Hondartza Fraga

I have spent my last day in company of a friend and his son. Walking around town, chatting, around in the playground, eating soup and waffles… rather wonderful. He says this is a very normal day for him, but for me it has been a quite surreal day, because it has been like a borrowed day, extracted from the normal flow of time, from my normal flow of time that is, into somebody else’s. Today it felt very much like the day I took the boat to Brekstad, in that like that day, nobody knew exactly where I was or what I was doing. Like having had disappeared into a blank map. Only with the difference that today I was just here in Trondheim, where I was expected to be. So it felt like I disappeared in time but not in space.

But now, writing about it, I realize, it is not about disappearing, that feeling of today, it is about the pleasure of being removed. But being removed without the coldness of the word. Remove oneself from a usual context, from an expected space, from a regular time. If a place or someone allows you to do this and share their context, this distance serves as reconciliatory interval. This distance is a warm one, it allows to ‘feel’ space, or time in an almost magnified way. And also, in a way allows you to be removed from your ordinary ‘counting’ or ‘accounting’ of time and space. The passing of time is not just something you try to control until the next thing you have to do, it is just something that you are allowing to happen. Today I did not think of being anywhere else, or doing anything else, no plans, no expectations, just the present. With the certainty of being exactly where I am meant to be, in the here and now.

But I don’t even know if all this makes any sense. Anyway, tomorrow, inevitably, I will be elsewhere. Tomorrow by this time I will be home (for now at least, that I call Sheffield).

My time in LKV has come to an end. And all I can say is thank you. Thank you to everyone in LKV and Babel. Everybody so friendly and fantastic. I leave with a smile and sure that I won’t forget it. A perfect last day without the stress of traveling and packing (that was yesterday…), without the stress of time, thank you Markus!

So long Trondheim, and thanks for all the fish!

Well, the last week begins… I haven’t forgotten this journal, but I have been busy with gift shopping, goodbye saying and work finishing. I feel that this journey is pausing (but not ending) but I don’t feel sad, if only a bit melancholic. I has been a time well spent and even there are many things left to do, places to see and people to have more time with, I feel confident that I might be back sooner than I imagine. I would like that. For the next few days I just want to do everything in slow motion, to see if time slows down a bit, so my departure doesn’t come too quickly. Yesterday, me and Bivas Chaudhuri (the other guest artist at the moment) were featured in the local newspaper (Addresseavisen) in an article about LKV and Babel, after they came to meet us last week. I haven’t yet found out what it says, but I hope only good things…

People is so friendly here, a woman from a craft shop let me even after they had closed, and when I tried to paid with my card and it didn’t work, she gave me a lift to her other shop, in the little chat in the car came out she had also seen the article in the newspaper. I have met so many nice people here. I tried a very tasty chocolate pudding with a very politically incorrect name. Got a lot of new music, from Norway, from Sweden, from everywhere. I have wore spiders for slippers and learn that I could probably keep a frog under the bridge of my feet… little things.

Some photographs from the flight Tromsø – Trondheim…

Well what can I say, this was great. At first it was a bit scary, I like dogs but I am not crazy about them, I am a cat person, and the idea of having to control five of them by myself was not so appealing… The ride was about 2 hours long, two people in each sledge, first one drives and the other just sits on the front, and then we swapped. It was easier that it appeared, the only problem I had was to stop the dogs, there were obviously stronger than me and even standing with two feet on the brake didn’t do the trick, but overall I managed, and I have photos to prove it! The trip included all the clothing and a hot meal which consisted on some reindeer soup with bread inside some typical Sami tents. Expensive, but totally worth it.

This week I visited Tromsø with some friends from Spain. The city was really pretty and there was much more snow than in Trondheim, and it was colder. And finally I managed to see some aurora borealis, although not very strong. I didn’t even try to take a picture on purpose, I wanted to keep that image just for myself so in the artict cathedral I just bought a 3D postcard of it.

We stayed at a lovely B&B outside the city centre, it was a red wooden house. All the roads where covered in white and there was a nice cemetery on the walk into town. We also took a boat to the nearest destination which didn’t have much to go for, but the landscape from the boat was beautiful again. The next day we went dog sledging… pictures from that to come next … it was great fun!

Dressed for Auroras…

Yesterday I saw a really good movie, which was a relief because I was starting to think that the problem was mine, I haven’t seen a good movie this year. But “The Limits of control” ( by Jim Jarmusch) is good. I really enjoyed the way it is shot and very carefully constructed details. It has a couple of weak points and a couple of little clichés that it didn’t need but overall, really good.

Today has been a very slow day. Tomorrow I am off to Tromsø for a couple of days. I had some cleaning and tidying to do in the house. My mind is very distracted today, going on about the same images, the same thoughts, somewhat blank. Even my drawings seem to go in a loop. Just a small difference: a bit of color… not for long though.

I have been drawing elephants again, with ink this time, and I think it’s working.

I went for another walk today, in the opposite direction, I headed towards the fjord. Today I didn;t make it down to the water but got distracted up hill again, I found two lovely forests/parks.

In the evening I took myself to the movies, it is the international film festival now in Trondheim but I missed a couple of movies that sounded good, I will try to go tomorrow, so I went to see the new Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Disappointing to say the least. I didn’t have great expectations because despite how much I like Burton, Alice’s story is so well known, so much interpreted that I thought it really hard to see with new eyes, but this is not Alice. This is a new made up story (very lame by the way, involves Alice killing a dragon to win against the evil queen………..how original). It doesn’t have any of the things that I enjoyed in the original story, none the individual little tales, which Burton did so well in Big Fish. Here the original characters are portrayed as mere anecdotes of themselves. I think the approach could have led to something quite interesting but it just doesn’t hold any personality. Oh well, just my opinion, I had to see it anyway.

Today it felt like my first day. My first day on a walk without a map. It was great to step outside to about 20 or 30 cm of fresh and soft snow. The light kept changing quickly and I tried to captured some of these changes on video, but it wasn’t easy to keep my camera dry for very long. I found a lovely park and the views from there were amazing. I love that mountain, with the layer of trees covering its whole surface, like a soft blanket (cheesy I know, but nevertheless, that is how it looks). When I finally went down to the town centre, it was extremely busy, it was difficult to find a place for lunch. It was nice to see a market in Market Square at last since I arrived. In a full café, sitting at the bar, I enjoyed my own company today, apart from some practical inconveniences (e. g. how to keep a table and order at the same time etc)… I really took pleasure on that awkward feeling of misplacement.

Today I have been doing contact sheets and some sketched from the archive of images I am building up. It has been snowing overnight and everything looks white, or off-white, again. Like in the beginning. Somehow it feels both long ago and yesterday.