Film: Single Use Only by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

This piece started with the music, composed and produced by Patrick Wray at the start of 2023. It seemed a little sci-fi to me. Also it conjured for me a sense of Elsewhere, coincidentally the name of this journal, a place other than here. I thought about the places which evoked the early series Star Trek technicolour aesthetic and for me and these were definitely fairgrounds and seaside resorts. These spaces do have out-of-season periods too where the atmosphere changes.

The photographs are from Blackpool, Llandudno, and Sheffield and were all taken by me during the summer and autumn of 2022.

Last year I posted a picture of a sock I was knitting on Twitter and someone asked if I would photograph the sock turned inside out so they could see how I had constructed it. I felt like that was a really personal request, unseemly almost, like being asked to undress, and I resisted. Here I wanted to show some of these images inside out, from behind, as a kind of concession to the potential curiosity about the process, even though you never asked for it.

This is a companion piece to Surprise View.

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Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Film: Surprise View by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

By Sarah Alwin:

When I come here it is not the quiet of the landscape that I experience but the residual resonances of the city which unsettle my head and my heart. It is a place of outlandishness and of natural and stinging beauty. Its impertinence is overwhelming. This space is full of busyness and clarity and colour. 

My friend Patrick Wray made the music for this piece, knowing that there was noise and strangeness in this. His music glues this work together.

I took these photographs from the end of 2019 to the start of 2023 at Surprise View, a ten minute drive from my home in Sheffield. I filtered the digital images with my printer and scanner and by stitching into them. What used to be a source of frustration (my beleaguered printer running out of ink) has become, for me, a new way of seeing this beloved place.

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Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

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Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Diligence in the Snow

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

I sit on my island, in winter, and the antigen test is negative. 

Winter in Ireland rarely means snow, but always wind and rain. From November on, storm after storm rolls in from the Atlantic, often making ferry crossings and fishing dangerous or near impossible, and howl around my house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. I was born in October, so autumn is my favourite season yet winter following is a close second. I always wallowed in the dark and the cold, as for some reason I do not seem to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder; or maybe a reverse one: I don't like heat, or the summer.  I have no issue with maintaining a work rhythm in winter, and sometimes even feel I write better, with the fireplace lit and a glass of whiskey at hand admittedly, but it is the muggy heat of summer that drains all my focus, motivation and attention. And where for others it might be a time for a lake or park picnic with friends or to have a few cold ones by the beach, it makes me only want to lie in a dark room with air-conditioning until October arrives. 

For me, winter is never about the hope of light after the dark, never about the return of spring. It is always about the dark itself, and the chance of introspection it provides. In recent years I often think about what we humans do in face of adversity and hardship, and how the pandemic has brought to light how our greed and fear of change seem to make it impossible to react properly to these challenges, much more than I would have ever felt possible. As I write this, people in democracies everywhere in Europe are out protesting the need to adhere to science and proclaim that they live in a dictatorship, on a continent that has seen so much real oppression and totalitarianism in the last hundred years alone. 

South of Dundalk, in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, hangs one of my favourite winter paintings: “The Diligence in the Snow” (La diligence dans la neige) from 1860, created by French socialist and realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877). If you look at the upper half of the painting, there is only an empty landscape, the east of France - on occasion Courbet added “Montagnes du Jura” to the title - stretching out to the horizon in grey and white, under an equally grey and white sky, indifferent in its monotony. There are no houses, no smoke from chimneys rising into the sky, and the light portrayed here is the undefinable greyness of winter - it could be anytime from later morning to early evening.

The human chaos and drama is confined to the bottom of the painting, where a stagecoach struggles through high drifts of snow pulled by two oxen and two horses, the two oxen in front struggling with their necks down, one coachman riding atop one, slumped down and blowing on his hands with a whip held in the crook of his arm. Behind them one horse rises up in its bridles, the other, exhausted, has already sunken to the side. The coach itself, weighted down with large chunks of snow on its roof, seems to be in the moment of foundering, dangerously tilted to the right. Another human figure, the second driver perhaps, has fallen face down into the snow hurrying towards the horses, and a woman and a man behind him, the passengers, are already left behind the capsizing coach. The man reaches out an arm towards it as the woman, the last in this chain of unlucky ones, holds on to the arm of the man. There are four or five houses depicted close by, also almost sunken into the snow, but no help is coming: there is no smoke rising from their chimneys either, the windows dark.   

Gustave Courbet,'The Diligence in the Snow' © The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What I like about the painting most is its duality, and, after a fashion, hopelessness. One moment you're hurrying along in the warm cabin of the coach swaddled in blankets looking out at a beautiful scenery, the next moment everything secure and safe is brought crashing down around you and the beautiful scenery you thought only to exist for your merriment becomes something dangerous, something threatening to kill you. 

If you live in winter, regardless on what hemisphere, you know this. You are acutely aware of the fragility of human existence, of it's often sudden and violent end in dark and windswept places, and are reminded of that fact every year when the first storms of the seasons make ferry crossings impossible.

I don't wish for winter to end. 

If we manage to kill it, which seems a distinct possibility given our rising temperatures and our incapability to do anything against the climate catastrophe here in Europe, what will make us pause and take a breath? If there is only an eternal summer, will we not manically keep on drinking and eating and using up whatever is left while the rest of the world already burns and those we abandoned making their way to us to partake in our frantic feast before it all goes to hell? 

I think we all need to learn to adjust to winter, even its dark and hopelessness. I was actually happy when in February 2021 the tail end of Storm Darcy  brought with it snow and wind for all of Ireland. Not much snow, just enough to dust the cockle fleet in the harbour and the scrapyard on the quays, but the three days it lasted may have given me more joy and hope than anything humans gave me in the 12 months before that. 

In the midst of winter, I did not discover an eternal summer, to paraphrase Albert Camus, but instead the conviction that we can't carry on as we've done before. As strong as the urge is to re-emerge from the pandemic into a world where nothing has changed, this is wishful thinking. Doing as we've always done and rejecting science is what brought us here, to a time of rampant viruses emerging from burning rain forests and thawing permafrost, of floods and death and people fleeing a heating global south. Those of us in the midst of winter, in deep ice and snow and hiding from the storms howling outside, we need to preserve and protect these moments of stillness and contemplation. Otherwise we will just watch the coach founder and find ourselves in a hostile place, with no help coming. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Five Questions for... Alison Pouliot

By Sara Bellini

I first came across Alison Pouliot in the pages of Mervin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, published just a few months ago. Sheldrake introduces us to the world of fungi and their complexity: They can digest plastic and crude oil, they give us bread and medicines, and they connect plants in an underworld network. They are much more underrated than plants and animals, and yet they are extremely fascinating, if only we give them a chance to shine. 

This is exactly what Alison Pouliot has been doing in her photography. With a scientific background as an ecology historian, Alison focuses on the more mysterious woodland creatures, like fungi, as well as on abandoned places bearing the traces of human disregard. 

While admiring her photo essays, it occurs to me that we don’t simply occupy the planet, we are part of it, and yet there is so much we don’t know about it. I think about how, in order to build a more sustainable relationship with nature, it’s necessary to slow down and look closely at the other part in this equation. How deeply do we understand how the environment works, what it needs, which human behaviours are helpful and which ones are destructive? It’s this attentive and caring gaze that allows Alison to capture the diversity of fungi: soft-textured geometric patterns, ghostly shapes that could be the stunning guardians of the Underworld and alien-looking mushrooms with a glam aesthetic. 

Her photography is now moving from a documentaristic to a more artistic approach: “I am striving to produce work that might just touch someone somewhere and make them feel differently about the world. It’s a time of such radical change and also a time of opportunity to test the waters and do things differently. I guess it’s often times of adversity that bring out the most innovative or creative or inspirational aspects of one’s work.”

Alison’s plans for the new year start with the publication in March of Wild Mushrooming, a book she had been working on for the past five years with mycologist Tom May. The book approaches foraging from the point of view of conservation and ecosystem balance. Alison lives between Australia and Switzerland and we caught up with her after she had just completed a series of six short videos on fungi and was back in Europe for the cold season. 

What does home mean to you?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever really worked that out. It’s certainly not a physical place. I’ve straddled both hemispheres for the last two decades (so that I can have two autumns a year and get myself a double dose of fungi) so I don’t really have a sense of a particular ‘place’ called home. In a sense I feel like I’ve been on the move all my life as we moved around a good bit in my childhood as well. I have few material possessions and find it easy to make a nest and feel comfortable pretty much anywhere, so long as there’s clean air, natural surrounds and little concrete or noise. When people talk about ‘settling’ or ‘settling down’ or getting ‘tenure’ in a job, it makes me shudder.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

Oh wow, that’s a big question. I have a short list of several hundred... Anywhere in the field really, the more remote and less inhabited the better. Of course, as an Australian and having spent many years exploring that continent, I feel incredibly connected to it, especially to the remote and wide open spaces of the interior. The blank spaces on the map, those often ungraspable, indeterminate, shimmering places that can feel so old, so solid, yet like a dream. I can’t get enough of them!

But as I’m writing these words, I’m actually wondering if one can ever really feel ‘connected’ to a place, or do we just feel comfortable or familiar? I mean, of course it’s more palpable than that. Sure we can feel a powerful inexplicable affinity, or something bigger more visceral, a physical bodily sensation, an intensity that we feel in one particular place and not another, an attachment of sorts that can be profound, but is that really ‘connection’? I know when I return to my grandmother’s home in Tasmania, now occupied by new residents, that I feel an overwhelming and inextricably entwined sense of emotion and memory solely linked to that place, but I’m not sure that I’d call it connection.I’ll have to give that some more thought. 

One of the things I love about Australia is its unpredictability, its extremes and its resistance to being controlled and regulated (as one sees, for example, in Europe) although we’re trying out hardest to do so. I love that it’s not ‘comfortable’, that it resists, that it’s so highly changeable. That it’s elusive and often incomprehensible. For me it begs one not to linger too long. It’s unsettling. It’s dis-placing. Perhaps I’m just more comfortable on the move.

What is beyond your front door?

Do you mean the flap of my tent? Wow, a wonderland of textures. A bruising storm front and ever changing light. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’m not sure that it’s ‘a’ place, a geographically defined place. A particular location. It’s anywhere that sparks my imagination and reverberates in such a way that excites or inspires or makes me feel vertiginous. Or perhaps where there’s something I feel or experience or taste that I’ve not done before. Or likewise, where a sense of intense familiarity can be just as compelling. While going back to loved places can be powerfully nostalgic or reassuring, I also think ‘going back’ can be hard. The world is changing so fast and it’s easy to become attached to the idea of how a place once was, and hence, once can quickly feel disappointed or disenchanted. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now? 

I’ve got several books on the go but am utterly engrossed in As we have always done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. An incredible piece of writing. I’m also re-reading some of the work of that amazing Alaskan anthropologist Richard “Nels” Nelson who died just over a year ago.

I’ve always got the radio or a podcast on and have just been listening to Nahlah Ayed’s program called Ideas on CBC (Canada) Radio. Am now listening to Far and Wide on RRR (Melbourne independent radio station). Otherwise everything from Anouar Brahem to Khruangbin to Carbon Based Lifeforms...  As for viewing I’ve been watching some short docos on AeonVideos.

Alison Pouliot's website
Alison's video The Kingdom Fungi

What's On: Navigating Berlin – Perspectives on Cartography

Copyright: CLB Berlin. Photo by Vietze & Fels.

By Sara Bellini

Tonight at 7pm at CLB Berlin sees the start of the second chapter of Navigating Berlin: Perspectives on Cartography. This is an exhibition in three parts about historical maps in dialogue with contemporary art to narrate how the representations of the city over time mirror the society that made them. Part I closed last week and focused on the maps from the private collection of Michael Müller and featured works by Olaf Kühnemann and DISSS. Lisa Gordon curated the exhibition in collaboration with CLB, an interdisciplinary space for the intersection of urbanism, art and cultural studies. 

Navigating Berlin II: Design and Cognition considers the maps as artefacts and symbol systems. The works by Berlin based artists Elizabeth McTernan and Simon Faithfull explore Berlin orbital journeys and water representation in maps respectively. It will be open until the 2nd of February and will be followed by Representation and Absence, with the participation of artists Birgit Szepanski and Hadas Tapouchi. 

The third part of the exhibition confronts the socio-political background of the maps and how it influenced, and even distorted, the reproduction of the city on paper. Because a map, exactly like a book, a movie or any other art form, is only a partial portrait, filtered by the cultural lens of the author and aimed at manipulating the perception of the viewer.

Navigating Berlin I: 30.11.19 - 05.01.20
Navigating Berlin II: 10.01 - 02.02.20
Navigating Berlin III: 07.02 - 01.03.20

CLB Berlin
Aufbau Haus am Moritzplatz
Website

Soundmarks: Art and Archaeology

We were extremely interested to hear about ‘Soundmarks’, the new collaboration between the artist and archaeologist Dr Rose Ferraby and the artist Rob St John, which brought together art, sound and archaeology to explore and document the hidden sub-surface landscape of the village of Aldborough in North Yorkshire, England. 

Aldborough was an important town in the Roman north, one with a central forum, basilica and amphitheatre. But for anyone visiting the town today, this history is not immediately obvious. And so the Soundmarks project was born; an attempt to bring this landscape back to life again, through art exhibitions, sound installations, a book and audio art trail, as well as a documentary film and podcast.

“There is rich ground for creative exploration between art and archaeology, allowing new ways of exploring landscapes. So much of archaeology is about imagination: engaging with creative practice can open up new ways of thinking through archaeology and communicating it in interesting and exciting ways.” – Rose Ferraby.

On the Soundmarks website you can delve into more of this fascinating story through the different strands of the project, including the documentary film and audio trail (with accompanying town map). And if you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Aldborough, the English Heritage Museum in the village is providing a home to the visual and audio elements of the project.

To learn more about the project, have a listen to the Soundmarks Podcast, in which Rose and Rob sit down to talks about the process of research, making and exhibiting, interwoven with field recordings and music made for the project:

Soundmarks is an art/archaeology collaboration between Rose Ferraby and Rob St. John using sound and visual art to explore and animate the sub-surface landscape of Aldborough Roman Town in North Yorkshire, UK. This podcast, recorded in September 2019, features a conversation between Rose and Rob outlining their processes of research and making over six months in Soundmarks, resulting in an exhibition, sound installation, book, art trail and film. Their conversation covers themes around art, archaeology, sound and landscape, and is woven with field recordings and music created in the project. Find out more on the project website: https://soundmarks.co.uk/ Soundmarks was supported by funding from Arts Council England.

Soundmarks on Twitter

Now, for the Future at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool

Preview by Paul Scraton:

The photography organisation Shutter Hub have teamed up with Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery this November for a new international exhibition that brings photographers from around the world together to explore contemporary ideas of myths, folklore and memory. The motivation for the exhibition was to not only explore the many unique ideas for creating a visual language drawing from the past and the present, but also one that, in this time of growing environmental crisis, plots potential road-maps for the future.

‘We’re looking for the myths and fables of today. Will the stories we tell today survive to be the folklore of the future? We hope that Now, for the Future could be a visual handbook for emotional survival.’
– Shutter Hub Creative Director, Karen Harvey

David Come Home © Simon Isaac

One of the highlights of the exhibition promises to be the work of Simon Isaac, whose work ‘David Come Home’ explores ideas of migration, home and homecoming through the story of David, who crash-lands back on earth having lived on a distant planet. Once here, he walks the landscape in search of his brother, reflecting the contemporary reality of many migrants who travel on foot for countless miles, leaving behind their loved ones because of war, the need to survive or simply the human desire to explore.

Elsewhere, the exhibition showcases the work of more that 20 photographers from across the planet, including Bolivia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, US, Portugal and, of course, the United Kingdom. It promises to be a thought-provoking exploration of how photography can be used to tell stories that help us understand what’s going on around us, and allow us to find common ground in this increasingly fragmented world.

About Shutter Hub

Shutter Hub is a photography organisation providing opportunities, support and networking for creative photographers worldwide. They provide the chance for photographers to professionally promote their work, access high quality opportunities and make new connections within the photographic community through their website, in-person meet ups and exhibitions. Shutter Hub has dramatically changed the way photography exhibitions are run. An online entry form and low entry fee with no further costs for printing, framing or postage levels the playing field, allowing photographers from around the world to enter. Bursaries are also available for photographers on low incomes.

Now, for the Future
1 November 2019 - 30 November 2019
Open Eye Gallery (Google Maps)

Open Eye Gallery Website
Shutter Hub Website