Sea Salt & Enamels: A Teaching Experience in Murcia

Teaching in Murcia

A teaching experience in the South of Spain.

Written in English.

Travelling during pandemic times is difficult, if not outright impossible. Usually, my job involves a fair amount of travelling and with that, the vibrant and joyful exchange of sharing a common passion in different cultural environments.

With those pale Covid-months stretching across a barren 2020, with no exhibitions, craft fairs, symposiums, workshops and other events to participate in, I feel almost starved of the exhilarating opportunity to exit my own bubble and taste some other reality elsewhere. Travelling, and more importantly, in-person contact with other creative minds, has become so rare that its value has increased dramatically.

So, an opportunity to teach a five-day enamelling workshop at the Escuela de Arte de Murcia this past week was a welcome and precious gift. The school, which actively encourages students to travel internationally via Erasmus exchanges and offers Erasmus staff mobilities to teachers and lecturers, focusses its jewellery course on contemporary art jewellery, especially exploring alternative materials and new techniques. In the midst of our bleak and never-ending lockdown, the jewellery department reached out to me and my partner Alvaro to travel to Murcia via an Erasmus mobility grant and teach a workshop there respectively; Alvaro’s course centring around creative wax modelling techniques for casting, and mine exploring a more experimental and perhaps intuitive approach to enamelling.

The region of Murcia is situated in Southern Spain, bordering Valencia and Andalusia, with the Mediterranean Sea to the East. Travelling to this light-bathed, unknown spot of land really did something for our souls – for both of us, there was an immediate shedding of the darkness that had muted our efforts to create something wholesome and bright during the winter. 

Alvaro’s workshop explored a range of different wax-working techniques, starting with several distinct kinds of modelling wax with their own unique purpose each, and becoming more experimental with the inclusion of plastic objects and organic materials, emphasising the particular preparation of dried plant parts to enable proper casting. The workshop combined all these different wax-working techniques in a final project: creating a modern chimera, an imaginary beast, a creature of all walks of life giving voice to any pluralistic interpretation the students wished to express.

My workshop expanded on basic enamelling techniques with an experimental approach, starting with easier techniques such as dry-sifting and layering enamel, and working towards more complex techniques using vitreous enamel, foil or graphite. Finally, the course encouraged participants to create completely unique and often surprising enamel effects using sand, aluminium, fine silver, organic materials to burn in the kiln, or anything else that might cause a chemical reaction with interesting results during the firing process. The students were tasked to identity and express a particular emotion in their final pieces, one that no single word exists for and that can only be described by explaining the situation it is experienced in. The spectrum of emotions presented in the end – many of them dealing with our current Covid-19-situation – revealed just how rich and varied the scope of individual experiences can be.

 To teach a alongside my partner Alvaro was a unique gift in itself. Even though we both have a history of diverse teaching experiences, this was the first time for us presenting workshops side by side, being able to discuss the studio set-up, the coherence of our planned activities, and the progress of our students. There was a sense of intense, creative flow, in unison. The tapas bar nights and extended walks through the city of Murcia were filled with conversations, ideas, plans for future projects. The unbelievable food experiences here were certainly also responsible for our enthusiasm: Tomatoes that tasted of ripe sun, and perfect olives, and the most exquisite fried octopus, sea food paella, oranges that were so fresh you could smell them from across the street, and everything augmented by the most umami sea salt (which is produced in this area of Spain near Cartagena) and toppiest top quality olive oil.

We vowed to find new way to keep chasing this positive energy and vibrant life force we felt here, not to allow others with a more negative disposition to drag us down back home.

An outing on the weekend to the beautiful Ricote Valley near the city of Murcia: Alvaro in an orchard of peach trees.

We began our workshops with a presentation of our own backgrounds, our work and its philosophical underpinnings.

Alvaro explaining different wax samples and their different uses.

It was incredibly rewarding to see the students become more and more bold and experimental in their work during my workshop.

Final presentation: The students show and discuss their test plates and final pieces.

Caught mid-explanation: Although the language barrier proved to be quite a challenge, we managed to explain, describe, translate and generally communicate in the most creative way. Definitely a rewarding and mind-expanding experience.

My wonderful course of second years for this workshop: On the far right is the jewellery department’s coordinator Noelia García Gallego, on the far left Verónica, who will visit my workshop as an Erasmus intern for two months this coming summer 2021.

Our workshops were followed by a boat trip on the river, organized by the school and our kind Erasmus coordinator, Rocío. Jakaranda trees, Oleander, figs and Tipuana tipus crowded the streets and brought back tender memories from my childhood garden in South Africa.

A local fresh produce market in Murcia, where every vegetable stall seemed to have at least sixteen different types of tomato for sale.

Newcomer

Newcomer

Bamberg: I’m new in town. So the natural thing for me to do is to explore, to go on long winding walks, criss-crossing the streets until I can assemble a map in my mind.

Written in English.

I’m new in town. So the natural thing for me to do is to explore, to go on long winding walks, criss-crossing the streets until I can assemble a map in my mind. Walks as long as my time and the limited daylight hours and our current lockdown curfew will permit.

 To live in a time with a government-imposed curfew! I never imagined it, it seems so bizarre. A curfew used to remind me of Second-World-War-stories, with grandmothers telling tales about blacking out windows with towels around the edges at night, stories of enemies out there, scared glances, and stealthy lovers sneaking home at night, carefully avoiding open stretches between houses. Now, we’re scared of a different enemy out there, an invisible one, all the more stealthy because we expect it in our neighbour’s friendly embrace, in our sister’s greeting and our business partner’s handshake.

 I have lost myself in the narrow winding alleyways of one of Bamberg’s seven hills again, alleyways that provide barely enough space for a small waste bin, a parked (unlocked) bicycle and one human being passing by. The cobblestones are sloped towards the middle, catching puddles of ice-crusted water from yesterday’s now melting snow.

An imaginary parade of Bamberg’s oldest inhabitants, tilted in mutual support. In my mind, those remembered images of real houses from my meandering walks are fused together into imagined compositions, half fact, half fiction.

The city has a multitude of faces, that much I’ve seen already. As the winter landscape is drained of colour, and the last dregs of sunlight subside, my eyes become more attuned to these soft winter hues, micro-nuances of colour, much gentler than the glaring summer light. The eye learns to pick out and compare the most subtle differences. These are colours much too elusive, their only names might be obscure numbers on some highly technical colour chart. But how much more romantic to call the colour of the sky “swan blush” than “pantone 434M”.

 These narrow streets are not as crowded as the main city centre: broad streets lined with stucco-covered historical buildings and shops. Although, even those are almost deserted now in comparison to the usual tourist bustle. There is something forlorn about these shop windows now, large posters with “SALE!!” written across them in bold red letters, “SALE 50% OFF” and “EVERYTHING NEEDS TO GO”. Some shopfronts are already empty like dark holes in the lit consumerist parade, rotten teeth. Some are dismantled, LED-signs hanging from a single wire, cardboard boxes stacked inside. Soon, the empty slot will be inhabited by another chain store.

 Although, maybe not, who knows, since Bamberg’s citizens are heroically patriotic, supporting their local community businesses in ever more ingenious ways despite the national Corona restrictions. It’s a joy to watch.

 To me, Bamberg features all those gloriously magical details I spent the siesta hours of my childhood discovering in gothic fairy tale books and glossy (and heavy) compilations of Romantic landscape paintings. It’s all here: The crumbling medieval houses – although the city centre is pristinely preserved and has certainly earned it’s UNESCO World Heritage status – so you have to search for those at the fringes; the moss-covered walls and stained roof tiles; the angular corners of houses unplanned and organically grown like bursts of mushrooms; the gilded church spires and patinated copper domes; the secret alleys and shortcuts; the river with its small surface twirls indicating treacherous currents underneath; the swans and waterfowl; the ancient oaks in the park that have survived wars and pandemics alike, and seem to be watching us with serious faces, branches weighed down with lichens and moss, in truth not single trees but a multitude of beings, inseparable now, tethered to their mutual network of lived history.

 And the Altenburg Castle, perched on its hill above the town. Although it is neither as old nor as crumbly as some other castles in the area, it is undeniably very castle-like and quite beautiful, especially now, lit in an orange halo in the blue snow dusk. There is the forest all around, silent and loud at the same time with trees whispering, watching. There are golden sandstone walls and buildings and statues and carvings in an astounding luminous ochre the colour of golden local beer (which is plentiful), honeyed stones revealing their true splendour in the slanted sunlight.

 There are so many stories layered here, dark-edged stories, stories that seep out of the mossy stones and pool black and menacingly around your feet as you pause. And there is lightness too, stories of relentless building and rebuilding, of crowning things, of preserving things, of weathering out storms and chiselling sacred knowledge into maps for future generations to rediscover.

 There are cries trapped in the rough stone, burnt witches’ cries and zealous believers’ cries and shouted salutes to the Führer, cries of pain and joy, panic at the sight of the next shattering ice flood thundering down the river and tearing away bridges and houses in its path, peasant uprisings, foreign conquests, ancient ideologies. And as the brittle stones erode in our current-day tornado, I can almost watch those trapped cries escape like frozen particles in Antarctic ice melting. All those criers, I remind myself, they were all brought into this world by a mother, hopefully they were loved, and loved others in turn, they ached for safety and beauty and hoped to care for those closest to them, they grieved, they trusted in something, and they all crafted away at their intimate little dreams.

 To be part of a multitude like this, and stand alone at the same time, feels infinitely powerful. I am quite excited to roam these streets until every corner is familiar, and then to watch the familiar change with the seasons, and then some more.

Altenburg Castle cushioned on its snow-topped hill above the city.

Watercolour and ink illustrations by Nora Kovats.

An Ode to Multidentities

Vineyards around Stellenbosch. Mountains, to me, have to be purple to be “real” mountains.

Originally written in April 2018.

As I’ve just returned from a six-week stay in South Africa, I am taking some time to digest my experiences and pick apart some my feelings about countries and identities.

South Africa to me is that exquisite country, the place I hail from and that shaped my personality, but not really my (only) home anymore.

Some time ago I uprooted my life there, packed it into a couple of suitcases, and let myself be blown up into the sky like a feather giving itself up to the wind. I touched ground again in Berlin, where I have begun to lay the foundations of a second home since January 2017. Now I have visited South Africa for the first time again after I left, revisited my past, sifted through old fear and pain and joy and broken love and adolescent shame and tokens of friendships. I was nervous about that visit: I barely have an inkling of the emotional power that landscape can wield, but it’s enough to recognize that landscape is etched into our souls, that a mountain or an ocean can cry out to you and make you scatter all rationality to the winds, until you forget your very valid reasons for leaving that mountain, that sea, the very earth that brought you forth, even if they are reasons your very existence may depend upon. So I was scared of that.

But I needn’t have been. This visit strengthened me in my dual identity and allowed me to articulate both my desire to really live that richness of a fragmented identity, and my inability to be only one thing. It’s true, I feel more of a South African now that I return to Berlin than I felt the whole of last year. But I am not an expat, I feel just as much German, with an added foreign tinge that is something else all together. For the first time, I feel liberated from that strange obligation of having to choose only one identity.

Even the way I speak is a testament to that: over the years, I have developed this unique accent when speaking English, distinctly European in my pronunciation, with a sing-song melody to my sentences, an unusual rhythm of sorts, and a rather large vocabulary for someone who was raised in another language, I’d like to think. At first, this accent bothered me a lot. Now I think it’s a wonderful fusion that bears witness to my life so far, and I wouldn’t want to lose it for the world.

What I have learned more and more over the past years is to make my work – my art – my true home. What I am attempting in my work is much larger than I am, larger than my life, an imaginary empire, a vast paradise garden, something that will remain after my body has become dust. I am tapping into a collection of ancient stories that have been the same since the birth of culture and will be the same until sapiens is extinct from the universe. And if I manage to remind a few people why life is worth living, my time here has been worthwhile.

So during this visit to South Africa I attempted to collect fragments of imagery, little pollen-sacks of memories, to be carried home – that other imagined home in my work – to become part of the layered visual language I am developing there. I’m taking those moments with me that will enrich and inspire my life, for now, and choosing to leave those things behind that burden and stress me unnecessarily. Perhaps there will be more writing about the dark side of life in South Africa at a later stage.

Into my imaginary suitcase I packed that rich diversity of the Cape Fynbos, intriguing with its inconceivably delicate structures contrasted with strong lines and hard scratchy stalks. Small bunches of bells that beckon the curious soul, the tiniest flowers, so indifferent and so lavishly scattered across the mountains. Thousands of furry leaves, soft as a Labrador’s ears, with red serrated tips. Dew drops in neat rows, glinting like diamonds and on some level infinitely more valuable because of their transient existence. Burned protea stalks silhouetted against bright yellow-green and rusty reds.

I’m taking with me that primordial taste of the ocean, the salty flavour of the womb of the world – exciting and comforting at once, with a wildness to it that envelops your whole body when you submerge yourself in it, inside and out. And that staggering rhythmic force of the waves rolling and tossing and pushing and pulling to remind myself that I am quite small, quite insignificant in this large world.

I’m packing the slow creeping of autumn in the vineyards around Stellenbosch, the place where I spent some of the most formative years of my childhood. That exquisite colour combination of burning reds bleeding into lime greens, of golden-ochre paling into blotchy browns. These colours act like a trigger with me; they cause some inexplicable sensation deep within me, a tearing, beautiful, aching kind of pleasure. Every single time, without fail.

I’m taking the purple ring of mountains, that protective embrace of the Gods, enclosing the Cape of Good Hope. The way the setting sun tints the rocks pink and violet, the Hour of the Mountains, the most precious moment of the day when Time holds its breath and a minute is longer than sixty seconds.

All of these treasures I packed, and many more, laughter and friendship, turreted castles made out of clouds, wholesome ancient foods, apples directly from the tree and grapes from the vineyard, wine that tastes like a song, sweat and salty wind in my hair.

And I want to merge these treasures with my daily urban encounters here in Berlin, treasures that are very different but equally precious in their own way. Keep an eye out for a new summer collection inspired by all these sentimental wanderings (with too many adjectives in every sentence).

The empty Theewaterskloof Dam in March 2018, and little hope of more rain this winter.