I can't see or feel the change from one season to the next, I crave greenery, and I constantly wrestle with the emotion of feeling trapped. I spend half my life opening doors and windows, trying to get rid of the airless, claustrophobic feeling that comes with being inside. I get woken up by bin lorries, the rush-hour traffic and my neighbours shouting, instead of birdsong and the wind in the trees. I can't sense when it's going to rain because I can no longer smell it in the air, and when it does rain I can't hear it landing on the roof.
I live near the sea because it gives me some sense of openness and freedom, but I don't think I will ever feel truly settled here – or anywhere else. My instinct is to travel, and when you have grown up waking to different scenery every day, it's easy to feel trapped. But to reach my dream, I have to put down roots.
For the full story, click here.
photo: Tam Carrigan, 1990
Spell to Be Said Upon Departure
by Jane Hirshfield
What had come here to do
having finished,
shelves of the water lie flat.
Copper the leaves of the doorsill,
yellow and falling.
Scarlet the bird that is singing.
Vanished the labor, here walls are.
Completed the asking.
Loosing the birds there is water.
Having eaten the pears.
Having eaten
the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.
Table be strewn.
Table be strewn with stems,
table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.
Table be strewn with pleasure,
what was here to be done having finished.
At the 2009 World Beard and Moustache Championships in Anchorage, Alaska, Beard Team USA took the lead with David Traver as the Overall Champion. This year's American team also featured Atlanta photographer Mark Adams who "stopped shaving the day he graduated high school in 1994 and has never looked back."
Check out the project she did there:
Elsewhere Cleaning Inc. was born when the three artists (Emma Houlihan, Helena O'Connor, and Eliza Fernand) met while participating in the Elsewhere residency program. Elsewhere is a living museum, where in the museum's collection is constantly being re-imagined and reworked. Nothing ever leave the collection and nothing is added to the collection, but still the museum is ever changing as works come in and out of storage.
Working within the museum context of Elsewhere, the artists found themselves obsessively cleaning and rearranging items within the collection. Inspired by the Elsewhere ethos of approaching everyday things as art objects, the artists tried to bring this curatorial idea to you in your home. Elsewhere Cleaning Inc. came to come to your house to clean, rearrange, and curate your objects. The purpose of Elsewhere Cleaning Inc. is re-imagine peoples’ private homes as museums and the objects within them as both deliberate and incidental collections and to re-curate these collections.
As we have learned through this process of cleaning and curating homes, the job of the curator is to select and often interprets works of art (but for our purposes the curator in the home is to select and re interpret your own object into arrangements of meaning.
By 2010 more than 50 million homeowners will be banned from line drying clothes outdoors for the sake of preserving property value and prudishness, the ban which infringes on a homeowners civil rights is contributing to the environmental and energy crisis, considering the dryer is responsible for 6% of the average households energy bill, as well as costing the U.S. an estimated $5 billion annually.
This is a film about freedom, communities and clotheslines. Drying For Freedom follows the fight for the right to dry clothes naturally revealing the protests, passions, politics and murders asking how did drying clothes become a life threatening, environmental social catastrophe? Why can’t we be free and dry clothes naturally?
from the Code of Ethics, United States Post Office, 1970 opening Bukowski's "work of fiction... dedicated to nobody"
By offering visiting creators free accommodation, we hope to remind people of a lovely little thing called hospitality. And in addition to making the visiting creators happy and Gothenburg a more interesting city because of their presence, we hope this simple idea can be exported and implemented around the globe. What a wonderful world that would result in.
