We came with no names, but we leave as kings. Pt 2

Princess, by Fatima. Berlin 2017

On the invitation of Kunstasyl arts organisation, Phil visited one of the largest refugee hostels in Berlin. In the second of this two-part blog he speaks with members of Kunstasyl, artists Barbara Caveng and Charlotte Danoy-Kent.

Phil:

I'm in a vast room, the core of an asylum seekers’ centre at Mertensstrasse, in Berlin. In the midst of this colossal space is a small stage and on the stage, a tent is being made by the Kunstasyl arts organisation. It's the beginning of their new project Kings. It's the early stages and the possibilities are as big as this room and the many human beings within it. 

I see the unmistakable flame-red hair of Barbara, the artist who devised Kunstasyl, and walk over to greet her. She has given me advice and introductions at crucial stages in my project in Berlin. At moments when she’s most needed, Barbara seems to appear. Her work with people who've had to flee from war began with the escalating violence in the Middle East, but she’s been making collaborative art projects for a much longer time.

Barbara: "Since 2003, I have worked with individuals making projects that ask a question. Not necessarily about a problem, just a question. Asking a good question, that is the art! I’d been doing a residency in Syria, talking to people, asking questions. When war started in Syria one and a half years later, suddenly people I'd been talking to over there were standing here in Berlin. So I started asking questions again.” 

The result was the remarkable exhibition Da Heim: Glimpses into Fugitive Lives, at the Europaischer Museum in Berlin. One of the most emotionally affecting exhibitions I've ever witnessed, a beautiful gesture of communal making which contradicts the fear, judgement, aggression that often meet the word “refugee”.

“A society is not just something we live inside, but something we can change. That is a big question, right there. I don't know if European society can make a change. If you see the project at Spandau, which created the exhibition, as an experiment with 100 people, then you can say it was successful. But how much energy and skill was focussed in that small space! What would happen if we did the same thing with a million people? Thats what needs to happen. But I don't have answers, just questions. Take my work as an experiment, not a recipe.”

I talk awhile with Charlotte who is helping to develop Kings, the next phase of the project. Kings will be a performance that uses the exhibition as a backdrop. Charlotte is busying on the plans for a group structure based on the pyramid of human needs. As we talk about the piece, people come and go, asking her for guidance, or simply what's going on. She answers them all with good humour and infectious enthusiasm for the work. Her intense focus on the process of making draws people to her, they're intrigued. She explains: the tent structure will become a metaphor for survival - and for what is needed in our lives beyond survival. 

I help for a little while, asking residents for their thoughts on the nature of kingship. One man discusses this with his group of friends, in Arabic. "We have decided," he says at last to me in English. The others nod at him, and he tells me: "Every king is only a poor servant of god." 

As I say good bye, Barbara waves me over. “You know, the exhibition at the museum has been a big success. But we have to build on that. We mustn't just leave it, we need to add life to it, performance. We came with no names but we leave as kings…”

Heaven-Proof House is a poetry project based in Berlin, devised by Philip Davenport from arthur+martha CIC and supported by the British Council and Arts Council England. The project continues the arthur+martha strand of international work with marginalised communities, connecting people across economic, social and physical boundaries. 

Berliner Stadmission run the Mertensstrasse building described here. Many thanks to Kunstasyl, Carlo Schenk, Berliner Stadmission.

Fresh Air and Poverty

Lois Blackburn working on Fresh Air and Poverty, at Buxton Library

We're in Buxton library for our quilting project Stitching the Wars. This has been a two year journey through hundreds of Derbyshire people's memories. Reminiscence about the world wars and the effect that war had on farming communities has been written down - sometimes as oral history, sometimes as poetry - and then stitched into quilts.

The pieces have great power and richness, to our eyes - but what do other people think? These last two days have been an open editing session in which Lois stitched together the patchworked reminiscence while I edited poems. Three enthusiastic volunteers helped with the huge stitching job. Meanwhile, library users and staff came over and commented on the work in progress. We were nervous about this public debut for the quilt-in-progress, but needn't have worried. The response was warm hearted, curious and delighted.

Janice and her embroidery at Buxton Library

Fresh Air and Poverty, work in progress

The quilt deals with difficult subject material, poverty and strife. But the colours and the sumptuous fabrics contrast with the theme, playing against type so that this piece is one of the most charming things arthur+martha has ever made for the eye. The dazzle of it certainly seduced many of our early-doors audience. However, the text interwoven through it is a more uncomfortable proposition and has yet to be completed. Perhaps there is still a little room for some nervousness...

The last word

SKY THAT HARBORS HEAVEN (detail) J. Rothenberg

Phil writes:

We all want to be heard, be valued, be loved. The Understanding the Ritual exhibition at The Storey gallery in Lancaster, is now in its final couple of days and the artists in it (including myself) will have to take our work down and hide it away again, in studios, or cupboards or under beds. It's always a sad moment, but I'm also aware of how very lucky we are are to have a chance to showcase and show-off in the first place.

These shots above and below were taken while I was invigilating yesterday. I'm delighted to be in an exhibition with the octogenarian poet Jerome Rothenberg, Gaye Black (aka punk rock icon Gaye Advert) and the irrepressible Pete Flowers who curated - plus many other good folks. My sister Finella and I (under the name The Gingerbread Tree) exhibited our bookwork The Practical Senior Teacher, an old school textbook which we've been 30 years making/destroying with collages, fire, paint. Jerry Rothenberg's poem The Sky That Harbors Heaven was the only textwork in the show - and my close-up photo of a line from the poem gives Jerry the last word...

Paintings by Pete Flowers and Geoff Parr.

SENIOR PRACTICAL TEACHER, Finella & Phil Davenport

UNDERSTANDING THE RITUAL exhibition at The Storey, Lancaster.

Burnt

During the 1980s and 90s, Phil and his sister Finella played music and made collages in a band called The Gingerbread Tree. A selection of the collages titled The Practical Senior Teacher will be published soon by Knives Forks and Spoons press and meanwhile the music is gradually being uploaded on YouTube as an online archive. The latest, is Burnt.

Phil writes:

Our family did much of its growing up in Northern Ireland (Finella was born there) at a time of civil war. I find that watching any war footage brings memories of that weird semi-war, my own personal interior footage. As a family we got away un-shot, un-beaten, un-raped. But the disquiet always is there when I see pictures of a war, be it Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever. If it is associated with unfairness or bullying, the disquiet turns into a blaze of anger. It rarely gets the oxygen of release, because the feelings are so unsettling. In this song, the anger comes cotton-wrapped in the gentleness of Finella's voice, Catherine's violin.

Damian and I rehearsed the acoustic guitars sitting in my parents' garden, him on the rhythm part which frogmarches everything along. It seemed appropriate that we played Burnt there because it is a telling in a far-off way of family history. The video for this track is made with collaged images from the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts, but the song is more general. It's trying to balance up two basic human needs: defiance against survival. All the firepower in the world can't hurt you if you yourself are made of flames.

Finella Davenport vox
Philip Davenport acoustic gtr, keys, backing vox
Damian Lawrence, acoustic gtr
Catherine Carrara, violins
Paul Dillon, production


For more from The Gingerbread Tree go to:
The Gingerbread Tree on YouTube
Playlists of related material:
The Margaret Thatcher Museum
Collage of Heck

MY PAINTINGS ARE INVISIBLE

MY PAINTINGS ARE INVISIBLE  is a poem for people who have gone missing. Made by Phil in Chongqing, China 2009-10, it was written onto a series of large semi-transparent sheets of paper and hung up on washing lines through the city, in parks, building sites, tea houses.

The poem posters are showing at Bury Sculpture Centre until 9 May, as part of the ReMix exhibition. If you can't get to Bury, the video gives a flavour.

Each poster is an 8-word verse, which remixes ancient Chinese poems with lines from contemporary text artists. Written onto large pieces of semi-transparent paper, one side scripted in English the other Chinese – they mingle calligraphies, meanings, histories. Principal artists involved as calligraphers and translators: Wang Jun, Mao Yanyang, Xu Guang Fu, Dan Dan, Deng Chuan and Yan Yan.

ReMix brings together artists from China and from the UK. The basis of their relationship is a curatorial exchange that has existed between Platform China, the artist run space in Beijing, and the British curator David Thorp. Alongside Philip Davenport, other UK based artists in the exhibition are David Blandy, A K Dolven and Richard Wilson.

MY PAINTINGS ARE INVISIBLE poster on a washing line in Chongqing, 2009

Asleep in the dark wood

The dark forest or wood, is a symbol that haunts human beings - from fairy tales to horror films we go into the darkness to encounter fear and perhaps to overcome it. This is the way that we grow up and become fully ourselves, by facing fears, demons, addictions, enemies without or within. The means to challenge and disperse one's particular fears is something that we only can discover individually, but because humans are emotionally similar we can learn from the experience of others, be they Hansel and Gretel or King Arthur, Dante or Dostoyevsky, whoever. The way that some of these experiences are passed on is through the strange fabrics of storytelling, poetry, art.

The exhibition The Dark Would, which I've just curated at Summerhall in Edinburgh, brings together poets and artists who take us into the heart of the Dark Wood, as the poet Dante called it. These are pieces that look at the confusions and difficulties of being alive, balancing that with  beauty - and perhaps too, very subtly, with ways out.

a quilt for when you are homeless

I now want to “walk” you through this exhibition, because it hinges on an arthur+martha piece and many followers of this blog won't be able to visit in person.

The central piece is a quilt that is hand stitched by homeless people from Manchester (helped by embroidery students and members of the WI) describing fragments of their lives. It was made during an arthur+martha project last year called 'the warm /&/ the cold'; the piece itself is titled 'a quilt for when you are homeless'. The making of this quilt is detailed elsewhere on the arthur+martha blog; it was a long process constructing this modest-looking piece, the work of many hands and much life experience. Much of the work occurred at The Booth Centre and The Big Issue in the North offices in Manchester. The quilt is a series of life story fragments from a much longer piece, which we are editing into a book called ALBION, funded by the NALD.

After Henry James, by Tom Phillips; on shelf, THE DARK WOULD language art anthology, at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2013 

In the main exhibition space at Summerhall, the quilt is spot-lit, and around it are satellites, other works also picked out of the dark by intense lights. I've put stuffing under the quilt, so that it looks as though there's someone sleeping beneath it. Around this imagined person are dilemmas and difficulties that we sometimes face, leading away like myriad possibilities. We see works about madness, rape, war, repression (by Tom Phillips, Caroline Bergvall, Simon Patterson) but also gentleness, love, humour, art (father and son Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, then Richard Wentworth, Maria Chevska). To my mind these pieces are speaking to each other. Here's the revolutionary thinker Guy Debord represented by two posters from the 1968 student uprising in Paris, in dialogue with Ian Hamilton Finlay about insurrection; in the next room along are pieces by Lawrence Weiner, Fiona Banner and Jenny Holzer which, all put together, make connections between male sexuality, power and war.

On the ground floor of the gallery we find work by Jenny Holzer, Mallarme, Richard Long, Sarah Sanders, Robert Fitterman, Tony Trehy and Laurence Lane (among many others) all of which touch on the places where we are rawest and most human. You can see shots of the exhibition and read more about it elsewhere in FLUX magazine,The Herald, Summerhall TV and other sites.

However, the two pieces I'd finally like to mention here both link back to arthur+martha again. The first is Holocaust Museum by Robert Fitterman the delicacy of which chimes with our own project involving Holocaust survivors, Kindness. Fitterman's piece takes the text from all of the photo-captions in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and simply reproduces them as a long "found" poem. The poem has been printed on A4 pages and pinned to the walls of an office room adjacent to the gallery.

The last room - and most uplifting, I find - contains two textworks by Richard Long. They were made by Long over twenty years apart, at very different times of his life. He suggested that I pair them. They are both circular and both describe going for walks in the outdoors. In a way they're tiny globes. They are in a long, bright room and the light changes subtly as you move from one end to the other, from cold to warm. The room has a soundtrack of schoolchildren impersonating birdsong, a recording that Lois and I made during an arthur+martha session at a school in Derbyshire, during a silly and joyous afternoon. They give the space that very underrated thing, a happy ending.   

I would particularly like to thank ACE for funding this project, all of the project participants from The Booth Centre, The Big Issue in the North and The Red Door, whose work and words made the quilt.

The Dark Would exhibition continues at Summerhall until 24 January 2013.

a quilt for when you are homeless

THE DARK WOULD: language art exhibition World Premiere

7th December - 24th January at Summerhall , Edinburgh

Launch (open to public) 7pm, Friday 6 Dec 2013

Venue: Summerhall, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL

Entry: Free 

World-leading poets and text artists exhibit works that cross the boundary of living and dying in The Dark Would: Fiona Banner, Richard Long, Simon Patterson, Susan Hiller, Tony Lopez, Sarah Sanders, Jenny Holzer, Richard Wentworth, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Baum, Ron Silliman and many others, including outsider artists. 

Summerhall and its Curator Paul Robertson are proud to host the world premiere of this ground-breaking exhibition, which has been curated by poet Philip Davenport.

Davenport says: "This is an extraordinary gathering that asks what it is to have a body and to lose it. Perhaps this is best done by people for whom language is itself a state of in-between-ness… artists who use language and poets who are artists. Here, the material of language is used as a metaphor for human material, our own bodies, our little lives. Whether poets or homeless people, outsiders or art stars - we all have to find our way through the dark.”

a quilt for when you are homeless (2012) denim quilt embroidered by homeless people, an arthur+martha project

A centre-piece of the exhibition is an arthur+martha piece: the quilt embroidered by homeless people in Manchester with fragments of their life stories, 2012. The Laurence Lane piece Uptight (2012) uses the iconography of rock and roll to describe a schizophrenic episode. New work has been made especially for the show by Richard Wentworth and commissioned pieces include Rorschach drawings by Mike Chavez-Dawson, made from the names of dead poets and live writing by Sarah Sanders. 

Uptight (2011) by Laurence Lane, unframed print

The Dark Would will also have 'answering' works by dead artists and poets including Stephane Mallarme, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Joseph Beuys, taken from Paul Robertson's Heart Fine Art collection which is based at Summerhall. For more information on Heart Fine Art: www.heartfineart.com

SING/WILD/KIND/WOOD (2012) by Alec Finlay 

The Dark Would exhibition is an out-growth of the large same-title anthology of language art, edited by Davenport and published by Apple Pie Editions 2013.

Exhibition contributors: arthur+martha, Fiona Banner, Erica Baum, Caroline Bergvall, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Maria Chevska, Matt Dalby, Philip Davenport, Steve Emmerson, Alec Finlay, Rob Fitterman, Steve Giasson, Susan Hiller, Jenny Holzer, Marton Koppany, Laurence Lane, Richard Long, Tony Lopez, Darren Marsh, Simon Patterson, Tom Phillips, Sarah Sanders, Ron Silliman, Carolyn Thompson, Tony Trehy, Carol Watts, Lawrence Weiner and Richard Wentworth.

APPEAL IN AIR

Phil's new poetry book has just been published. It brings together some strands of arthur+martha work, including the strange, zigzag aerial paths between mental health and creativity.

APPEAL IN AIR: anatomy of sadness

Press Release

Philip Davenport’s new book-length poem APPEAL IN AIR is in the form of a spreadsheet that adds together a suicide, a list of bird-names and a valedictory roll-call of poets. By using an accounting tool for an anatomy of sadness, the poem questions the way that we place value in our own lives. Who gets overlooked, what is unheard, what’s too loud?

The poem begins with a pile-up of noise, urban overload, into which is inserted the story of “A”, a true story of a suicide, verbatim from an overheard conversation. “… a thought lost in noise sold as music…” The poem drowns in random information, out of which come soaring flights of birds – first in tiny letters, then in flurries of word/birds that fill the page. The final section leaves us in the big wilderness spaces of the air.

“ringin beyond yr ears/blackbirds in London/starlings of Manchester/stitch th blue postcodes of th sky…”

Davenport’s debut was published by seminal avant-garde press Writers Forum in 1999; his poems handwritten on apples were shown at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. His work has been variously billposted and exhibited throughout Europe and in China. Davenport curated the largest survey exhibition of Bob Cobbing’s work for Bury Text Festival in 2005 and the first posthumous gallery exhibition of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work in 2006. His current sequence of spreadsheet poems have been exhibited in the Henry Moore Institute and will be shown at Turnpike gallery this April. He co-directs experimental arts organisation arthur+martha.

APPEAL IN AIR is published by Knives Forks and Spoons press, UK whose list includes many leading British avant-garde poets, particularly visual poets.

APPEAL IN AIR
isbn 978-1-907812-77-4
£12-00

Further information contact:

theknivesforksandspoonspress@hotmail.com
philipjohndavenport@hotmail.com

The book can be ordered online at this website:
www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

Chi Chi the panda and the impossibility of freedom in the shared mind of any given social structure

(From China journal Jan 2010)

China as body politic has been a decade coming out of the big cold war freeze, but it's happening slowly and with contra-indications. On one hand there's an outbreak of Starbucks, on the other there's secret police fingerprints. In Chengdu we find the whole thing exemplified by pandas. Chengdu is one of the big international tourist stop-offs in China because this is, or was, panda country . (Less well-known is the beauty of Chengdu teahouses in summer; even less well-known is the fact that Yan Yan's mum lives here.)

On our first morning in the city, we book an early cab to see the pandas getting their breakfast. It's a cold, bright day with a little mist and we hurtle past dayglo shopfronts and little tableaux of huddled people readying stalls and gossiping, their breath condensing on the cold air. I feel properly a tourist today, snapshotting curiosities from our warm taxi. Julia is still acclimatising to the driving style and has her eyes closed.

We arrive in time for the first panda munch of bamboo shoots. The bears' audience of Chinese and European tourists coo as one. Pandas have the knack of appearing to pick delicately at their food, while in actuality shovelling hundredweights of breakfast down their throats. It's a dodge I envy. They are almost a definition of cute (aka “Q” here) with their Mary Quant eyes and cuddly demeanour and they've a delicacy at odds with their size. I flashback my dad's old cine footage of Chi Chi in the London Zoo of my early childhood.

The panda sanctuary is renowned for its inmates fabulous living conditions so we're disturbed to see the animals in small concrete cells, glassed on one side so that people like us can peer in at the bears despite their shyness. Then as we watch a magic trick occurs, a small steel door opens in the cell we are watching and the bear disappears into greenery. We go around the back to see a large field of grass, shrubs and trees where the bear is free to roam with a couple of companions. This pattern is repeated through the sanctuary. At first it's a relief to see the animals released into a bigger captivity. But of course it is still captivity. And it is one perhaps not so different to that shared by the human population.

A green goodbye

The train to Chengdu is practically a jet plane. There are stewardesses in uniform and two cleaners who forlornly mop the shining floors throughout the journey. A security guard doubletakes when he sees Julia and I, fixing us in his mental inventory.

I'm writing this entry in hazy sunlight as we tumble mile upon mile through terraced fields. There are fir trees cresting the hills like green teardrops. Cupped in the valleys are rice paddies and low houses and crop stoops. There are ploughed hills and little scatters of villages and people working in the old ways, but my eyes have been starved of green in CQ so that's my predominant sense, that we are aswim in green. The land here is lush - we're going west, cutting across the vegetable gardens of China. It's late afternoon and Julia is trying to photograph the moon dancing along the telegraph poles.

An hour ago we said our goodbyes. Yan Yan, Deng Chuan and Wang Jun came to see us off. I felt sadness squeeze my ribcage as we parted. The two months in CQ have been guided by the care and kindness of these people, especially this trio - and they have become fast friends. The gatherings around art-making and hotpots have often been celebrations. I will miss this little gang with their sweetness and eccentricities. It's been awhile since Julia and I were part of a group and I've missed that social clustering. By cutting this link we also cut away from our shepherds through this land. We're out on our own now with a smattering of phrasebook Mandarin and a guessed itinerary. Julia has been awake half the night with a cold and I'm coming to earth after the rush of the teahouse exhibition. I wonder who's taking Ciao Q out for a walk this afternoon?

(Typing this up a year after it was written in my battered notebook, I'm happy to say that emails between myself and Wang Jun are a regular habit, with a visit forthcoming from he and Deng Chuan, that Yan Yan has sat in this house in Manchester with us for a meal and that Wang Jun snored his way from Yorkshire in the back of our car on one of our many expeditions during his Manchester residency early 2010, and that Ciao Q is still apparently wreaking havoc on his walks...)

Present for Xmas

Julia appears briefly at CQ arrivals gate, waves, gives a little skip and disappears again. 15 minutes and she reappears with her luggage, grinning sleepily. We hold hands as Yan Yan rockets us through the city and I point out the neons and mist. She's been held up by worldwide snow, made it onto one of the last two planes out of Manchester, got past delays in Helsinki (due to other less efficient airlines than Finnair) and Beijing (a mysterious medical emergency). 36 hours of travelling with no guarantee of arrival. Yan Yan drops us at the flat and we stroll Huang Jie Ping in the early hours, to let her descend from the adrenalin. She's my Xmas present.

Next day, I try to show off the studio and artworks to her, but Ciao Q effortlessly steals the moment by chewing open a tube of Yan Yan's oil paint and then licking it over his paws and around his muzzle. He doesn't like the taste, but loves the squeals of consternation when he chases people aropund the studio with the threat of blue paw marks. Yan Yan scolds; he hates it when Ciao Q's coat gets muddy and blue oilpaint is worse. My observation that Yan Yan's dog has the good taste to select a close match for International Klien Blue doesn't help. The favoured pronounciation of Ciao Q has changed once more to "Ciao Ko". I wearily start calling him "Ciao Ko" and the favoured pronounciation changes to Koko. Whatever he's called - not that he cares - his IKKB paws last two days.

Julia is wearing a vivid orange quilted coat that miraculously receives only one little blue smudge. Ciao Q likes her because she finds him funny. Later she takes him for an afternoon jaunt and he's won over entirely.

Later again she says to me - "You need to start thinking about how you light those pieces, they're dying in here when there's no daylight." She has a photographer's eye - unforgiving at times, but invaluable. She starts taking some experimental shots with her Leica, using the window in the hallway to frame people in the street outside.

The show is imminent and I haven't thought about light.