En visitant le Museo de la Memoria à Rosario, j’ai été frappée par une photographie qui occupe un mur entier. Elle est l’œuvre de Gerardo Dell’Oro, un reporter argentin qui a accompagné aux Malouines en 2010 le premier grand pèlerinage de familles de disparus. Elle représente des dizaines de bottes et de baskets éventrées fichées sur des piquets au milieu de la lande déserte. Dans le contexte du musée de Rosario, cela peut passer pour de « l’arte povera ».
If one is wondering about Care, its value and its meaning, I have finally been wondering about carelessness. To be careless isn’t somehow, more than a way of not paying any attention, a behaviour that returns not receiving any gesture of Care? These two kids, growing in my womb, in my hospital room during the lockdown, without any gesture of attention nor care from their father, nor family and friends: weren’t they left careless?
To be careless has, at least two meanings, that mirrors the notion of reciprocity. If the Oxford dictionary offers this definition to the term careless: « not giving sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harms or error.» Its synonyms are: « to be inattentive or uncautious ; An action or its results caused by a lack of attention. Not concerned or worried about.»
In March my friend Nadia sent me this video of a bombed out house in Ukraine. I thought it was someone she knew, but it turns out the clip was widely circulated at the start of the war. A woman returns to her house after a bombardment. The first thing she does is to dust down her piano and start to play. As she plays, the other person filming moves the camera about the room and then out through the door and through the house. The camera swings and swoops with the expansive runs of the keyboard, the player’s hands gaining force and confidence with the cadences that ripple out as the camera tracks a trail of rubble and destruction, in every room and down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs the ordered line of shoes by the radiator by the front door is only slightly disrupted. The pair of felt boots with rubber toes have fallen separately — valenki. Valenki, tapki, the ubiquitous out and indoor footwear of Ukrainian and Russian homes. Such lines of shoes are the first things that greet you as you cross the threshold into the private living space. Down the corridor, smashed glass, the washing up still in the sink, a whisk in a milk pan, and below the window, a child’s toy hard hat on the floor with the real rubble. We hear news of bombardment, and we see the cities with their half-collapsed and burnt out buildings, but it is shocking to see the everyday interior, the fine detail of doors and wardrobes and windows, smashed and fallen. To think of this multiplied endlessly — all the rooms, all the sad belongings — shoes, clothes, pictures, chairs and tables, scattered and crumbled.
Le Care ne s’étend pas au simple soin des débiles, des fragiles, des enfants prématurés. Le Care dit quelque chose de notre relation à notre environnement à travers la logique de nos actions. Le Care, d’après la philosophe américaine Joan Tronto, est un geste micropolitique. Faire acte de sollicitude c’est prendre soin de ses amis, des ses enfants, de ses parents, de sa maison ou de son jardin, de sa communauté, de ses forêts, de soi-même.
Depuis que je suis arrivée à Saint-Julien l’été dernier, j’ai souhaité m’occuper d’un des jardins de la commune. J’ai passé plus d’une dizaine d’heures à débroussailler les herbes enchevêtrées, comme il avait été laissé à l’abandon. Une vingtaine d’heures à désherber régulièrement ensuite. Quelques heures à planter des cosmos, des oeillets d’Inde, une monarde, une verveine fleur, des herbes aromatiques. Hier, pour la première fois, j’ai obtenu une récolte de tomates et de pommes de terres. À midi je me suis régalée d’une salade succulente. Le soir, d’une soupe de courgettes et de pommes-de-terre à l’estragon et au basilic. Quand je prends soin de lui, le jardin prend soin de moi en retour, c’est sûr.
»Every day bad news from Ukraine. Still. Every day a new name of a village, town or city in Ukraine. Every day a screenshot-photo of a tree in that town. A tree to just hold in for a moment. A tree as a reminder. A tree as a metaphor for time. And a quote referring to that town.« Katja Stuke, Trees in Ukraine, since 24.2.2022
The blue and yellow flags outside the houses here are not for Ukraine, they have always been flying in front of people’s houses, on the driveways and in the hedges, blue and yellow for the Gaelic football team of Kilcar, a village just below the better known Glencolumkille, in South West Donegal.
We come here every summer. My children’s great grandmother grew up here, one of thirteen children, in a low two room dwelling up the side of a glen. The half-ruined house is still there and used as a store for sheep feed. There is a tarmac road that runs up to it where a windmill has been put up on the land, just above the ruin of the house.
I used to be always on the move — planning trips, looking for tickets, for timetables, was the regular punctuation of my life, but it was also a distraction and an anxiety. Two years of enforced relative stasis by pandemic and I am still drawing breath, relieved at not having to spring into step at my own or other’s demand. But I want to get to Belgium, there is a painting I would like to see in Ghent — Children Washing by James Ensor. I am not even sure if it is still there. Oddly enough this painting is one of the few things that binds me with obstinate allegiance not only to my house but to my room here in Glasgow. There is something about this painting, and about its relation to the room in which I sleep and read, that means I cannot imagine moving elsewhere, from this room, in this flat, in this city.
This winter among the trees of sub-arctic Russia I found light and heat became elusive, granular substances that take on indistinct but alluring personalities. The day’s light scatters quickly if you aren’t alert, and even if you are it is still always fading, dispersing like sugar in tea. The rainbow colours of afterglow on snow dissolve into the night and before they disappear they melt the edges of things, blur bodies and sharpen windows and other angles. In my longing I found delight in the glitter of vestiges of sunlight catching the crystals of snow, or the lazy, sleepy blue that held on till I found myself tramping through shadows. I’d notice suddenly that my ears were tuning in to the loud crunch of my heavy lumps of cold feet and that the sound was all that was guiding me now.
Elle tire sur son cigarillo Davidoff, moi sur le mien. Elle n’avale pas la fumée, moi non plus. Nous fumons de concert, chacune selon sa partition. Jamais de cigarettes, avec ou sans filtre. Jamais de tabac parfumé à la menthe, à la vanille. Pourquoi pas au chocolat ou au nougat tant qu’on y est ? Jamais de substances allégées, light, édulcorées. Autant d’escroqueries. Il va de soi que Marcelle et moi, nous ne fumons pas par addiction. Une boîte de cigarillos est comme une boîte de chocolats fins : on ne se jette pas dessus. On déguste. On soupire d’aise. Qu’il est doux de fumer ensemble en causant de choses qui font plaisir ou sans causer du tout.
I used to be always on the move — planning trips, looking for tickets, for timetables, was the regular punctuation of my life, but it was also a distraction and an anxiety. Two years of enforced relative stasis by pandemic and I am still drawing breath, relieved at not having to spring into step at my own or other’s demand. But I want to get to Belgium, there is a painting I would like to see in Ghent — Children Washing by James Ensor. I am not even sure if it is still there. Oddly enough this painting is one of the few things that binds me with obstinate allegiance not only to my house but to my room here in Glasgow. There is something about this painting, and about its relation to the room in which I sleep and read, that means I cannot imagine moving elsewhere, from this room, in this flat, in this city.
This winter among the trees of sub-arctic Russia I found light and heat became elusive, granular substances that take on indistinct but alluring personalities. The day’s light scatters quickly if you aren’t alert, and even if you are it is still always fading, dispersing like sugar in tea. The rainbow colours of afterglow on snow dissolve into the night and before they disappear they melt the edges of things, blur bodies and sharpen windows and other angles. In my longing I found delight in the glitter of vestiges of sunlight catching the crystals of snow, or the lazy, sleepy blue that held on till I found myself tramping through shadows. I’d notice suddenly that my ears were tuning in to the loud crunch of my heavy lumps of cold feet and that the sound was all that was guiding me now.
Elle tire sur son cigarillo Davidoff, moi sur le mien. Elle n’avale pas la fumée, moi non plus. Nous fumons de concert, chacune selon sa partition. Jamais de cigarettes, avec ou sans filtre. Jamais de tabac parfumé à la menthe, à la vanille. Pourquoi pas au chocolat ou au nougat tant qu’on y est ? Jamais de substances allégées, light, édulcorées. Autant d’escroqueries. Il va de soi que Marcelle et moi, nous ne fumons pas par addiction. Une boîte de cigarillos est comme une boîte de chocolats fins : on ne se jette pas dessus. On déguste. On soupire d’aise. Qu’il est doux de fumer ensemble en causant de choses qui font plaisir ou sans causer du tout.
There are many rituals surrounding the Russian banya. As I was told it is just the place to bathe, in villages that used to have no running water. But it is also a place and time to take care of yourself and others. Beating each other with moistened venniki, often bunches of birch leaves, makes your skin tingle and increases the heat. The wooden house in the village I stayed in had two banyas (and no running water). There was a white banya (po belomu) where the wood-stove has a chimney, and an old-fashioned black banya (po chornomu) without a chimney where the smoke settles in the room and the soot cleans your skin. The banya is also a place for foretelling the future. Sergei Kulikov, a historian I met recently, told me that the banya was traditionally seen as a profane, unclean place because of its pre-Christian, pagan associations with fortune-telling. I made this film together with the artists Albina Mokhryakov and Sofia Skidan.
The last person I cared about was my grand-mother. The day she was sent to the hospice. I did not care for her. I care about her.
How one can end up his/her life in such an impersonal place? What brought an entire generation of humans to believe that was possible to erase olden days, older people, vulnerability?
I always wondered about what does it mean to be taken care of by strangers hands, when your life has been devoted to your family. How could we do that to her?
I tried to help her escape. I offered to stay with her at her place.
I was never heard. And she complained to us: « I don’t want to stay here. How can you do that to me? You are my children?».
And I cried, silently. And I feel ashamed. I loved her.
We used to play in pubs before the pandemic. Ten or twelve of us, some artists, a theatre worker, an academic, social worker and a psychologist. Now we are a touring band. We are quite in demand, at Care Homes and Hospital Departments, for ailments mental and physical. On Sunday we played our Christmas gig at the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit, at the biggest hospital in the city. The doors were opened wide on the small back garden and the sky above the helipad of the vast complex opposite was dense with rain that fell as a fine curtain and then more furiously as we played towards the distant figures in chairs and wheelchairs, looking out.
My children did PCR tests and took the night boat to Ireland with their father. I have stayed behind to try and work. Its a heatwave on the streets but I stay indoors, too familiar with the imaginary landscapes outside to be drawn out. The silence of the empty rooms in my flat makes a novel, larger landscape. I pull down the blinds to mute the bleaching harshness of light beyond the windows and make a glowing secret space. I can believe myself in Rome, Madrid or Budapest, in the enclosing solitude of another time and another country. It is enough for now.