Anne Brunswic

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Anne Dubos

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Dettie Flynn

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Ruth Maclennan

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Liza Dimbleby

Letter from Glasgow: In the Garden

This Saturday a group of us played music in the walled gardens of the old Gartnavel Asylum. We had been invited as part of a Covid commissioned theatre project. A few people were allowed into the garden to hear us and we played old Klezmer tunes, Breton and Scottish folk tunes under an ancient pear tree. The garden before us was full of flowers and herbs, abundant and well tended, behind us loomed the West House of the Asylum, with glass doors opening on to a terrace

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Esther Shalev-Gerz

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Manuela Morgaine

The Return of Sweetness

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Michelle Deignan 

Circular Cruise, single channel HD video, 1′ 22″, 2021

Aurelia Mihai

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Ana Mendes

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Catherine Radosa

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Ruth Maclennan

I would love to be here, above tree line.  I dream of this landscape. It is better than dreams of flying, because I have been here before and I can smell it and feel the breeze.  I am scooped up in the blue haze, looking out at the endless shadowy waves, searching for familiar peaks but happy to let the sweep wash over me. I look out from the high ground, thousands of feet above sea-level, brought there miraculously this time, not under my own steam having come from somewhere else in the dream, not through the woods. My feet and hands remember the rocks from scrambling over them, or leaping from rock to rock along an almost imperceptible trail.  The cairn in the photograph is designed to keep hikers on the path, to protect the fragile alpine environment. I was on my way upward when I took this photograph, turning to look back at the last of the dwarf trees, and to have a breather no doubt before the last push up the ridge to the top for lunch.

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Ivana Vollaro

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Liza Dimbleby

Letter from Glasgow: Salvaging

If I had turned the corner a few minutes later I would never have known about the fate of the piano, like all the other furniture that must have been removed, demolished, discarded, from so many houses over so many years, without my knowing about it. But if I happen to coincide with a throwing out I feel it is my duty to take care of what is left behind. The objects don’t have to be rare or antique. A plain table or chest left in the back lane will catch my attention and I feel that I must look after it, I must take it in. I guess this is how some people feel about abandoned animals. I feel responsible for these objects. But I can’t feel responsible for all this furniture, there is no room in my house for even one more chair.

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Emma Woffenden

These last weeks have had a sense of waiting, stillness and tension. I want to go forward, want to press play.

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Manuela Morgaine

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Natacha Nisic

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Sudha Padmaja Francis

As a child, I went to places with my family, every vacation, almost always in a train. I remember the sleepless nights on the long train journeys, travelling to Goa, Maharashtra. Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu…

Brown trains became blue trains. The smell inside trains; something which we took home invariably. We wouldn’t know of the smell until we reached home though.

I would be given a lower berth mostly, because it was difficult for me to climb  up onto the upper berth. I would lay awake in the night and look out of the window, trees taking different shapes and forms that fascinated me endlessly. I always saw animals and creatures in my half asleep state. It is telling I do not have a single image of things outside a train window now.

I was fascinated by the red chain one saw in trains to be pulled in case of emergency, as a child. I always used to wonder what would one feel like if someone pulls the chain of the train we are travelling in, unexpectedly. 

I think, this is the year since I was born, the least I have travelled in trains. The last I boarded a train was in March 2020; and then the world was held hostage by a virus. And of course our own thoughts on death and mortality.

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Manuela Morgaine

In the Logic of our dreams, her epidemic diary filmed in Kerala,

Sudha Padmaja Francis pronounces this sentence: “When will everyone get to sleep?” Since, every night, from the river, I keep asking myself.

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Liza Dimbleby

Letter from Glasgow: Un-forgetting

Last week I travelled as far as Edinburgh, the mirror city. I walked for miles along the Water of Leith. It is hard to miss the obvious evocations in this name of the mythical river, Lethe, that ran through the underworld. I look up the Greek word: it means Oblivion, Concealment or Forgetting. The word for Truth is A-lethe-ia; literally it means an un-concealment or un-forgetting. These last two translations move in different directions. Forgetting suggests a limbo state, something that might sometime be remembered, and provokes a counter impulse to seek that which has been forgotten, the wish to reclaim, or rescue from Oblivion. Forgetting, and the recovery of that which has been forgotten — the un-forgetting — is most often involuntary, at least against our conscious will. But concealment and un-concealing is active, it can be willed, and alerts us to the fact that the hiding of the thing was probably a deliberate act. Un-concealment is closer to the conjuror’s trick — ta da! The big reveal, the curtain drawn back. I walk back upstream, against the brown bubbling current where willow leaves trail on the surface, and wonder about things that have been hidden on purpose and things that are forgotten against our will.

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Esther Shalev-Gerz

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Ivana Vollaro

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Katja Stuke

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SE Barnet

collaborators Lily Windsor and Esther Windsor

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Natacha Nisic

 

Sudha Padmaja Francis

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Ruth Maclennan

• 

• 

This little stone Tulsi ­(basil) shrine used to stand in a beautiful garden on the shore of the Paglachandi lake in West Bengal. Tulsi is a goddess. The shrine was washed away in a flood.

Marigolds suggest sun and warmth. I photographed these in a little front garden near where I live.

Wishing the protection of goddesses and the joy of marigolds to our Crown sisters in India.

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Anne Brunswic

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Natacha Smolianskaia

For a year and a half I have been reading my mother’s diary, I recognize her in her doubts and impressions …

The notebooks from her diary are like carriages, and the reading itself is like a train journey, train journeys in Russia happen to be so long … My mother’s diary counts the days like the road counts landscapes in the windows of a train.

In her diary, my mother describes her travels – from Moscow to Voronezh, from Voronezh to Borisoglebsk, from Borisoglebsk to Moscow …

First, it was necessary to take a ticket, a whole gamble, between two cities, Voronezh and Borisoglebsk, a very small distance, but they, a Moscow schoolgirl and her grandmother, had to change three times, each time wait at the station, then look for places to sit in a carriage, two days in a row. And during the war, the road from Moscow to Tashkent took a whole month … Countless stops, sleeps without a chance to lie down, anticipation, excitement about what awaits them.

Stops, along the train, face to face to the windows, waiting for them, with pies, potatoes, this does not change, the train goes ahead, I look out the window …

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Dettie Flynn

 

Any grouping of people who have at one time been colonised : their territorial resources ; naturel and especially human, objectified by dominante possession, feel a particular kinship with other groups of people, carrying similar burdens of intergenerational trauma, even if the bloody civil war in the wake of partition, pans out some 7000kms from their own backyards.

That is an easy evident kinship, the kinships that try, are the keeping open of doors between ourselves and our coloniser siblings.

Two eyes, one nose and a mouth, no more nor less than those we instinctively recognise as own.

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Emma Woffenden

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Manuela Morgaine

INDIAN WAVE 1 – In 2006 I left for my first trip to India with the hope of finding strength to change my life. First love journey to Mumbaï, in the chaos of the city, the peace of the island of Elephanta, and the sweetness of a beach filled then with recklessness. I had never seen those four hours of footage shot there before today. Here is a first extract – gesture extended to you, our Indian accomplices, as a sign of support during these epidemic times which affects your country more tragically than elsewhere.

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Kyoko Kasuya

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Ivana Vollaro

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Liza Dimbleby

For a year we have kept watch over the students whose rooms we look into opposite. I have photographed their windows for the Crown Letter, and written about them. First, the student painter who I see from my study, and then the woman in the room on the other side of the main door, who often sat in her bed all day working, and kept rearranging the furniture. She always waved to us if she saw us in the window, and soon this was part of our daily routine — my daughter and I waving and smiling down to the woman in her room, at desk, bed or sofa below. This Easter we met her for the first time as she was coming out of the flat. We were heading out to visit friends in their garden and she accompanied us a way along the street. We learned that she had come to Glasgow from India last summer for a year’s MA, but has been confined to her room.

Soon after this, things started to get much worse in India… When I see her again she tells me that her family have moved out of the city in Jaipur to a village in the countryside, for safety. Her mother, grandmother and aunt all have Covid. The men of the family are now doing the shopping and the domestic duties. Her best friend’s mother, who she had grown up with, died from the virus. She stayed up all night crying and talking to her friend online. She worries continually, but she can’t be there. She says that sometimes when she sees me in the window with my daughter, brushing her hair, it reminds her of herself and her mother. Indeed I am the same age as her mother, although my daughter is so much younger.

At night I see her light on late and the curtains closed and I worry about the possibility of bad news from home. Sometimes the curtains stay shut all the next day and I worry more. But so far, when I pass her open window on the street and check in, her family have survived intact. Soon, once the restrictions here are eased, my daughter and I will cross the road for dinner.

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Kyoko Kasuya

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Natalia Smolianskaia

Depuis un an et demi je lis le carnet intime de ma mère. Elle s’en est allée il y a maintenant presque quatre ans et a écrit dans son testament qu’elle me laissait ses carnets qu’elle avait écrits entre juin 1939 et 1947, je ne les avais jamais vus avant. Il m’a fallu du temps pour les lire, 17 cahiers différents, petits et plus grands, épais, fins, jaunis…

On y trouve des fleurs, des lettres, des voyages, j’y vois des fenêtres passées par les fenêtres du train, des fragments de vie bien connus et lointains.

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Catherine Radosa

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Dettie Flynn

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Ivana Vollaro

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Ruth Maclennan

It was a warm, sunny day – perfect for climbing trees, having a picnic and marching. We did climb trees, and statues, and sat swinging our legs next to Winston Churchill’s sturdy torso; there was lots of singing and dancing,  and we watched while some of us planted seeds in Parliament Square. Apparently there was a very good crop of hemp later that summer. 

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Liza Dimbleby

the world slowed to the pin needle drop I wanted. 5am wake up call from the baby rose the dawn, the birds and nothing more but a view out the window of bodies turning in the beds, breathing, not rising. the air over the city oxygenised, greened. everyone claimed new found time and freedom, mine dwindled in contrast. 

something inside opened – love.

POSTCARDS TO GLASGOW (II) : LOOKING OUT

My friends situate me in space. I like to know where they are and what they are doing — what preoccupies them. I like to have at least one ongoing email conversation with a friend each day as I work, preferably three. I picture my friends as I describe to them what is in me and around me, and they help me to complete the picture.

This week the postcards arrived as drawings, and a painting, views from a specific space and time.

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Manuela Morgaine

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Michelle Deignan

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Aurelia Mihai

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Liza Dimbleby

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Anne Brunswic

Les masses

Durant les meetings, nous n’avions qu’à nous tenir debout sagement, nous n’étions même pas tenus d’applaudir. Le tintamarre de la propagande me berçait. J’imaginais les jouets en bois que je fabriquerais pour les enfants, je dessinais un collier de baisers au cou de ma colombe. Sur l’estrade ornée de drapeaux rouges, nos garde-chiourme prêchaient à la manière Lénine, le coude appuyé sur la balustrade, le bras droit pointé vers le peuple. La leçon était simple, nous devions racheter nos péchés contre la révolution par notre labeur, hors du travail productif point de salut. Les recordmen de la brouette et du béton monteraient au paradis socialiste, les tire-au-flanc tomberaient en enfer. Fanfare.

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Natacha Nisic

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Dettie Flynn

 

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Emma Woffenden

The Cure.

Speedwell removes excess mucus, soothes internal tissues, is used to treat coughs, asthma, pleurisy, and used as a blood purifier. A tea made of speedwell can be used to clear sinus congestion, help eyesight and ease sore eyes. It relieves tension, especially the neck and shoulder areas and helps relax the muscles. Use it externally to treat skin rashes and inflammation. It contains chlorophyll, minerals, vitamins, protein and antioxidants.

The Affliction.

In Yorkshire we called it Birdseye and we never picked it in case it caused our mother’s eyes to fall out, or the birds pecked each other’s eyes out.

The miracle.

The plant’s Latin name Veronica means “true image”. Referring to a cloth miraculously  impressed with an image of a deities face.

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Ruth Maclennan

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Manuela Morgaine

Testament song by Violeta Parra, chilean artist who committed suicide in 1967 at the age of forty-nine. First South American artist to exhibit at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.

Song of shared life with charango, a five-string guitar. Brief passage of life. May the passage of LA VIDA on the Seine, accompanied by sand and black birds, be a sign from her.

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Natacha Nisic

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Liza Dimbleby

The puzzle of my days is more important than the puzzle of my dreams, for you should understand that there’s no dream puzzle, but rather the puzzle itself, the puzzle of days, the undetectable chaos of reality that tries to articulate itself in a dream, which sometimes in a composition brilliantly reveals to you who you are.

Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza

 Pandemic Dreams, Sixth Box: Shapeshifting

 

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Dettie Flynn

May yet well become as contagious as the variants of interest

Peut encore devenir aussi contagieux que les variantes d’intérêt

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Manuela Morgaine

455 DAYS / 10 PLAGUES

455 days later, Wuhan. January 2021: this image is part of the collection of haunting images that fill my Venetian Plague Doctor mask. I wear it from time to time to look at the horizon through my porthole and give it the power to predict future or call memory.

We are the day of the exit from Egypt. How not to think about the ten plagues? So that the people of Israel can leave Egypt, God inflicts ten punishments or plagues, to convince Pharaoh to let them go. The waters of the Nile turn to blood; the frogs fall from the sky; soil dust turns into lice; horseflies fly; the herds die; men and animals are covered with boils and pustules; hail falls and turns into fire; locusts cover the entire surface of the Earth, eat plants and fruits and plunge the world into darkness; darkness; the death of the firstborn.

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Katja Stuke

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Ivana Vollaro

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Catalina Swinburn

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Manuela Morgaine 

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Dettie Flynn

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Catherine Radosa

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Emma Woffenden

In 1999 I exhibited two glass sculptures on tables inside a circular white plastic screen. One was a solid glass casting, a simplified human trunk, an arched spine and pelvis cut off where the legs and head normally continue. On the smaller table a head-like shape with an interior shape meeting the outside made from two blown glass pieces. They represented two separated body parts, the head with the lung and the torso. I didn’t know why I did this and it took a lot of motivation to develop and make, but now looking back I understand how I am connected to it, how we hold thoughts, contortions, expression in our body. I titled the work Severed Installation.

Three years later in 2002 my sister was suddenly taken ill and was on life support in intensive care, unconscious for five weeks. We often sat with her, terrified she wouldn’t survive. Through my brothers determination the hospital tried a new ventilator, bought in from a different hospital. Instead of the in and out rhythm of the first machine, it relentlessly and noisily pumped air in, and her body did recover. Later I connected the incident, the body and the breathing machine, with the Severed Installation and now I am connecting both to scenes from the pandemic. However difficult the incident, making connections makes me feel better, less out of control. 

When we were children I would go to sleep listening to my sisters asthmatic wheezing. The yellow tablet she was given before bed, placed under her tongue, was always removed and placed in the hem of the curtain when my mother left the room. They formed even little peaked yellow stains along the curtain edge.

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Natacha Nisic

Tous les gestes entre nous tous les gestes revus tous les gestes perdus tous les gestes déchus tous les gestes appris tous les gestes oubliés tous les gestes à faire tous les gestes entretenus tous les gestes sans fin tous les gestes référencés tous les gestes enfouis tous les gestes inconnus tous les gestes vertueux tous les gestes infâmes tous les gestes verrouillés tous les gestes abîmés tous les gestes révoltés tous les gestes fabriqués tous les gestes bienvenus tous les gestes sérieux tous les gestes envieux tous les gestes avariés tous les gestes invisibles tous les gestes communs tous les gestes admirés tous les gestes pourris tous les gestes amoureux tous les gestes illégaux tous les gestes perçus tous les gestes interdits tous les gestes reconnus tous les gestes déçus tous les gestes attendus tous les gestes convenus tous les gestes protégés tous les gestes délivrés tous les gestes aboutis tous les gestes innocents tous les gestes appropriés tous les gestes difficiles tous les gestes attendus tous les gestes investis tous les gestes répudiés tous les gestes inscrits tous les gestes à venir

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SE Barnet

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Ruth Maclennan

Ruth Maclennan, Horizon (Twelfth Lap), 2021

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Liza Dimbleby 

Dreams tantalise not only with half-recognised rooms, or the train that we never quite manage to catch, but with the promise that they might disclose something — an insight or an answer even, that has been withheld by the dispersal of the everyday. We pursue our dreams in the hope that they might lead somewhere…

Pandemic Dreams, Fifth Box: Journeys  

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Anne Brunswic 

Prophylaxie
En tant que médecin-chef, je jouissais du privilège de circuler sans escorte. J’habitais au village dans un appartement où la Guépéou avait réquisitionné une chambre. Martha m’avait fait parvenir un colis de vêtements, du papier à lettres, quelques livres. Tchekhov me consolait et me servait de guide. Tout ce que je savais des bagnes, je le tenais de lui. De l’île de Sakhaline au canal de la mer Blanche quarante ans plus tard, le noir était-il devenu moins noir ? Mon cher Anton Pavlovitch se taisait.

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Anne Brunswic 

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Maithili Bavkar

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Natacha Nisic

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Saviya Lopes

The Matriarchs “The Tereza I know” (Photographic Series), 2020
The Matriarchs
They followed Matrifocality.
They were fierce.
They were outrageous, audacious and courageous.
They were committed;
Committed to the survival and wholeness 
of entire people/community. 
They loved music. 
They loved to dance. 
They loved their spirits. 
They loved food. 
They loved their struggle. 
They loved themselves 
and other women. 
They loved Love.
They were the Womanists.
All this while, they carried a part of me inside their womb. 
A part that keeps growing inside me now.
We were always connected
We will always be womanists.

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SE Barnet

https://player.vimeo.com/video/520708208?dnt=1&app_id=122963SE Barnet International Women’s Day, Single channel video – 3 minutes

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Kyoko Kasuya 

Le point de départ, 2011-2021, 
C’était l’année 2011, je terminais ma licence dans une école d’art en France. Après avoir passé trois années dans une ville du sud, je pensais retourner à la société japonaise et rouler sur les mêmes rails que tout le monde. Cet incident est arrivé pendant mes vacances d’hiver. J’étais alors à Paris et j’ai reçu un sms d’une amie japonaise qui m’informait l’annulation de notre RDV fixé le jour même. En l’appelant pour en connaître la raison, elle m’a mise au courant d’une terrible nouvelle : un séisme avait eu lieu au Japon. Il avait provoqué un tsunami sans précédent mais également l’accident nucléaire de Fukushima. J’ai allumé la télé. J’ai vu de nombreuses scènes de vagues noires frappant les villes au bord de la mer. Ces scènes se sont répétées sans arrêt sur tous les médias pendant un certain temps. Cette catastrophe s’était produite dans mon pays mais cela ressemblait à un incident dans une contrée lointaine. Jour après jour, l’exposition aux radiations résultant de l’accident de la centrale nucléaire s’est progressivement révélée. L’économie japonaise est devenue instable et les entreprises se sont effondrées progressivement.

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Manuela Morgaine 

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Catherine Radosa

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Ivana Vollaro

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Liza Dimbleby 

Letter from Glasgow: Birthing Room
The first birth took place at the Queen Mother’s Maternity Hospital, Glasgow, on January 12th 1964, a day after it opened. It closed its doors on January 12th 2010, on its forty sixth birthday. Forty six, the age that most women are done with child bearing, imagined, feared or desired. I am four years and nine months younger than the hospital, and I gave birth to my second, my last child the year before it was closed. I noticed that we were almost contemporaries, and that like a woman, the hospital was retired from birthing duty in her mid forties. 

In the early 2000s I spent many nights here, keeping watch over women I had never met before as they laboured long hours. I was working as an interpreter for asylum seekers who were being sent to the city each week in coach loads to be settled under the new Government dispersal scheme. Often I was called in when they were already advanced in labour, so we would barely speak — but I knew that I must speak for them. The women were from Congo, Rwanda, from Ivory Coast and Algeria, from Chechnya and from Georgia. Almost always they were giving birth alone. 

This January, looking for a new place to walk within the city boundaries, I headed towards the river, and found a path leading around the old hospital. The tall building with the birthing rooms stands, still empty, on the hill, catching the light. There is a thumbnail of a moon, almost full in the sky and I remembered that on a full moon there was usually a rush of births. I could be called out several times, back and forth to the hospital for one labour after another. I think of those nights, the corridors and continual doors behind which women were labouring, birthing, night after night. I look up and picture those familiar rooms inside, now empty, unpeopled, but filled with light. 

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Michelle Deignan

Michelle Deignan: March 8th, 2 mins 16 secs, 2021

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Anne Dubos

Les effets de réactogénicité sont en lien avec la réaction du système immunitaire de la personne vaccinée aux antigènes présents dans le vaccin. Ces effets se divisent en effets locaux (réaction au point d’injection à type de douleur, rougeur ou gonflement) et effets systémiques (pouvant comprendre fièvre, fatigue, maux de tête, frissons, vomissements, diarrhée, douleur musculaire, douleur articulaire). Ces effets indésirables sont attendus car déjà identifiés et caractérisés dans les essais cliniques ; ils sont transitoires et réversibles et régressent habituellement en 2 à 4 jours. 

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Luise Schröder

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Katja Stuke 

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Emma Woffenden

Missing The Backside
The Three Graces by Antonio Canova. Victoria and Albert museum. I enjoy the backside not the frontside, it seems to have a different energy and physicality, different people. Missing friends marble and flesh. May 17th public galleries and museums should open.

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Ruth Maclennan

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Katja Stuke

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Luise Schröder

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Liza Dimbleby

Pandemic Dreams, Third Box:

Take pleasure in your dreams… Giotto

**

I dreamed you had a big, big house, a stately dark house with the windows half boarded up and shining polished floors. The house was so big. You had a student living in one room and you were a bit put out to find she had her lover living in there too. It was such a grand house.

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SE Barnet

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Manuela Morgaine

I went to Syria for the first scouting in 2005, then a second time in 2007. Today, I can precisely list EVERYTHING that has been destroyed and realize to what extent my rushes, despite myself, represent a reserve of documents. For fifteen years, I could not open these images, view them, so unthinkable was the superimposition of all these beauties with the traumatic images of war. I thought about it day after day, year after year, but the treasure seemed inaccessible. And above all, I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a dead letter. And then there was the shock of the movie FOR SAMA by Syrian director Waad al Kateab. I had never seen such an intimate document on the war. It took me several weeks to realize that her film finally gave birth to mine, which dreamed of being the antidote. During the pandemic, during the months of confinement, I viewed and flushed the long hours of footage. I imagined a particular film, a letter that I address to Waad. In this epistolary form, it is the exhumed images and sounds that bring life to a bloodless Syria. This film follows the chronological order of the shooting from 2005 to 2007 from Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Palmyra, to the desert of Cham along the Euphrates. The story of two trips, but above all a sensory and memorial experience, he seeks to literally express and show the country, its unforgettable humanity, its sumptuousness and vitality, its grace and its joie de vivre before destruction. mass of its people, its houses, its cities, its heritage.

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Ana Mendes

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Catherine Radosa

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Kyoko Kasuya

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Anne Brunswic

Le temps des froufrous
Ma mère m’envoyait sonner à la porte des maisons bourgeoises. J’avais quatorze ans, l’air d’une écolière pauvre. Le portier et la cuisinière me regardaient de haut. Je leur présentais notre petit catalogue, huit dessins de corsages joliment coloriés, on me laissait alors entrer dans la cuisine et j’attendais, j’attendais. Madame n’aimait pas le démarchage à domicile, madame venait de perdre un parent et ne s’habillait plus qu’en noir, madame n’avait besoin de rien, elle commandait ses corsages à Paris. Notre vie devint plus aisée quand maman se lança dans la mode enfantine. J’allais chez les clients faire les essayages. Les enfants gigotaient comme des diables, criaient à la vue d’une épingle. Un jour, un sale gosse de riche qui avait presque mon âge me piqua le bras. Il se mit à hurler en prétendant que je l’avais piqué.

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