The Other Side? – Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art

Kathy Prendergast, BLACK MAP SERIES (Bulgaria), 2010, ink on printed map, 94.4 x 131.7 cm (Detail)

By Anne Mager:

Anne Mager is a curator and arts manager living in Ireland and Germany, and the curator of "The Other Side - Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art", which runs at the Dortmunder U until March 2020. We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to publish her introductory speech from the exhibition opening in December:

Until recently, I felt that I was able to count myself among a lucky generation that in childhood and adolescence saw the disappearance of more and more borders: not only the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, but also fewer and fewer border controls that were interrupting vacation trips by family car to Belgium, France, Spain and other countries in the eighties and early nineties. In retrospect, and from the perspective of December 2019, it seems almost naive that, like many others, I naturally assumed that this was the direction in which Europe will continue to steer; that the removal of borders, customs duties and the further dissolution of the internal barriers of the EU is something positive and that newly opened borders should remain open. How sobering, no, how shocking it is to finally understand, a week after the disastrous UK elections, that many people do not share the same sentiment.

I moved to Ireland a little over three years ago, to the small town of Dundalk located exactly halfway between Belfast and Dublin, two capitals in two countries on the small island of Ireland and only two hours by car or train from each other. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland runs exactly halfway across this route, just a few kilometers north of Dundalk. Anyone crossing this border today is often surprised by what cannot be seen: there are no border guards, no security checks or large warning signs and no passport controls on the train either.

In many places one is not really sure where the border runs at all. The head of the regional Arts Council once told me that he crosses the border around seven times when he drives his daughter to her weekly ballet class. Of course, this was not always the case and until the nineties this section of the border, idyllically situated in the Cooley Mountains and in the middle of a fjord, the Carlingford Lough, was under strict military surveillance. Numerous attacks took place here and anyone who's car broke down in the border strip in the 1980s was at risk of having it being blown up by British security forces, according to the official security rules in place back then.

The Irish border opened with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The de facto arrangement to date: the border is still legally there, but in fact it does not hinder any traffic in both directions. It is not there and yet it exists. And even three years after the first Brexit negotiations, there is still no way of knowing exactly what will happen to what exists de jure and which is de facto hardly noticeable. But it is also a fact that a new EU external border will soon run here.

This will mean much more than inconvenience due to passport controls and more complicated customs regulations – which may also affect the transportation of this exhibition back to Dublin, London and Newry.

The conflict and also the peace in Northern Ireland are not only a complex but also a very shaky affair, and the shadows of the past have buried themselves deeply in cities like Derry and Belfast. As co-director of a Belfast exhibition space and as an somewhat outsider, I am always amazed at the contradiction between this "not there and yet existing": of course there is peace and it doesn't really matter in everyday life whether you are Protestant or Catholic. And still, the so-called Peace Walls, which are higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, are still standing, separating Catholic and Protestant districts and neighbourhoods. Finding my way around the city when I started working here, it was not uncommon for Google Maps to guide me through streets at night where I suddenly found myself in front of the locked gates of these walls that had been open all day. On official forms, funding applications and surveys, you are always asked to which community and confession you yourself or e.g. the exhibition visitors belong, just to make sure that this sensitive balance can be maintained. It is a fragile peace, in many places the conflict is still bubbling to the surface and the violent past has confusing and often contradictory social consequences, which I – like many others – still try to understand.

But what other form of expression is better suited to deal with complexity and contradictions than art? In my curatorial work and in this exhibition in particular, it is very important to me to use artistic positions not as an illustration of a topic or concept, but rather as an opportunity to approach the complex, the confusing, the unseen and overlooked, and at best to change perspectives.

The first position you will encounter in the exhibition is that of Enda Bowe. In Love’s Fire Song, he photographed young people on both sides of the Peace Walls before and during the symbolic, politically charged annual bonfires. The artist deliberately refrained from depicting political symbols or overly clear classification criteria. Rather, his work is about the ordinary and everyday, about what connects us, but also about how we shape future generations.

The question of how to deal with conflict and terror across generations also plays a major role in Willie Doherty's works. As in many of his other works, the setting for the video installation “Remains” shown here is his hometown Derry, also a border town, which has gained a sad reputation as the site of the Blood Sunday massacre 1972. Willie investigates the relationship between landscape and memory across generations and, unfortunately based on true facts, tells the story of a father who is supposed to bring his son and nephew to a site where both are to undergo kneekapping, a punishment method of the Provisional IRA, which is still in use today and which the narrator, the father, had already suffered before.

Sean Hillen brings together the horrors of the so-called Troubles, different levels of time and reality, Irish landscape and pop culture motifs in a completely different narrative and with a completely different, very analogue technique. In his delicate collages, he combines his own documentary images of the conflict with utopian imagery, often in a bizarre and yet irritatingly humorous way.

Kathy Prendergast's cartographic works are also miraculously utopian and poetic. Something wondrous happens when she paints over every-day street maps with black ink for her Black Maps series: she shows in a very reduced but all the more vivid way what happens when we overcome borders. Through artistic elimination and transformation, she succeeds in overcoming power structures and clarifying the subjectivity of maps and subtly questions topics such as identity and location.

This exhibition takes the Irish border as a starting point to reflect on political conflicts and social separation. It was therefore all the more important to open up the view beyond national borders. And that is exactly what Jesse Jones does in her video work "The Other North" from 2013, in which she connects the traumas of Northern Irish and South Koreans in an haunting way. It is a very special honour for me to show this work which connects two divided countries here in Germany, in the thirtieth year of reunification.

Dragana Jurisic’s book and photo project YU: The Lost Country also takes us beyond national borders. The Serbian-Croatian photographer, who lives in Dublin, went on a photographic search for traces of her homeland, a country that no longer exists, and reminds us of how fragile European peace can be.

It is precisely this change of perspective, this view of the supposedly "other" that the exhibition "The Other Side" would like to invite you to. To show that there are more similarities than differences both on a political and on an individual, personal level. I would like to end with a quote from John Hume, who received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the Irish peace process. Enda Bowe kindly brought the opening sentence of the following quote to the exhibition:

“Difference is the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth, and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity.”

Exhibition website

It chimes in your chest like a bell

By Emma Venables:

It’s November 2013 and I’m on a plane, scared. I’m not scared because of all the things that could go wrong with the plane. I’m scared because we’re circling, preparing to land in the city that has occupied my mind for the past four years: Berlin. What if the Berlin I’m about to land upon isn’t the Berlin that’s consumed my thoughts, my research, my writing all this time? I’ve been so focused on the Berlin of the twenties, thirties and forties, what if this Berlin shows no traces of its past? What if I can’t compute 2013 Berlin with my version of Berlin?  What if we just don’t get on? 

Oh, Berlin. Beatrice Colin’s novel The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, starts with this sentence: ‘Berlin, a word that chimes in your chest like a bell.’ And oh, it does. My chest aches with the chiming of Berlin. Let’s sit in this feeling for a bit longer, think of the Berlin I’ve read about – of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, of Hans Fallada’s Berlin – and my own picture of Berlin. 

Eva Braun first brought my imagination to Berlin, down into its claggy depths with little time to explore its surface. I followed her around the Führerbunker, watched her apply her lipstick, marry the Führer, crack the capsule between her teeth. Magda Goebbels caught my eye, we backtracked, went out into the open, into the bombed-out wreck of a city and my attention turned to the women beyond Hitler’s inner circle, to the Frau Müllers and Frau Schmidts, to the women living and dying in the ruins – what were their lives like before and after National Socialism, before and after war? 

My curiosity about these women transferred into a Creative Writing PhD project and this is why I’m now on a plane, gliding down through the Berliner Luft, staring hard at the clouds, trying to get my first glimpse of real Berlin. It’s a grey day, a cold day, not the kind of day for first meetings, but it’s all we’ve got. Hallo, Berlin. I see you. I see your apartment blocks and courtyards, your lakes and open spaces, your roads and your railway lines. I see your runways, feel the bump of your tarmac meeting the aircraft wheels. 

Once off the plane, my fiancé and I go to buy travel cards to get into the city. We’re asked where we’re from. ‘Near Liverpool,’ my fiancé replies. ‘Liverpool? Ah, Sonia.’ SONIA. My childhood heart. I’m transported back to the early nineties. I’m wearing a pink and black party dress from Woolworths and Polly Pocket clip-on earrings and it’s my birthday party. Sonia’s album is the soundtrack to Musical Statues and Pass the Parcel. She’s currently the soundtrack to the writing of this piece. That boy was sent for me, that boy was meant for me…

Berlin, I feel at home already and I’ve not even left the airport, caught a bendy bus, experienced that special smell of the U-bahn (which I refuse to try and break down into its components for fear of undermining its magical effect), checked into my hotel room which has a Marilyn Monroe-shaped mirror in the bathroom and a photographic portrait of Andy Warhol above the bed. 

Over the next few days, notebook crumpling more and more as I retrieve and return it to my pocket, I wander around, researching, thinking, experiencing. The Brandenburg Gate. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Topography of Terrors. The German Resistance Memorial Centre. The Jewish Museum. The German History Museum. A Third Reich walking tour. On one particularly bleak day we catch a regional train out to Fürstenberg/Havel, walking the same path through the quiet residential streets as the thousands of women destined for Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. I stand in the vast open space that was once crammed with barracks and bodies, living and dead, and wonder how I’ll ever manage to stitch history into fiction, how I’ll ever manage to communicate how such ugliness occurred in an area of such beauty. 

But my first experience of Berlin is not all research-related. On our way back to the train station from Ravensbrück we stop in a café and I get my first ever taste of German apple cake. We go in search of Christopher Isherwood’s residence on Nollendorfstrasse and when casually looking down, I spot a window and through that window: the office of Boner magazine. I smile to myself. Christopher would have loved that, wouldn’t he? We go to the zoo and I learn I’m more scared of a mouse rummaging through the straw than the rhinoceros it rummages around. I walk through the Tiergarten and experience the special shade of auburn that the tree leaves turn in autumn. I sit in restaurants by the Spree and discover I’m rather partial to a Berliner Weisse mit Himbeeren. 

I have been back to Berlin many times since that first foray in November 2013, and one thing remains: Berlin does not separate itself from its past, its neighbours, its visitors. Berlin is inclusive, reflective. Her streets have been shattered and separated by war and politics. You can still put your fingers in the World War Two bullet-holes in her facades, tread the path of the Berlin Wall. You can marvel at the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, and then turn right around and find yourself faced with the concrete blocks of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the stark reminder of what happens when humanity attacks humanity, when we conveniently forget out similarities and propagandise our differences. Berlin’s history is our history. We share wars. We share peace. We share Sonia and Christopher. Wir sind Berlin. Berlin ist uns.

I’m no longer scared when hovering over Berlin Tegel on a plane, ready to land. In fact, I’m scared to leave and return to a divided United Kingdom, one that is all too ready to scratch out inclusivity, to erase its shared history, to pretend, like a petulant child, that it doesn’t need help from anyone, least of all its European siblings.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

Diwali in the House of Shio Mgvime

Photo of Shio Mghvime by George Melashvili, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0

By Gurmeet Singh:

Above Mtskheta the air is hot. 

It is not thin. 

Our taxi driver, tells us Batumi—Batumi is really hot. 

At least this is what I think he’s saying. We—my partner and I—do not speak Georgian, and he does not speak English. Many Georgians also speak Russian, and we don’t speak that either. Only the younger people tend to know English. This is what abstract political events look like in real-life: the Soviet-Union falls, so the young people learn English, while their parents speak Russian. 

“Horrorshow” I say, Nadsat being in part, Russian-inspired: “good”.  

“Batumi”, he nods. 

We’re heading to the the Shio Mgvime Monastery, which we’re told is on the left bank of the Mtkvari river, on the southern slope of the Sarkine ridge, but there is no sign of water. 

Shio is honoured as one of the 13 Assyrian “fathers” who came to Georgia in the 6th Century to strengthen Christianity. Under the guidance of John of Zedazel (‘Saint John’), the group lived in Mtskheta, and then on Zedazeni mountain, where they founded a monastery. 

Shio left after four years, and then inhabited a cave on Mount Sarkin. The monastery was founded literally above this cave, and grew over the next several centuries, evolving into six or seven buildings, experiencing growth and decline as the country was invaded, at peace, taken over by Christian powers, Islamic powers, the Soviets, and now after all that, offered as a tourist destination.

Shio is buried in the monastery complex. 

Pathetically, I am feeling nauseous. The roads through the low mountains rise and fall. They are winding, winding. My partner tells me: “you look green”. I close my eyes. My brown skin, so beautifully evened out and darkened by the late Summer heat here, looks green. How pathetic, can’t even take a few winding roads—even a few good winding roads. 

“Batumi”, he says again. “My brother, in Batumi. My brother.” 

“Horrorshow”, I say.

He nods. 

I press my hands against my stomach and close my eyes. Pathetic. 

Motion sickness occurs — they say — when there is a discontinuity between visual and proprioceptive information. Your body expects one kind of motion and experiences another. Your eyes expect gentle slopes, your body experiences long, harsh ones. Your inner-ear and eyes argue. Your brain asks your stomach to regurgitate. 

The advice is to keep your eyes closed. I try to do this but it’s hard to not look out the window. A dry, orange, almost Australian landscape passes by. Australia with hills, and where mountains shimmer in the distance. The outback where greenery occasionally blooms. 

By the side of the road, there are the bones of a cow or buffalo, mostly intact. It gives the place an atmosphere. 

I should not have eaten those jellied peanuts in Mtsketa.  

“Batumi”, he says. “Batumi khorosho”. 

I close my eyes. 

*

What does the world look like to a person like Shio? To someone who believes in God so much that they are willing to leave society and try their luck on a mountain? 

The mountain is dry and seething and the air hot.  

The footprints of animals. The sound of breaking twigs. There is no wind. 

The limestone cliffs surrounding the monastery are bright and pitted with large holes which could have been the caves of other ascetics. Is it hot or cool in them? Stuffy or fresh? Do you sleep in one, bitten by insects, barely able to breathe, and in the morning, emerge into the hot sun and say ‘thank you God’?

TV sound buzzes: taxi drivers are assembled outside the gates of the complex, just waiting, watching Youtube on their phones. 

You walk up a dry, brown path to the buildings. 

Some of them are ruined, their interiors broken, their walls dark and the images of Jesus are faded and fragmented. Some of the buildings do not allow cameras inside. Their frescoes are daunting and huge; God and Jesus together looking down onto the sinful world, the super-ego itself enthroned in red and gold and aquamarine. 

The stones are hard underfoot. There is no matted grass. Dark shrubs, blue sky. 

Does someone like Shio not see ‘mountain’, or ‘cave’, but ‘creation’?

What would make someone spend two years in a cave? 

*

Inside the Church, a few people pray loudly. 

Some touch the glass containing holy relics. 

For at least the third time in Georgia we find a relic which claims to be from the shroud Jesus was wrapped in. 

My partner makes the ‘can you believe it?’ face. She rolls her eyes. 

It just so happens that today is Diwali, the Hindu and Sikh festival. Hindus celebrate the festival to mark Rama and Sita’s homecoming to Ayodhya, after their banishment to the forest. That’s not the whole story of course, there’s a war, a monkey God, a ten-headed demon, a giant who sleeps for years, magic herbs. There’s loads more. 

Sikhs celebrate Diwali, or as it’s known, Bandi Chhor Divas, to mark the release of the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind from prison in the mid-Seventeenth Century. There’s more here too: the Guru helped secure the release of several dozen other political prisoners. 

Both Sikhs and Hindus light divas or candles in celebration. 

The Church in the monastery of Shio Mgvime offers candles to light. 

Having left the Sikh religion some years before, I do not celebrate the festival. But I also do not participate in the kitsch or sentimental renewal or display of faith by lighting a candle ‘just for fun’. I especially do not confuse the various traditions by lighting a candle in the Church to mark an Indian festival. 

And yet, the world offers these possibilities, with traditions overlapping, with meanings reaching over one another, pulling each other inside out, so that if I wanted to, I could join the schoolchildren and pilgrims in lighting a candle in the dark incense-filled Church to honour Shio, and also Rama, or the Guru’s release. 

This is what abstract events look like in real-life: 

A discontinuity between what you see and what you experience. 

*

Outside, large sheets of shade cast by the brick buildings are occupied by Russian tourists. A family, it seems, and they sip water from plastic bottles and sketch the dry, intensely bright landscape around them. 

The limestone cliffs resound with the hum of sunshine. Dark birds fly overhead. 

My What’sapp buzzes: photos mum sends of her lighting candles in the Gurudwara. 

We walk back down the hard stone path to our taxi.

My partner tells me some monks were back there working with power tools. 

Small, violet-tinged pigeons pick up the bread the taxi driver crumbles for them. 

He wipes sweat from his face with a cloth. 

***

Gurmeet Singh is a British writer living and working in Berlin. He writes non-fiction about art, politics and culture, and is also currently working on a novel. He tweets @therealgurmeet.

Usedom: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

We have travelled north to the Baltic in the lowest of low seasons, to reflect on the passing of another year and another decade at a place that has meant so much to us over the recent and not-so-recent past. It feels like we are the only ones here, in our thatched house divided into apartments, and we move quietly up the stairs despite knowing there is no-one around to disturb. We arrive after dark, so we know our location only from the little blue spot on the map, but the morning will come and we will step out onto the village’s quiet streets, to walk from one side of the island to the other.

The next morning, when we reach the harbour the view across the inland sea is obscured by the mist that has rolled in off the Baltic and covered the island. Is there any point to this? We ask ourselves the question, but still we press on, following a farmer’s track across the field to the lookout point. It is a gesture more of hope than expectation, for visibility is down to less than fifty metres, but we are rewarded. First we hear the call, loud and distinctive, sounding through the mist. And then we spot it, standing tall in the misty field. A white-tailed eagle, its distinctive beak visible even in this strange half-light. After a moment it takes flight, and we catch a momentary glimpse of its impressive silhouette, before it disappears into the mist and the clouds, soaring high and out of sight. Perhaps it manages to get high enough for a glimpse of the sun. We can only imagine. 

It will be a day of shadowy apparitions, of figures emerging and retreating as we make the short walk that will lead us across the island from the lagoon to the sea. We leave the last of the village houses and enter a low landscape of fields, drained by ditches and surrounded by dykes, home to bulls, sheep and horses. In the distance, we spy a couple striding along a dyke-top path that my map tells me is a dead end. In the other direction, two cars meet at the end of a bumpy track beside a collection of tumbledown wooden buildings. I imagine a conversation through open windows and something in the boot, to be transferred from one car to the other.

You cannot help but summon scenes and images when the mist obscures almost everything that would normally be in sight. The footpath enters a forest, rising and falling between dense evergreen trees before we come across a brick house behind a high wall and metal gates. There are empty flagpoles in the garden, three of them, and they suggest a story, a history, that is unavailable to us in the mist. Unhappy is the land in need of heroes, and insecure is the land with too many flagpoles. But those poles were erected in a country that no longer exists, and however insecure we might be, not all of us are waving flags.  

Across the main road and the railway tracks, we enter the resort, where the houses sit on low cliffs above the beach and dunes, with a view across the stilled waters of the Baltic Sea. The kiosks and beer gardens are shuttered and closed, but smoke rises from the chimneys of holiday homes and light shines behind net curtains in some of the windows. In the distance the mist curls around the white towers of a grand hotel, that seems less grand the closer we get. The walls are water-stained and the terrace canopies tattered, with grass poking through cracks in the paving stones and a handwritten note posted in a smudged window to tell us the bar is closed for the season. 

In the 1920s this was the preserve of silent film stars, who travelled north from the studios of Berlin to take the water and the sea air. Now, at the start of the 2020s, the town was quiet, the posters outside the hotel advertising karaoke nights and tribute acts, and evenings with members of GDR-rock bands, the skeleton staff stalking the echoing halls in service of the handful of guests. 

We walk through the dunes, past an old fishing boat long out of service, and for the first time we see the waters of the Baltic. At the beach, the sand, sea and sky blend almost into one as ghostly figures walk the sands. In the mist it has been a kind of half-light all day, and now even that is fading. It is as if the town, the hotels, and the island itself is just waiting. The new year has begun. A new decade. But not here. Not yet. Only when the mist lifts, and the sun starts to shine once more.

***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). 

A Year Walk

We return in 2020 with a piece from our books editor Marcel Krueger, on a walk in Ireland to reflect on the year gone and what is to come:

Setting sail
From a crushed rooftop
Fathoms deep
Shallow as a raindrop
- Down, The Tides

On one of my last days in Ireland in 2019 I set out for the mountains. I park my car in the car park of the Lumpers Pub in Ravensdale north of Dundalk, in the foothills of the Cooley Mountains, and set out on the Táin Way, the 40-kilometer looped trail across the Carlingford peninsula. But I'm not trying to do the whole loop in a day, or even half of it. This will be my final walk in Ireland this year, before I travel to the continent to celebrate Christmas with my family in Germany and France, and I want to walk up one of the hills that I've always bypassed on previous walks here, the 370-metre The Castle. It had been raining all night, but when I set out there's only a low-hanging, dirty-grey overcast sky and a few raindrops coming down. I walk up the small road that leads from the car park to the trailhead, past suburban houses decorated with Santas and sleighs and yapping dogs in the garden.

I first encountered the Swedish folk tradition of Årsgång, or year walk, playing an atmospheric game with the same title on my phone. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas or New Year’s Eve, during the night. Almost all regional variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room, not allowed to talk to anyone or eat or drink. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. If the year walker managed to follow certain instructions and to solve particular challenges (such as potential encounters with supernatural beings), they would catch glimpses of what would happen the following year. I always tried to do a proper year walk myself on New Year's Eve but have failed so far, and so I guess my short excursion into the Cooleys today will have to do as substitute. It will give me ample time to reflect on both past and future, and encounter enough things in my life that might represent a challenge. 

I travelled a lot in 2019, maybe too much. I drank many beers and ate cheap airport food and put on a good few kilos, and I can feel it as I huff and puff up the steep trail that leads to the forest halfway up the hill. But due to the weather I have the trail almost for myself, and after half an hour I settle into my own rhythm and am promptly rewarded with a fine view past Drumisnagh and Trumpet Hill west of me towards Dundalk Bay and Dundalk town itself. The cloud cover is still a good hundred meters out and there is the sun glittering on the Irish Sea, so I can make out the spidery Dundalk pile lighthouse from 1853 in the bay, the curve of land at Soldier's Point on the Navvy Bank, one of my favourite locations in town, and St. Helena's Park just around from where I live. It feels good to have the sea and the mountains close. 

I'm writing professionally (as in somebody paying me to publish my words on paper or the internet) for ten years now, but 2019 was the first time I felt that my writing might make a tiny impact. People have started booking me and my words as part of academic conferences, readings and workshops, and it seems, unbelievable for self-taught history nerd like myself, that my knowledge is worth something, that I somehow can assist others in sharpening their understanding of the world. I published a magazine featuring many amazing writers living on the island of Ireland, gave a reading at the Leipzig book fair for the first time in my life, spent five months as the official writer-in-residence of wonderful Olsztyn in northern Poland, gave talks and readings in crumbling Prussian palaces from the 17th century, in a 16th-century water castle in Wroclaw, an academy set up for cultural dialogue between the Baltic states just 10 kilometres south of the Danish border, Northern Ireland's best independent bookshop, the modern library in the city of Gelsenkirchen, and in the birthplace of legendary German writer Wolfgang Koeppen in the lovely seaside town of Greifswald. It was a good year.

Like always when out walking alone, I feel a certain dread. I tried, but I can never fully and innocently seem to enjoy scenery just for itself - my imagination is always in the way. I see hidden gathering places of Neonazis in rural Brandenburg, skeletons of previous wanderers in the gorges of Crete where sheep have died, phantoms in the Irish mist. I enjoy these moments of childish dread up to a point, but then on the other hand it seems I have read too much W.G. Sebald to look at a nice place without seeing tragedy and horror. 

It is the same today. The higher I get, the more the rain clouds close in and the dark patches of conifer forest on both sides of the sandy trail seem ominous and menacing. Maybe, because of this dread that is the constant companion of many walks, it also feels as if the scales will soon need to tilt, that my personal triumphs need to be balanced by tragedy. In recent years I have the feeling that more and more misery heaped upon the world by old white men, and I'm often at loss at what to do about this. I go out and as often as possible tell my small stories about my grandmother and my granduncle and how Fascism and totalitarianism ruined their lives and killed them, and I try to write as much as possible against the rising tide of ignorance and hate that encroaches on us all, but I don't know if that is enough anymore. I often feel like the proverbial 'small chubby Berliner who tries to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter', as Erich Kästner called my favourite Weimar Berlin writer Kurt Tucholsky, a dedicated anti-fascist, once. I'm a small chubby bloke on a hill in Ireland and equally helpless. 

My dismal contemplations are interrupted by a jolly group of hikers in all colours of the Goretex range coming down the hill towards me, who must have made their way from the other side of the peninsula and covered 25 kilometres this morning - compared to my measly ten up and down a hill. They cheerfully wish me good morning and ramble on, maybe towards a late breakfast or an early pint. The scales tilt up again.

The friendliness of the locals also reminds me of the beauty of living in a small, working-class town like Dundalk; that it does not ask anything of you, but if you immerse yourself in the community it provides a lot, a lot more than other, more urban or 'sexier' places. And maybe through my travels this year this has become even clearer to me. The place I live in has all I need. I have a house with a fireplace and a cat and a room for all my books and plastic skulls and pictures of rusting ships, a lovely independent bookshop down the road of which the owner is a friend of mine (everyone needs bookseller and librarian friends is all I'm saying), all the pubs in the world, the harbour and the sea two streets down the road and a peninsula with a mountainous spine to walk in. And it provides you with a place to come back to and be yourself.    

I emerge from the treeline, cross a fence and enter the clouds. The wind is strong here, just 300 meters above the sea, and I have to put on gloves and set up my hood. I can only see a few meters ahead, the trail, the heather and the bog all shrouded in grey. I stomp on, trying to find the parting in the ways that will lead me up to the summit of The Castle. As if foreseeing the bad weather today, it is indicated by a series of stakes leading up the hill. But to me, even though I know that these have been put there to aid walkers, they seem more ominous and eery, Irish totem poles. 

The destination of my year walk is not a church, but a wide grassy summit with a small cairn. I look around and see nothing but brown-green bog a few feet in each direction and hear nothing but the wind screaming into my face and battering my waterproofs. I look right into it, in the direction of the unseen sea, and once more realise that I like living in the North as it reminds me of mortality. 

In January 2019, across Carlingford Lough in the Mourne Moutains, just a few meters higher then I am now, Robbie Robinson and Sean Byrne die. In separate accidents, both lose their way due to clouds and fog and are killed by exposure in the ice-cold winds howling down the mountains. And there it is, another reminder that death comes for all of us, and because of this we all should work together, for abstract concepts like peace and love and keeping the planet alive, but also for keeping the border in Ireland open and the communities in the north and the south linked to each other, and to help people in need anywhere we come across them, on the streets of Dublin or the beaches of Greece. In my life, and especially 2019, I made the experience that unity is always better than fragmentation, that solidarity is always better than ostracism. But standing on the hill in Ireland alone, looking into the wind, it seems that many people are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, and eaten up by nothing with the hope to take their cheap wealth and gadgets with them when they die, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski.   

Before I walk back, down the hill to my car and back to the old crooked house in Dundalk where I have to pack my bag for my travels, I lean into to the wind and look down the surprisingly steep seaward flank of The Castle, which drops away into nothingness. The clouds obscure everything here, both the bottom of the valley and the future.  

***

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 the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

A festive postcard from... Ullapool

As Christmas approaches we’re about to take a few weeks off from Elsewhere business, so we’ll leave you with season’s greetings and this festive postcard from Julia Bennett. We’ll be back in January with more writing, art, events and more...

Thursday evening, late November. At 5.30pm it is already dark along the north west coast of mainland Scotland. The ferry is about to leave for Stornoway, 50 miles across the Minch on the Isle of Lewis. A well-wrapped crowd gathers at the end of West Shore Street by a stack of creels. A drone buzzes overhead. As the ferry begins to move it turns and backs up like a learner driver practising 3-point turns in a narrow road. Luckily the ferry captain is an expert and the ferry turns and backs up, turns and backs up, until its search light is shining onto the shore. Then the hooter sounds and a moment later the sea front is lit up: strings of white lights like bunting hanging from posts all along the front, waving the ferry off. And most magical of all, the stack of creels is transformed into a Christmas tree swathed in red, blue and green lights and topped, not with a star or an angel, but with a crab.

A December day in Ullapool has an average of just over 6 ½ hours of daylight and only 45 minutes (if you’re lucky) of sunshine. Ullapool’s lights are a sign of human presence, of potential safety from the unknown but well-imagined dangers of the dark. The musical lighthouse on West Terrace flashes along in time to well-known tunes every evening. Strings of coloured lights in the shape of sailing boats welcome visitors arriving by road. The lights are idiosyncratic, imaginative and fun, telling the stories of this place. They shout out from a small fishing village into the darkness of a Scottish winter: Fàilte. 

***

Julia Bennett is a sociologist who researches place and belonging

A day at the opera

By James Carson:

It started badly. At the box office, the charmless young woman could barely have dispensed our tickets with less grace had she pelted us with them. When I asked where the tour began she mumbled something inaudible. I asked again, and she released an impatient sigh.

”Ten minutes! You have to wait there!”

She was pointing behind us, to a vestibule that was devoid of character, illumination and, most importantly, seating.

Robert glared at the woman, a familiar venom in his eyes. After a lifetime in hospitality, my other half has developed a pathological intolerance for bad service.

“There’s nowhere to sit,” he told her. But she had already moved on to not serving the next visitor. 

The bleak foyer was a chilly prospect. We returned to the sweltering streets and found a bench in front of the theatre.

Sited between the Plaza de Oriente and the Plaza Isabel II, the Teatro Real occupies perhaps the finest piece of real estate in Madrid. The theatre has a majestic view of the Royal Palace and is embraced by elegant apartments with filigree balconies, and flowerbeds bursting with colour.

For the next ten minutes we baked beneath the midday sun, listening to the bluesy meanderings of a busking saxophonist. In the middle distance, a fake matador was posing for selfies with tourists. Every now and then, he gave his cape an exaggerated swish.

When we returned to the vestibule, there was still no sign of our guide, and the box office was also deserted. We had a look in the theatre’s shop: DVDs, CDs, scarves decorated with dancing treble clefs, mugs with mugshots of composers. I bought a couple of bookmarks. It was now nearly an hour after the scheduled start of the tour.  We returned to the vestibule and waited disconsolately.

Finally, a woman wearing a long, floral skirt and a frilly, dark blouse appeared. She looked to be in her seventies; small, smiley, full of life, she introduced herself as Hortencia. We were the only ones on the tour, and when she heard we were from Scotland, she beamed. “A great country, “ she trilled, “I love it!” Robert nodded wordlessly. It was going to take more than a bit of tartan-trimmed soft soaping to defrost his nuclear winter. 

She led us to a small elevator and we squeezed in. Hortencia gave a puckish grin: “First, I’m going to take you to Paradise.” We glided up in silence, and as the doors opened, Hortencia led us into the auditorium.

Traditionally, the ‘gods’ of a theatre contain the cheapest, most uncomfortable seats. The ones here in ’Paradise’ certainly looked a tight fit, something confirmed by one dyspeptic online critic who also had a go at the central heating: “Ok for dwarves with hypothermia.”

From this lofty vantage point, there was a fine view of the stage.  An empty theatre is a joyless place. But even in the half darkness, it wasn’t hard to imagine the expectant buzz of an audience in their finery, the orchestra tuning up, a mezzo soprano hovering nervously in the wings

Our eyes were drawn upwards to a glistening chandelier which, Hortencia informed us, came from the royal crystal factory at La Granja. Robert was about to take a photograph, but Hortencia intervened: no pictures allowed in the auditorium. Robert bristled:  “In that case, why is she allowed?” He was pointing to a woman down in the stalls, merrily snapping the red seats, the gilded balconies, and that magnificent chandelier. Hortencia frowned and shook her head sadly. “It is not allowed.”

I’ve never understood the photophobia of some tourist attractions.  At best, it’s a barrier to a bit of free publicity; at worst it can spoil the whole visit. Once, in Berlin’s Helmut Newton Museum, I was about to snap the great man’s silver-blue jeep when a supervisor barked at me: Kein fotografie!” I could have stopped to explain to him the irony of a photography ban in a photography museum; instead, I silently christened him the Stasi bastard and moved on.

Back at the Teatro Real, Hortencia was explaining how an opera house works. This was more interesting than it should have been, mainly because she used a cute little model of the building to demonstrate the lifts and pulleys deployed when changing the scenery. From the outside, the Teatro Real seems to occupy a modest space, in contrast to the sprawling opera houses of Vienna and Paris. But what it lacks in girth it makes up for in the inventive use of its vertical space, with 18 overlying platforms allowing scene changes in seconds.

Hortencia led us downstairs and onto the theatre’s external balcony with its superb view of the palace and the Almudena cathedral. 

“I’m going to give you some dates that you won’t remember,” she said, and gave us a potted history of the theatre that mirrored the story of modern Spain itself: construction, damage, decay, reinvention, restoration. 

One date I did retain, mainly because it was plastered in big white figures on a red banner above us, was 1818: the year when King Fernando VII decided Madrid had waited long enough for an opera house to match those in the other great capitals of Europe. 

After a lot of stopping and starting, the Teatro Real finally opened in 1850, and quickly attracted the world’s great operatic performers. But after just 75 years the curtain fell when work on the nearby metro station afflicted the theatre’s foundations. 

For much of the early twentieth century, the Teatro Real was a forlorn shell, treated with indignity and disrespect. During the civil war, it was a storage depot for munitions, and shortly after General Francisco Franco took control in Madrid, an explosion destroyed the interior. 

During the 1960s, the Teatro Real was rebuilt as a concert hall. On YouTube, a grainy film of the opening night shows General Franco, arriving in evening dress, accompanied by his wife. A few steps behind, there’s a young crown prince Juan Carlos looking seriously uncomfortable.

An aerial view of the theatre uncovers something unexpected: the Teatro Real is a coffin, a perfectly formed hexagon. In reality, this casket for the dead is a music box where audiences across the centuries have been brought to life by the sounds of Stravinsky and Verdi, Carmen and Aida.

And - unlikely as it may seem - the Teatro Real occupies a curious place in Eurovision history. In 1969, the song contest was staged here.  At the time, this was a big deal for Spain, which many western European countries still regarded as a fascist dictatorship. Spanish television used the competition as a golden PR opportunity, and recruited Salvador Dalí, no less, to design the stage. The surrealism spilled over to the final result, when four countries received the highest number of votes. With no provision for breaking a quadruple tie, Spain’s moment of Eurovision glory ended on a flat note.

Six years later, Franco was dead, triggering a remarkable transformation of the country’s political and cultural life. Hortencia explained that the Teatro Real was not immune to the winds of change sweeping a newly-democratic Spain. “The Socialist government wanted to show its cultural credentials, and they decided to rebuild the Teatro Real as a world class opera house.” 

We were now in the Cafe del Palacio a swish restaurant with shiny marble floors and carved Lebanese cedar-wood. 

Hortencia pointed to the walls, where framed remnants of the old auditorium hung alongside the heavy costumes singers had to wear in the 19th century. 

“Today, singers also have to act, sometimes to dance across the stage, and so the costumes have to be lighter.” She told us about recent productions, including a Philip Glass opera on the life of Walt Disney. Robert sniffed. “I prefer more traditional operas.” 

“Me too,” said Hortencia, and recalled a memorable performance of The Magic Flute at La Scala.  And with that, the thaw was on. Robert can be grumpy, and sometimes frustratingly stubborn. But his heart is as big as the sky, and whenever he encounters sincerity, he’ll always reach out to find common ground. I left them happily discussing their favourite operas, the genius of Pavarotti, unforgettable nights at the Met and Covent Garden. 

I wandered into one of the public salons where audiences can mingle during performance intervals. In the spirit of the new democracy, it was stipulated that these rooms should be open to all, not just the great and the good. The salons have been tastefully restored, with deep and sumptuous carpets, woven from Castilian merino wool, La Granja chandeliers and portraits of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, who opened the restored Teatro Real in 1997.

Our final stop was the royal box, where I resisted the urge to give a regal wave to the technicians on the stage. Hortencia shook our hands and smiled uncertainly:  “I hope it wasn’t too boring for you.”

We returned to the summer afternoon, joining laid back  Madrileños and sunburnt tourists. 

From a cafe nearby came the sounds of a city at ease: the clink of glass on glass, the sizzle of paella, the hum of conversation. 

We lingered to listen as two guitarists set about their instruments with passion and intimidating skill. In the shadow of the Teatro Real, they were playing their very souls out, as if to convey that a life without music is no life at all.

***
James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

The Largest Mud Building in the World...

Photo: Mud Mosque, Mali – Mike Manson

By Mike Manson:

I arrived in Djenne as the Sahara light faded. Twilight was quick and grey, the air heavy with desert dust. The mosque, said to be the largest mud building in the world, sits alongside what was now an empty market square. Squat towers and a minaret were outlined against the grey sky. The pale light flattened the features. I was excited by the obvious energy of this powerful building. 

Djenne

Dotted along the milky Niger from Mopti to Kabara - the tiny river port that serves the legendary Timbuktu – are several intriguing village mud mosques. These structures are classic examples of Sudano-Sahelian architecture, an eco-friendly style of building characterised by the use of mud bricks and wooden support beams that jut out of the walls.

The most splendid mosque of all is in Djenne. The building stands like a castle on a rise overlooking the town’s market square. Djenne, an ancient flat-roofed adobe town, is built in a loop of the lethargic river Bani, a tributary of the Niger.

After a night in a straw-roofed adobe hut I was eager to explore. I got up shortly before dawn to avoid the heat. The market traders were already setting up their pitches of vegetables, second-hand clothes and piles of pungent dried river fish. 

Since 2007, when a fashion photographer disrespectfully held a photo shoot in the mosque, non-Muslims have been barred from officially entering this holy structure. However, as I walked around the building admiring the construction I was quietly approached by a guide who, for a small contribution, offered to slip me in through a side door.

The ochre coloured walls of the mosque are buttressed and pierced by spiky wooden struts. The roof is supported by ninety gargantuan pillars making the prayer hall akin to an indoor maze. There are no windows. Shafts of dusty light shine from the roof through small ventilation holes which are covered with ceramic caps in the rainy season. Adjacent to the main building is a large courtyard surrounded by six metre high mud walls. 

Photo: Djenne Mosque, the largest mud building in the world – Mike Manson

Although the present structure is only 100 years old, it sits on the site of earlier mosques dating back to 1280.

Sun dried mud is one of the oldest known building materials. Adobe building (the name is Spanish for mud brick) requires few tools relying on material as local as you can get. The shape of a brick is universal - the width is half the length, so it can be used side-on to add additional strength. The tools of the trade may be simple but the skills required constructing adobe buildings are complex. In Djenne, the adobe masons train for an apprenticeship that can last for as long as ten years. The apprentices are also taught secret spells that protect the buildings.  

There are a number of possible approaches to the construction largely governed by what is available locally. The simplest technique is to build-up gradually layers of clay to form walls. To obtain the optimum combination for strength, the raw earth is moistened with water and artfully mixed with straw, dung, animal hair, small pebbles and any other suitable materials to hand. Some adobe buildings will have a supporting wooden frame, others are constructed with an unreinforced raw mud mix. A water-tight roof is essential to prevent the building from being washed away. The roof will consist of roughly hewn timber logs covered in clay. Flat roofs will have wood, pottery or tin drainage spouts. If grass or reed is available a pitched thatched roof is an option. 

In villages I saw bricks drying beside the mud pits from which they had been excavated. Mud bricks, shaped by hand or formed in wooden moulds, are left to dry in the sun. Unfired, the bricks are then laid and cemented with wet mud. To offer additional protection the wall may be covered with a mud based plaster. Before construction begins a text from the Koran will be read.

Photo: Unfired mud bricks are left to dry in the sun – Mike Manson

Aside from the use of local materials, the benefits of adobe structures are that the interior is warm in winter and cool in summer. The buildings naturally breathe; in recent cases where waterproof cement has been applied to the exterior this moisture can be trapped, which adds to problems of damp.   

There are, of course, limitations. Walls necessarily have to be thick and doors and windows small; ornamentation is basic. The biggest threat to adobe buildings is rain. Unlike fired bricks, which are hardened and hold their shape even when damp, mud bricks quickly return to their original form when exposed to rain. Over the years, if not properly maintained, unfired bricks melt back from whence they came, leaving merely a hillock on the landscape.  

In Djennne there is an annual festival when the town comes together to repair the mosque. Mud is mixed by foot and handed to agile youngsters who climb the projecting struts and pat on a new protective layer.

The oldest building in Ghana

Other fine examples of Sudano-Sahelian mosques are to be found in the North West of Ghana. Several years later I visited Larabanga, whose mosque is a surrogate Mecca for Ghanaian muslims.

Photo: The whitewashed Larabanga Mosque, Ghana – Mike Manson

I paid my respects and a handful of cedi to a sleepy mullah resting in the shade of a tree. Excitable youths escorted me down a lane. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the serene whitewashed mosque, sheltered by a huge tree, is said to be the oldest building in the country. It once stood alone in the sandy sub Saharan scrub, set in its own low walled enclosure for outside worship. Flat roofed huts have grown up around, so now it is in a back street. 

The uneven organic form of the building - low, squat and punctuated by irregular triangular buttresses - is captivating. Scraped from the earth, supported by rare and precious timbers the mosque is built on a simple wooden frame. The ends of the supporting, uncut, beams extend beyond the walls providing useful props when the mosque is repaired after the rainy season. Two pyramidal towers, a mihrab which faces Mecca and a minaret, are capped with plastic orbs. Traditionally these finials, as in Djenne, would have been ostrich eggs. 

The surrounding streets were dirty with animal dung and plastic rubbish but the yard is clean, swept gracefully by a woman with a long handled nylon broom. The Larabanga mosque is entered through a low, 5 ft high doorway. As your eyes adjust to the dim light, the impression is not of a room but of a series of interconnected passageways. Because of this only few worshippers are able to directly see the iman. Uneven steps at the back of the building lead up to a stumpy minaret and a gently cambered flat roof to allow drainage. 

Although there has probably been a mosque on this site since the thirteenth century - the age of the present structure is open to debate. Certainly the Larabanga mosque has recently been extensively restored by the World Monument Fund after the mihrab and minaret were on the verge of collapse after a severe storm.

Over the years most of the mud mosques in Ghana have been replaced by more substantial brick buildings; in 2018 just eight of these Western Sudanese style mosques remain.

In these eco conscious times these organic buildings are about as environmentally friendly as you can get. The building materials - mud, water wood and dung - are local and biodegradable. They leave hardly a footprint on the landscape.

***

Mike Manson is a writer and historian who lives in Bristol, England. His most recent book Down in Demerara (Tangent Books) is set in Guyana.