Circuits in history

Now that we have a few days respite from traveling it's time to reflect...

Of all the artworks and pavilions we saw at the Venice Biennale, two works stood out: Ai Wei Wei’s piece, SACRED and Bill Culbert’s FRONT DOOR OUT BACK - both ‘whacked’ you but in totally different ways. SACRED takes up the central nave of Sant'Antonin church with its six large iron boxes, into which we could peek to see miniature worlds recreated from his lengthy incarceration by the Chinese government. 

Ai Wei Wei being interrogated, another of him showering, sitting on the toilet, or sleeping outstretched on his back, and always two blank-faced uniformed guards standing over him. In every cell he is stoically coping with being hemmed in  - it was horrifying and fascinating at the same time, so we waited patiently to get to those tiny windows. The only detail of the cell's exterior Ai Wei Wei said he observed on his release was the number on the door: 1135, fittingly each of the boxes’ smooth surfaces are etched only with this …More

Culbert’s seven different works in FRONT DOOR OUT BACK, simply took our breath away with its luminescent beauty making the ordinary extraordinary. Seeing it as we came out of the bright Venetian light into its brick building’s soft dark shadows, we felt a little dreamlike as one does when confronted by the familiar made unfamiliar, home but not as we remembered it… More

 

The theme of the Biennale this year, The Encyclopedic Palace, brought a huge array of outsider art into its sacrosanct arena, but sometimes the juxtapositions of spiritual, occult, and downright obsessive alongside the conceptually challenging was enough to send you spinning towards the nearest Espresso machine! I found myself wondering: are we seeing a desperate search for any possibilities that might take us out of the material crisis we’re experiencing? If so, it's intriguing the circuits in history this is taking us through.

Reviving art & cuisine skills in Tuscany

We are staying in Toscana about 12 kilometres from Florence with Fabiola and her delightful 94-year-old mother, a long-since retired archaeologist, who both speak excellent English, luckily for us as we speak no Italian whatsover! They share a typical Florentine countryside house on several acres of olive trees, where Fabiola has revived the ancient technique of Scagliola,  creating objects and images with a composite substance made from selenite, glue and natural pigments.

Fabiola says she's 'passionate about everything that is art, but also nature and the kitchen. "I cook traditional Tuscan and Italian dishes using products I collect in the field according to the season." This afternoon she is going to show me how to cook Fiori di zucca Tuscan style, a little mozzarella and and a dab of anchovy are placed inside the flower before it's sprinkled with flour and deep-fried. We bought the Zucchini flowers together this morning at the local market, where they were selected fastidiously for their uniform shape by the seller, 1 Euro for a kilo!! And if we get enough time we'll also make a favourite Greek dish of her's with sliced eggplants scorched over the fire before cooking with wine and plum tomatoes, I can't wait! 

When you're living on a small budget as Fabiola and her mother do, it's sensible to buy food the old ways. They don't go to the supermarket much, instead they buy the local Chianti wine from a nearby vineyard, and olive oil by litres from a neighbouring farmer. Water is scarce here - summer and winter - and only farmers with deep wells can manage to make a living all year round. So their neighbours with a well let them run a hose to water their herbs and salad vegetables over the summer. 

Fabiola says the last two years have been disastrous for Italy, the political reaction to the GFC of increasing taxes has affected small businesses and artisans, like herself, to the point where increasingly more and more are closing, leading to less and less spending money and jobs. "We are the ones carrying the burden of increased taxes, up to 70%, but it's us that kept the economy going, what did they think would happen? Of course there'll be less to spend and less work, even a pizza out is too much for us now!"

While workers and youth in Greece, Spain and Portugal have been waging general strikes and taking to the streets in their millions in opposition to a never-ending austerity onslaught, in Italy there has been relative quiescence. This is in spite of the devastating economic impact on ordinary people, with living standards falling to the level of 27 years ago, but a new political movement is spelling change...More

Thriving Green Shoots in Europe

It’s difficult not to feel a little guilty at spending so much time and money traveling in Europe as we have been for the last two months and, incredibly, will be for another two! We come to terms with this by telling ourselves we’re supporting local economies by using airbnb, accommodation that’s included young semi-employed professionals renting rooms in their flats as well as smaller traditional B&Bs, and whenever we can buying food from local farmers markets. And along the way we keep scanning for thriving ‘green’ shoots in still GFC-affected Europe, read on…

Thousands of Greeks are coming to terms with the collapse of a failing social and political system by taking matters into their own hands through grassroots activism and local collective action. There are signs of a lifestyle transformation, incorporating values and social patterns of the past…more

Photos: Solidarity and second-hand clothes at Akadimia Platonos and Rebel zest and great food at El Che-f collective kitchen by Kostantinos Koukoulis

La Cravate Solidaire

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When your income is falling, keeping your wardrobe up to date is hardly a priority. Two young Parisians, Yann Lotode and Mademoiselle Oz, have founded La Cravate Solidaire, a non-profit, to help people give a good impression at job interviews. They take used clothing and recycle or up-cycle it: people can try on garments, which Yann alters for a better fit or to the taste of the job candidate. Oz then offers hairdressing and makeup to give the job seeker the best chance to look his or her best at their interview. http://lacravatesolidaire.org/#

Creating employment through recycling and up-cycling

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Gerald Poter gathers rags for a living, going door to door to ask for old clothes, then reselling what he can. But Poter, 27, is neither a hobo nor homeless; in fact, he`s got the best and the only job he`s had in years. A worker at an experimental company in this recession-hit area near the north-western coast of France, Poter is one of 180 employees back in the work force because of the approach taken by a company called Le Relais that seeks to make money to create jobs.

After seven years, Le Relais now takes in about $5 million a year with its labor-intensive enterprises-collecting, resorting and selling used clothing in France, Africa and Asia, recycling paper and manufacturing paint. Profit is ploughed back into the company and shared with employees. A project that grew out of a charitable commune run by Catholic priests, Le Relais (The Relay) has helped dozens of virtually unemployable people - former convicts and people out of a job from one to five years - discover usefulness to society and a long-lost sense of self-worth. And if Le Relais is far from solving France`s economic problem of 10% unemployment, which runs as high as 18% here, where the coal mines shut down years ago, it has already inspired the creation of similar companies near Toulouse, in Burgundy and in the city of Mulhouse, near the Swiss border.

``Society is flawed; the fact that there are people who are completely excluded from society is unacceptable,” says Pierre Duponchel, Le Relais` managing director, standing in a warehouse full of sorted, used clothes. …More

Nimes Jardins Solidaire

This community garden is a paradise, enclosed by hedges, olive trees and grapevines it went on for block after block, little paths winding through varied allotments all bursting with productivity on our sunny spring visit. We’d heard that it had brought new immigrants together with established residents, in keeping with the European Urban Garden Association’s goals of cultural and social integration.

Indeed it was started by an idealistic social worker who after cultivating her own family plot in Nimes became convinced of the social benefits of organic gardening. In 1996 Muriel Gavach founded the Côté Jardins Solidaires bringing together ‘social workers and members of the peasant world to create a community garden on land belonging to the city of Nimes.’ Today it employs three community workers (equivalent to two full-time) who work collaboratively with local gardeners to provide food aid, gardening and cooking workshops, weekly community meals, social skills and budgeting, a weekly vegetarian and fully organic table d’hote (partnership with “Marigoule” cooperative, with local farmers and friends) – and runs workshops in local schools.

‘Despite an interdependent world, social links become more and more disconnected. This particularly affects big urban areas that have difficulties such as high unemployment rates, marginalisation, rejection, poverty, and criminality. At the same time, these areas are the place for social innovation and economic growth. In these big cities, even though interpersonal contacts are regular, there is no actual exchange between these city dwellers with various cultural origins, of various ages and different social categories.

‘In these cities more than anywhere else, cultural integration of people from various origins is a real debate, leading some European politicians to call “multiculturalism” a failure. Community gardens are a part of this. Coming from the movement of working-class gardens forty years ago, some of them today are places of education for meetings, exchanges, for the integration of mutual respect, while keeping the historical aspect of food self-sufficiency alive.’ (European Urban Garden Otesha).

Nemausus and Nimes Jardins Solidaire

A lucky encounter with Maria, a local community garden worker for Nimes Jardin Solidaire, allowed us to see inside the Jean Nouvel-designed social housing project Nemausus. The Solidaire’s office is run from an apartment in Nemausus, and she was busy unloading food up the stairs when I asked if we could see inside. I’d been intrigued by this astounding building ever since I first came across it studying urban design, and seeing it from the outside years later simply wasn’t enough to satisfy my curiosity. Jean Nouvel designed and oversaw the construction of Nemausus I and II between 1985 and 1987. Two separate seven-story buildings flank a grove of trees and outdoor space, one a little smaller than the other because of site constraints. Nouvel minimized construction costs by using simple industrial materials and minimal interior finishes. Built in an industrial zone in the southwest part of Nimes they were part of a program to renovate a decrepit district of 1960's public housing with Nemausus providing a radical alternative model to the usual limited, desolate programs of rent-controlled, subsidized housing.

Sleek and modern, they remain an outstanding alternative to the usual, dreary subsidized housing projects. Nouvel managed to keep the construction costs down while providing much larger apartments to the usual confined spaces in social housing. The typical apartment is defined by a 5x12 meter bay but includes the space of the terrace covered by the cantilevered balcony above. The dwelling typology has 17 different types including several different flats, duplexes and triplexes that range in size from one-bedroom flats to three bedroom triplexes. Most of the one-bedroom flats are on the top floor; however, some of the triplexes extend into this level where the top floor bedrooms have separate entry and exit. Every apartment has bi-fold metal doors opening the full width of the dwelling, and most of the multi-floor dwellings have two story high volumes while some have two-story high doors.

What I loved most about Nouvel’s design was its solution to the usual space requirements of access and cars: raised on pilotis it provides covered parking at a slightly depressed lower level freeing up the car-allotted space above for gardens; and using external stairs and horizontal walkways on the northside, covered with his maritime-inspired canopy, left more space for the apartments and the all of the southside for extensive private balconies. Simple but ingenious!   ‘To Nouvel's chagrin, the idea that savings in construction costs resulting from the industrialized building techniques and minimal interior finishes would be passed along to the tenants in the form of much more spacious, generous dwellings was never realized and apparently rentals were determined by floor area instead of building costs.’ (http://architecture.about.com)

Community gardens in every city, town and village

 

In every city, town or village we’ve visited or driven through we’ve seen community gardens, large sprawling ones that took an hour to walk around through to tiny little allotments perched alongside riverbanks and motorways. Creatively put together garden sheds and even small community cafes are common, flowers and vegetables grow side-by-side, while old and young are seen tending their patches. Urban community gardens often have the support of their cities as they’re seen as helping to create cultural links between new immigrants and established residents. Several began with the working-class garden movement forty years ago and have now evolved into spaces for education and social integration while handing down the skills of food self sufficiency.

Miraflores in Seville

Massive industrialisation that left no space for green zones and urban gardens led to the creation of Miraflores Park in 1989, explains Manuel Lara, president of the committee of the pro-educational Miraflores Park Association (Asociación Comité Pro-parque Educativo Miraflores). ‘The urban cores will continue to be built, destroying the agricultural zones as they go. But thanks to the perserverance of the citizens, 165 plots of land which are 150 metres squared will be preserved,’ says Lara…More