Familiarity

Familiarity

I have just come back from a 5 day break in Cadiz. It was the third time I have visited this beautiful city and at last I felt a sense of familiarity with its streets. The first time I visited I remember thinking this was an impossibility.

At home in Cadiz.

The streets seemed to have no plan, they criss-crossed the peninsular, some stopped abruptly in a dead end whilst others opened up unexpectantly onto tree filled squares. In my imagination I had compared this place to a cleaner, friendlier and sunnier version of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld city, Ankh Morpork.

A typical street in Cadiz.

The difference between orientating yourself in a northern European city and this one, 59 miles away from Tangiers, Africa as I see it is one of scale and proportion. The climate and topography are obviously very different and these factors have influenced the evolution of the street system, the buildings and therefore our familiarity with its form.

Details of places once visited become familiar landmarks.

Cadiz gets very hot and one way of creating shady passageways amongst the city is to build taller buildings, close together, so that the sea air is funnelled through the streets, allowing for a cooler more comfortable city environment.

Looking up.

I have grown up in the UK where in comparison, the climate and topography is variable and in general the streets are wider and buildings lower than those in Cadiz and this allows landmarks to be more easily recognised from a distance.

Path in the Botanical gardens.

Whether they are manmade or natural these landmarks have given me a spatial awareness by which I have been able to map my environment. Even in a city like London, the vista is wide enough to be able to pinpoint a landmark and orientate myself. The scale of London is larger than that of Cadiz which is more of a pedestrian or human scale model.

Orientation

One of the difficulties of navigating around Cadiz is that it is set out on a peninsular away from the mainland of Spain. This creates many views through the streets that look similar; multiple narrow streets have a brilliant glow at the end, as the space becomes expansive and the sun on the ocean glints in the distance.

Looking out to sea.

Laurie Lee in his novel, ’As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’ described the city well.

‘ Cadiz, from a distance, was a sharp incandescence, a scribble of white on a sheet of blue glass, lying curved on the bay like a scimitar and sparkling with African light.’

His other descriptions of the city are detailed and don’t paint the place as a pleasant destination at all. I am glad to say that it has changed; it is quite beautiful and charming now, with wonderful architecture, food and culture.

Door detail.

But on this visit, once I had relooked at my old map and taken note of the shape of the peninsular and remembered familiar ‘hang-outs’ from previous years, (such as various bars, the beach and market areas), it took me a while to orientate myself but then it was clear! I continued to add information on this trip to my past knowledge of the place and suddenly it felt familiar.

Detail from one of the many church facades.

This was a very comforting feeling to achieve and made me realise once again how important my project could be, connecting people to place through walking, discovering or rediscovering their locality.

Festivals and Rituals

The reason why I have visited Cadiz so often in the last few years is because of my interest in Flamenco. I have always loved the music and costume, so when a teacher offered classes in flamenco movement 5 years ago, I joined up. Four years ago we travelled out to Jerez, a neighbouring town of Cadiz and participated in our first Feria.

The Feria at Jerez is a place to promenade.

The history of the ‘Feria de Caballo’, (Jerez horse fair), goes back to over 500 years ago, when it was the location for a livestock fair, which ran from April to September. Over time it grew in popularity and stands were put up by local wine and sherry producers to sell to the spectators and participants. The specific dates are based on a three week timescale after Semana Santa, (the week leading up to Easter Sunday.)

Promenading by day and night.

People in this area have connected to the place where they live by participating in this event each year, watching the horses parade up and down the park and dancing Sevillanas in the surrounding ‘casetas’. This shared experience of an annual event is valuable to a community in many ways. It can bring people together, build community, encourage pride in a place and also inspire tourists to visit.

Flamenco costume in Cadiz streets.

During my MA study I researched the history of connection to the land through ritual use, including processional movement, symbolic landscape markers and ceremonial gatherings. The feria at Jerez was very interesting to visit with these aspects in mind.

Here in the UK there were many more annual festivals that have been lost. One I am particularly aware of was the ‘Scouring of the White Horse’ at Uffington in Oxfordshire. Thomas Hughes of ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’ fame, wrote a book with this title back in 1859 and depicts the ceremonial annual practice of scouring the chalk cut horse, so that its white shape can be seen with greater clarity from a distance.

The ceremonial path at Avebury has inspired me to paint.

The artist Paul Nash took this photo, he was also fascinated by the chalk white horse.

There is an Iron Age fort up on the hill, just above the chalk figure, it was in this enclosure, named ‘Uffington Castle’, that the festivities took place. His book details all the merry goings on and is an interesting read.

Midsummer

Next month it will be midsummer and yet again I will quietly lead a group of people up along a section of the Salt Way path to light a fire and enjoy being in that moment at that place. Over the last few years it has become even more special as I share the experience with others and they all add their own trace and story to the route.

The section of the Salt Way that we walk at Midsummer.

One lady introduced her daughter to the walk last year and they both shared a very special experience as the sun set and we sat around the fire at the top of the hill. The journey back down was lovely as the lanterns lit up the procession and people were chatting happily as fireworks went off in the distance at the harbour. I am sure this year will be wonderful again for the participants and any potential onlookers.

To Follow...a Path

To Follow (or not to follow) a Path

One of the workshops I teach is ’Way-finding and the Art of Psycho-geography’, I encourage participants to go out and find their own path: their own route to venture through the locality. This creates an opportunity for them to encounter the town in their own personal way. This may lead to discovering Whitstable for the first time or rediscovering it again on this course. I have developed a practice during my MA which can be taught and is based on a ‘derive’.

Taking a derive.

To take a ‘derive’ was one of the basic practices of the Situationists Movement..

‘The Situationists also believed that artistic intervention in the everyday environment could awaken people to their surroundings and lead to a transformation of society.’ Amy Dempsey, Styles, Schools and movements.

When exercising our imaginations we start to be curious and observe more.

I find it interesting when I ask people to go out for a short, 5 minutes or so, derive, they become concerned about why, where and how and whether wallets/bags should be taken. We so often take ourselves out on a walk to do something or perform a task such as to walk the dog, push the pram, get shopping etc that to ‘just walk’ becomes seen as a tricky instruction.

Saxon Shore Way walk, following the seawall at Seasalter.

Following existing paths, (such as our local ‘Saxon Shore Way’, a long distance path around the Kent coast) allow ‘the walk’ to become the destination in itself. It is a place to visit and explore, walking these long distance paths is acknowledged as a ‘verified’ leisure activity. To just walk, with no destination in mind can feel both anarchic and liberating yet could also be seen as an indulgent and wasteful pursuit of time.

Curiousity

I love to follow existing paths randomly and see where they go, Whitstable is a great town for exploring in this way as it is full of little quiet back lanes and old alleyways. One of these is often photographed by tourists as its name is ‘Squeezegut Alley’. As you may have guessed it is very narrow at one end and apparently used in times past by naughty children running away from a particular local ‘bobby’ who couldn’t chase them all the way through, as he didn’t fit!

A well used path to the sea at Seasalter.

A new book has just been published that I am looking forward to reading, it is called ‘Playing for Time- making art as if the world mattered.’ It was written by Lucy Neal and created in collaboration with other artists including Anne-Marie Culhane, who I met at the Eden Project back in February this year.

Rob Hopkins has highlighted this book and other similar works in his blog ‘Transition Culture’. The blog looks at the journey of the Transition movement which he initiated back in 2007, it’s well worth a look at if you are interested in a more sustainable and enjoyable approach to life.

An inviting pathway on the Welsh hills.

 Another recent blog of his published on the 27^th of April 2015 talks about Lucy’s book ‘Playing for Time’ and interviews two other authors and founders of similar work. There was a great quote about curiosity that I want to highlight.

‘Artists pick up on what’s happening in society from talking to people through an innate curiosity that we live with all the time.’ Sarah Woods

I have enjoyed developing my walking art practice and seeing how people can be encouraged to explore their locality for themselves. Curiosity awakens us up to new experiences and when tapping into this through creative imagination and expression I believe we can connect much more to our senses and therefore our surroundings.

Place

When we feel a sense of familiarity and ease with our surroundings, our local environment, we are far more likely to feel possessive of it, even protective. This was the title of my MA research paper; Place, Projection and Projection- How people connect to place.

Lichen on a footpath post in Wales.

Listening, yet again to Radio Four this morning I caught a wonderful programme with Phillip Glass the composer, explaining about creating an imaginative place with just his music. I know that music can take us back to specific times, events and places; he was talking about his music scores for films, operas and symphonies.

‘the music is the thought…a Buddist teacher, Rinpoche told me once that there is not just one universe, there are 3,000 universes, right away I asked him is one of these music? Yes he said, could I go there some day? Hopefully, he replied. When he told me that, 15 years ago I thought that he meant in some future reincarnation but perhaps he didn’t, perhaps he was thinking in this very life I would be in that world…’ Phillip Glass, Words Without Music

There would be a different soundtrack to both the coast and the hills.

I can see that if this imagination is exercised then we could discover many more layers to a place. Similar to a piece of music, perhaps a film score which has the power to transport us back to that memory of the film, plot, characters and the overall ambience of the place, we can create our own soundtrack. It may be the sound of our footsteps, the wind in the trees or any other site specific noise. When I think of areas that I know well and enjoy to walk in regularly, I can map their sounds in my mind even now as I sit writing. Perhaps walking these routes regularly has already created a sound map.

Loch Sunart, I believe this would produce an epic musical score.

I certainly have a sound map of The Street in Tankerton, this has a soundtrack of people and dogs on the prom, shingle crunching as I walk down the beach, wind whipping up as I walk out onto the Streets visible expanse, seagulls crying and in the distance other shore birds calling. As I reach the end of the Street I hear the waves as they converge, splish splashing together, the wind is always more ferocious out there and any distant noises from the shore are only intermittent, windblown and ghostly.

Next week I plan to take some video and still camera footage, over a number of days, on a few walks to create a library of images which I can use for the promotional film for my Kickstarter project. It will be very interesting to see if my imagination and reality itself can be layered together to produce a significant and unique soundtrack for the recording. I can at least try. It will be interesting to see what I discover about places that I think I know well from what appears on the soundtrack.