Hallaien Ulaien! Hello Boy! End of October we went for a visit to the Netherlands and he needed a passport of his own. So we choose Thor Erland. Thor after Heyerdahl the Kontiki man who was voted Norway's most popular person of the twentieth century. Erland was sponteneously added. Later I found a very Dutch explanation for this: Erland van Lidt de Jeude! Actually the Name-day of Erland is 14 of June and given the fact that he was born on very early Sunday morning the 15th seems appropriate given the fact that the time line for many people in the weekend is not that clear. At the moment I am reading the book Boy by James Hanley, it might have to do something with it. I am willing to believe me.

The Garden of Erland

2008-12-21T08:07:00.002+01:00

When Venedikt writes about green trees

2008-12-20T12:19:00.012+01:00

The picture was in the lobby of the hostel during my stay in Kirkenes and it immediately reminded me of a conversation between father and son I read in the novel Moscow – Petushki. It is as if the large tree in the picture talks to the little one. In the mean time it refers to the multiple exposed pictures I have been making and which I would like to call from now on In The Garden of Erland. It is connected to the idea I got catching real time in a time-based manner which I also mentioned in the first post.

... I finished my fourth glass and started to get agitated. 'When I haven't got you, kiddo, I'm all on my own. You understand that? You were running around in the woods this summer weren't you. You'll probably remember what pine trees look like. Well that's me, I'm like a pine tree. They're so tall, really tall, and so lonely – really, really lonely, same as me. And all they do is look up at the sky, same as me, but as for what's under their feet, they don't see that, and they don't want to see it. They're so green, and they'll be green forever, until they fall down. And that's like me – I'll be green forever, till I fall down . . .“Green,' said my little boy.
'And then there's dandelions, for instance. They sway in the wind, and fly all over the place, and it's really sad to look at them. Well, that's me too – don't I fly all over the place? And isn't it disgusting to look at me, the way I fly all over the place for days on end? 'Disgusting,' my little boy repeated after me, and smiled blissfully. And even now I remember his 'Disgusting', and I smile blissfully too, and I can see all the angels nodding to me from afar, and flying away, just as they said they would...

From Venedikt Erofeyev's novel Moscow – Petushki (1969)

It is a small step from Kirkenes to Yerevan

2008-12-19T19:45:00.008+01:00

During the last weeks the idea for the project of Ivan Erland gradually and emotionally grew. I realized that it was not only the river Jacobselv I had to return to. At least I had to connect some other places I neglected in the past as well. Rivers and mountains which formed me through the years or left me troubled: Tankenberg, Ben Bulben, Waterloo, Vaquois, Vitosha, Ararat, Snezka, Danube, Rhine, Elbe, Sava, Drava, Dinkel, Dnestr, IJzer... complicated: I have always proclaimed I rather visit one place multiple times instead of finding something new and now I find myself in shortage of time? So yesterday I saw an announcement about a perfect residency in Yerevan and it triggered what is actually going on now in my brain. Today I have send an email to Armenia which I will put on this site soon.

Bordersigns along the Jakobs river

2008-12-19T19:37:00.009+01:00

Kirkenes Norway 27 September 2008

2008-12-19T16:48:00.000+01:00

We met that day one local man

2008-12-19T16:45:00.001+01:00

Why this site exists and how it started on the Norwegian Russian border

2008-12-19T15:16:00.007+01:00

I am a former contemporary artist. This is an attempt to show an ever changing project I intend to develop from beginning till end. I give it the title: The Wanderings of Ivan Erland. It is open to anybody to read or comment. (Ha hero, not much risk: these kind of pages are rarely visited). It is in the mean time an attempt to show there are no hidden agendas in my world. This is my paste copy diary and sketchbook to show some roots towards my sons Ivan and Thor Erland as well. I have no clear idea why I do this. I realize I cross thin lines between private and public which might offend someone involved. I will find out along the way or after wards or not at all.

There is no clear moment of beginning where this journey starts but the first time I welded my sons names Ivan and Thor Erland together was in an email to the artist in residency Pikene på Broen in Kirkenes. I posted it end of November. Till now I had unfortunately no reply yet. Here is the letter:

Priviet Luba Kuzovnikova,

This letter is about BAR International and BAS Bergen,

By email I was informed that you are going to visit the BAS architecture school in Bergen tomorrow to look at the works which are being developed by the students for Gerrit Mosebach's project Barents Scenario 2058. That is good news to hear! As you probably remember I accompanied him visiting you late one evening at your office in Kirkenes last September while you were packed and ready to take off to the airport.

Within the BAS academy I am a so-called DAV teacher which means that I am attached to a project as visual artist to introduce different methods to the students and help to visualize their individual contributions. I am however not the initiator or organizer of the particular project. This means I will not participate in the follow ups after mid January.

I was very fortunate to join on the journey to Finnmark and Murmansk-Oblast actually. Usually there is, budgetary speaking, no room for the DAV teacher to come on the excursion too and it was a totally new experience for me to go to this part of Europe as well. I did not intend to work for myself but mainly to accompany the participants. So, during the short stay in Kirkenes I made with some students an afternoon trip along the Jacobs river, from the Russian border crossing up to the coast. I had only an old Chinese camera with me that day which is actually mainly suitable for portraits and better to be used under the best light conditions but now seeing the results I do not have to complain. We met that day one local man. The rest of the afternoon was rainy and deserted which did not bother me at the time at all. Attached to this mail you will find the few photos I made that moment. Gradually during the trip the idea came to me that I HAD to return and visit this road again some day soon.

Main question of this email is if I can apply and make a chance for the BAR artist in residency program in 2009?

My history and background in short:
I am a Dutch citizen born in 1961. I went to the AKI art academy from 1979 till 1984 where I was skilled into a video artist. Now I can call myself, according to the art historians, one of the pioneers of the 3rd generation in video art. From 1982 till 2000 I worked as a mixed media artist-duo under the name Sluik/Kurpershoek. Our work is in several museum collections and all videos are now looked after by the Dutch Institute for Media Arts Montevideo/TBA. Early 2001 I switched Amsterdam for Kishinev, Moldova. Here I started mainly to focus on photography. Furthermore I co-initiated an art center and publishing house AoRTa, an artist in residence and a contemporary photography department at the Creanga State University. Unexpectedly and quite rapidly I changed habitat from Moldova to Norway end of 2007 where I am living now. A curriculum vitae can be found on my site.

My motivation (rough version) to come to Kirkenes can be described as follows:
I have a Russian son called Ivan of almost four years living in Kishinev. I have a 5 month young Norwegian son called Thor Erland living in Bergen. I love them both dearly. Due to visa restrictions they have not met; they did not shake hands. The only place they could without leaving their mother ground is at that particular river. This fact made me aware of something I can not fully grab or catch (yet) but it seems to me that a kind of key lies in the middle of the Jacobselv. This is why I would like to return and go again along that border river, not in a hurry but step by step.

As far as I know the Russian Norwegian border region is the only in the world where there is a direct time difference of 2 hours. In principle one can make a picture of the near future or past in one second and that future or past would be an hour more than on any other time borderline. With other words there must be more time there. The area seems to be the perfect place to attempt to catch or manipulate real time in a time-based way. One could at the same moment make pictures 100% Norwegian or 100% Russian without moving a foot. In all my earlier works I have tried to deal with time. I still believe that the best film lasts one second. On the Jacobselv I would like to catch 2 hours in 2/100 of a second. Many must have taken that route to the Barents sea and photographed or filmed the Russian territory on the east bank of the river but has Norway ever been photographed from the Russian side except by soldiers? Would it be possible now to travel along the other side of the river?

The work title which spooks through my head is The Wanderings of Ivan Erland. I guess this is not so surprising.

I do not want to make my letter too long and in the mean time I hope it shows my sincere interest and drive to stay for an extended period around Kirkenes. Furthermore I would like to ask if it is possible to take my Norwegian family along considering they are part of the quest.

In the first half of 2009 I will tutor several BAS students towards their exams, curate an exhibition in Lodz and also teach at the FAMU academy in Praha. There is however space enough to include a long stay in Kirkenes this spring, preferably April- May. I would actually like to come twice. This way I can collect, reflect and create the best way. So a second visit later in the year or in 2010 would be perfect.

Dear Luba, I write this letter now, a day before your arrival to Bergen, because I am not sure if I am able to come to the academy myself on Friday afternoon and furthermore I am not sure if it would be the appropriate time or occasion to talk about my request.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Yours sincerely,
Ron Sluik