Mother Tongue Kick Off

Dear friends,

Thanks to many of you I kicked off the production of Mother Tongue two days ago. I arrived in Donaueschingen, Germany on Thursday, July 18 and was fortunate to find a great hotel and a bike shop within a half an hour.  I rented a bike in order to explore the town with the intention of finding the source of the Danube, but it seems this act thrust me into the middle of a controversy as to where the Danube actually begins.

There is the storied memorial of the Donauquelle – the spring of the Danube, (currently under reconstruction) that is situated in the gardens of the palace of the Furstenberg’s (local aristocrats) and lays claims to pilgrimage by the Roman Emperor Tiberius in 15 BCE and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian in 1499 along with many other celebrities. The Furstenberg’s elevated the story of the Donauquelle as the true source to the status of legend and representatives of many nations on the Danube have placed reverential plaques on this site.

Donauquelle under reconstruction and sans the statue and plaques

The construction sign at Donauquelle

Legends aside, the more moderate cartographers have placed the source of the Danube at the confluence of the Breg and Brigach rivers about a mile away.  Here I found two tipsy locals drinking Furstenberg beer (since 1283) on a bench by a statue of a woman and child.  The woman represents the Barr – the local landscape that gave birth to the Danube and the Child of course is the fledgling river. 

The tipsy guys were happy to be interviewed and spoke haltingly in German about the river.  My disadvantage is a lack of fluency in German, so I will need to translate the interview in post- production.

Beer at the Breg, Brigach and Danube

 

The mother - Barr, and child - Donau

I find the people extremely friendly and have had success getting answers to my questions.  I ask people to respond in their mother tongue to Key Words that I present to them.

The words are:

1. Danube

2. Usually these words are the names of the two countries above and below the Danube of the country I am in.  In Germany, at the source of the river it is only one word: Austria.

In Austria the words will be Germany and Slovakia.

3. Borders

4. The possibility of no borders

I met a group of guys playing beach volleyball and one of them, Peter, took me in his car about 20 miles to the Black Forest where yet another contender for the source of the Danube resides at the small town of Furtwangen at the source of the river Breg. Here at an altitude of about 1000 meters above sea level in the beautiful Black Forest you will find multiple plaques at the spring of the Breg claiming the spot as the beginning of the Danube. Near the spring is also the dividing line between the watershed of the Danube and the Rhine.

Peter at the source of the Breg

The confluence of Breg and Brigach with Danube on bottom right

These murky beginnings point to how the landscape is washed in our wishes.

I’m taking a 3 day bike ride to the city of Ulm (about 150 kilometers north east) tomorrow morning as the Danube is not navigable at this point.

I will continue to blog every several days as I acquire material.

Peace

Note: Much of the historic background I am getting from Andrew Beattie's The Danube - A cultural History, a worthy read.  

Launching the Mother Tongue Kickstarter Project

Just launched the Mother Tongue Kickstarter Project I am hoping to fund.  Beyond trepidation at whether it will succeed or not, I have a lot of things to think about.  Although there is always a need to define a project, (especially if there is a grant deadline) to me the project itself is an organic thing that will have it's own will and will eventually settle into what it wants to be.  If I pay attention.
To do:
Contact organizations in Europe to set up interviews for the project.
Contact friends in Europe to set up meetings, interviews.
Research audio equipment
Start learning German
Think about general itinerary
Keep thinking about the end goal - what is the simplest, most direct reason for this to be in the world.
Is there really a need or even a possibility for a borderless society that preserves within itself multiple identities that come from our tribal beginnings?

Interesting article by Tomonobu Imamici on this theme.

Great Conversation with Josh of LOCALFLUX.

Interview

With the energy of Kingswood Oxford students - the Work makes itself.

Slide show, talk video link.

Stuffed Animal Project at KO

Here is a link to a stuffed animal donation organization.
Make a comment about your project.

Kingswood Oxford Residency

Below are some questions I asked at a presentation of my work at Kingswood Oxford.  Here is a link to the power point presentation.
I hope to have a conversation with you - the students about how these questions can lead to making art.  Please make comments to start a conversation.  I will be checking every couple of days.
Does art have to stay in a frame?
Is it ok to break the law?
Can art be in the everyday?
Is it ok to lie?
Is it ok to destroy things?
Can you alter public property?
Is it ok to do ridiculous things?
Can you farm with a bike?
Can we be at home in nature?
Can the world be your school?
Is it ok to panhandle?
Can you shape the future?

Currently working on BREAD CYCLE WORKS

Through planting and harvesting a field of wheat in Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood BREAD CYCLE WORKS is interested in engaging people in a communal way in order to affirm our relationship to the land and the physical and metaphoric sustaining qualities of bread. We aim to celebrate a multicultural calendar of rites and community activities associated with planting and harvesting. The breads we bake from the wheat will be shared with the Frog Hollow Community and volunteers and eaten at a fiesta.

Gypsy Wagon Prophet Theater

truth

While living in Sofia I became interested in the Roma community of the city. They are most visible traveling the streets in their horse carts collecting scrap material from the trash or work sites. This marginalized community is living on the periphery of Sofia’s life in ghettos, economically impoverished and socially separated. In Sofia they are the only people still using horses, so there is a historic chasm between the Roma and the Bulgarians who drive cars. This mixture of contemporary and historic technology that can be observed in Bulgaria was my initial inspiration for creating The Gypsy Wagon Prophet Theater.
I wanted to give a voice to the Roma people by using their own traditional sayings. These sayings such as “What is a lie to you, is truth to me” contain clues to the history and identity of the Roma. See video.

rage

I used a video projection of a slot machine on a screen mounted on a horse wagon. The slot machine spat out Bulgarian Roma sayings as the wagon traveled through Sofia. The wagon traveled through zones forbidden to Roma wagons by the decree of the mayor such as the square in front of the parliament building and other center city locations. The sayings become scrambled with time as the words start to be randomly selected by the slot machine creating a sort of chance poetry.

victory

To me the slot machine represents chance of birth, profiteering at the expense of the poor, fortune telling. The horse wagon represents a marginalized minority holding on to their historic way of life in a sea of contemporary society represented by the cars.

Sofia Underground Performance Festival

This week the Sofia Underground Performance Festival is happening here. It promises to be quite an eventful and interesting week in Sofia.
I am doing a second annual performance with my pal Rebecca Parker - 24 Hour Conversation as well as organizing an electric KIDS performance exchange with my good friend Emcee CM. He is organizing a KIDS has some work to do schedule of events in NYC and we thought it would be nice to set up a virtual bridge between Sofia and New York and give people a chance to collaborate. We hope to have the website function as an open ended space for performance instructions and documentation that can be used by folks from all over the world. On May 23rd the Gypsy Wagon Prophet Theater will be traveling the streets of Center City Sofia

Temporal Monuments

The name of my project in Sofia is Temporal Monuments. It has moved dramatically from my initial intention of doing video projections on buildings. Living in Sofia for a few months I have become increasingly aware of people begging in the streets, selling flowers on the corners or plying any kind of skill such as playing the accordion and dancing or carving wooden figurines.
While some might find this unsightly I see these people as survivors. I see Roma wagons cruising the streets for recyclable goods and I think about sustainability. These goods would otherwise find their way into a landfill somewhere. When there is a lack of resources sustainability becomes about survival.
These people on the streets of Bulgaria living by their wits are just making ends meet, but as a result not putting the kind of pressure on their environment most people of means do.
So this begging and hustling I see as hopeful. It’s like fishing, hoping to collect a bounty, something positive, helpful to one’s survival. It is about being opportunistic, working with what you have. In academia it’s called writing a grant proposal, here on the streets there is a more immediate and pressing need.
These are the people that I am interested in establishing a temporal monument for.

Monument

I found a headless monument in the park on the corner of Pirotska and Opalchenska Street and thought it would be a good space to honor regular folks in. An older couple told me that on top of it used to be a bust of Georgi Dimitrov – the Bulgarian Communist Dictator. After Dimitrov’s death a mausoleum was erected in the center of Sofia where he lay embalmed like Lenin on Red Square. Post communist political changes saw the mausoleum demolished.
I was later told by a policeman who was half-heartedly trying to stop us from completing our project that the bust was of the Russian writer-philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev who’s writings were based in Christian Spirituality. He was a Marxist and a revolutionary who gradually walked away from the radical Marxism of the Bolsheviks and found himself on the “Philosophers’ ship” of the exiles the Bolsheviks sent out of the country.
Both contenders for the monument were tied to Marxism, a philosophy promoting the equal rights among people.
So a temporal monument to the people at this spot seemed appropriate. I asked some friends to work on it with me. We created a set of stairs for easy access, cleaned graffiti from the monument, laid flowers and made a plaque to the Bulgarian people. You can see the video of the project and some photos I posted below. If you are in Sofia you can go to the site and take a picture of yourself on the base. Send it to me if you do. Here is a map of the location.

Before

After

Are they biting? Кълве ли?

MONUMENT TO THE HOPEFUL FISHERMAN
Кълве ли?/Are they biting?, Performance, Sofia, Bulgaria, March 2009

To make art in Sofia I am looking for the spaces between spaces. I am trying to figure out the potential, the possibilities. I am searching for the margins of the built environment for the places not yet resolved. Those spaces are alive with possibility. Can you catch fish in a puddle in Sofia? No, but you can catch lots of smiles, greetings and the proverbial Кълве ли?(Culve li?), Are they biting? What are you getting? Som (catfish). They are bottom feeders – opportunists. Just like so many have to be. It is a fruitless activity, but somehow full of hope. Yes. They are biting. The opportunities to be inspired, to figure it out, to create are everywhere in Bulgaria.