orange lozenge

Having passed through the orange lozenge there are two smaller orange lozenges, one on the left and one on the right, containing glazed doors, and a wider lozenge shaped passage continues into a courtyard. (Where another orange lozenge awaits). The building is a 12 storey block of flats, cicra 1970something.

What a fantastic entrance sequence.
Into an open mouth without so much as activating an automatic door. Like in any building at some point one has to tap a code, turn a key, push a door. But here those actions seem secondary. The open orange lozenge defines the entry. Rather than going through a door to get into a space one goes through a space to get to a door.

20 quai de la Marne 75019

11.07.10

Stones of Menace

Images from the Stones of Menace event here and here:

Box Nests

A couple of months ago, just days before Spring finally sprang, I saw this lovely piece of bird architecture in Kings Wood in Kent. It is the most engaging of three animal/bird residences in a small enclave in the woods called Super Kingdom, by artists Londonfieldworks. They describe the project as 'a sculptural installation of animal 'show homes'... inspired by reports of anomalous animal behaviour in nature as a response to a shifting environment'. They talk about an interesting web of ideas to do with urban encroachment and displaced ecologies, and the purposeful reintroduction of species (re-wilding) and assisted migration - all considered in the context of Kings Wood, a working woodland managed for timber production, recreation and conservation, and the wider environment of nearby Ashford and its ever multiplying Barratt Homes. Slightly puzzlingly the artists also mention being inspired by despots palaces, this particular structure is called the Mussolini Bird House (adjacent are the Caecescu and Stalin bird houses), an unnecessary connection - there seems to be plenty to think about already.

So there are lots of ideas behind it, but they are not the reason that I stopped and took a photo as I read about them afterwards. Here are my reasons:

1. I like the way the tree looks as if it is wearing a jumper.
2. I like that some of the boxes are really tiny, more insect sized than bird sized.
3. I like the way that lots of rectilinear boxes have been put together to form something extremely un-rectilinear.
4. I like imagining that it is fully occupied, tweeting and rustling.

Shed Nests

Wobbly planks, loosely attached to one another perch amongst the steel struts and tubes of the Pompidou Centre's façade. Like giant nests for some as yet unevolved breed of enormous bird.

I first noticed them from afar, across the plaza. Strange messy blips interrupting the familiar primary coloured rectilinear facade that isn't a facade. Yet they also had an unsurprising quality, as if they were quite normal.

Things accumulate. Dust, old newspapers, leaves, people, pigeons. All trying to find a quiet corner. The city could be understood as a giant machine containing a thousand different mechanisms to counteract the incessant accumulation of stuff. Street sweepers, bin men, window cleaners, little anti-pigeon spikes on statues and ledges, signs warning of fines for bill posters, little metal studs on horizontal surfaces to dissuade homeless people from settling down, buses and metro trains to keep everyone moving.

These wooden structures are commissioned artworks, so they are not going to be cleared away until their official art work installation period is up. We know that they have been carefully planned and constructed. But how nice to play the game and imagine that they really are strange nests or cocoons for a mysterious urban creature, or sheds hastily constructed by claustrophobic Parisians living in tiny flats.

Tadashi Kawamata

'Huts' au Centre Pompidou

10 avril - 23 août 2010

Garden

rue Poulet, 75018
05.06.2010

House

Rue Clavel 75019
30.05.2010

Blue + Yellow

Bassin de la Villette, 75019

30.05.2010

Stones of Menace

On Saturday June 26 (2-6pm) I will be participating in a one day art event about Brutalist architecture. I will be reading a short text about the modernist sculptural structure the Apollo Pavilion by Victor Pasmore, and showing a series of images I took last year of the dilapidated concrete play spaces at the foot of Balfron Tower.

Blurb from the website below:

The architecture of New Brutalism has some severe critics, one of the most famous being the Prince of Wales whose speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated Brutalism, calling many of the structures "piles of concrete". In contrast, John Ruskin faulted Palladianism in his book The Stones Of Venice (1850) for the “screamingly harmonious” quality of its designs.

Such debates about architectural aesthetics usually go hand in hand with convictions about architectures’ ideological foundation and social function. Whilst the austere architecture of New Brutalism is often vilified as producing social neglect rather than securing the vibrant community life envisioned by its architects, contemporary art is almost required to ‘stir things up’ through expressing discontent and exercising criticism.

This show will explore polemical perspectives on architecture and art and open up a debate on the role of culture as a source of conflict and criticism. The exhibition will display art work that reflects on the relationship between art and architecture and its social and physical context or on issues around creative expressions of violence and social discontent.

The event will take place in the main space of St Pauls Bow Common, a New Brutalist church from the late 1950's and showcase work by architects, artists and members of the local community.

St Paul's Bow Common, Burdett Road, E3

Transformation.

This is the Tour Bois-le-Pretre in the 17th arrondissement, Paris. It was built in 1959, given a new facade + insulation in the 1980s, and is currently being renovated by French architects Frederic Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. You can see the top left of the facade the windows and panels have been replaced by full height glazing (with a temporary garde-corps). Once all the facade has been replaced prefabricated winter-gardens with balconies will be installed for every flat. Everyone is staying put during the works. 93% of the residents support the project (the architects were disappointed it wasn't 100% but there's always a few dissenters). The figure is interesting though, having read countless times in the great Robin Hood Garden debate that the majority of residents (80% usually) wanted the building demolished. I guess it depends upon what they are offered.

Demolition.

They should dynamite that building. It's so ugly.

So said the woman standing near me at the lookout at the top of the Parc de Belleville. She was referring to the building on the left of this photo. A block of social housing. Built in the 1960s or 70s. Full of family homes, where children have grown up, where parents have become grandparents, where people have argued, laughed, cried, loved. Homes full of old photos, favourite toys, carefully chosen curtains and wallpaper.

But you can't see all that from the outside. From the outside you see a tall grey block. With a repetitive facade. You know it is social housing. You subconsciously think of the social problems that are often connected to social housing. And in this particular case, the rectangular grey blocks interrupt the picturesque Parisian panorama. A five storey high pale sandy grey panorama. The Eiffel Tower and the dome of the Pantheon (and the tour Montparnasse) silhouettes in the distance.

Would the view be more beautiful without the buildings on the left?
Who decides what is ugly and what is beautiful?
Can ugliness alone ever be reason enough to demolish something?

There are programs in place to demolish similar buildings in cities all across Europe. Thirty four demolitions are already planned in Glasgow alone over the next decade. The reasons are complex. But it is a phenomenon that stems from the fact that 60s and 70s social housing blocks are deemed ugly. They have been stigmatised. Turned into an image that signifies crime, fear and social breakdown.

But we have to learn to look at them differently. To look at them from the inside out. Last week I interviewed the architect Frederic Druot. He has collaborated with Lacaton+Vassal on the study PLUS, establishing a method by which such buildings can be renovated. They currently have a project on site, the renovation of the Tour Bois-le-Pretre in Paris. They photographed the interior of every flat. When they present the project to people, and show some of these images, people are shocked - it suddenly hits home that these deeply personal interior spaces are what has been threatened with demolition - rather than an abstract and distant concrete block.

I have a lot more to say about this subject. Treat this as an introduction. It is one of the big subjects of the moment. Post-war social housing has come to an age where it is demanding attention. Repair, renovate, transform. Restore, preserve, conserve. Demolish.

Demolition is the easy option. Easy for the planners, the developers, the money men, the decision makers. Not so easy for the displaced residents. Demolition doesn't require us to engage with these buildings, to re-imagine them, to use what works well and transform the rest.

Gorilla Station

El Gran Chufle
An abandoned railway
A new moon
An occupied house
The Lords of Altamont


15.05.2010
1 avenue Corentin Cariou, 75019

the Future

There is a street not far from here (a bit up the hill, towards Télégraphe) called rue de l'Avenir - street of the Future (or perhaps Future Street). It sounds so promising, so full of anticipation and optimism.

It slopes up from the rue Pixérécourt, flanked on either side by turn of the century apartment blocks. One yellow and red stripy brick. One pale Paris stone.

Then abruptly, after barely more than twenty metres, the buildings are cut and the street crashes against a taciturn facade of white render and square windows. Like a curtain drawn across a stage. The name suddenly seems wistful. Future street is a dead end street, and not much longer than a bus.

Looking on Google maps later on, it is clear. The future arrived in the shape of new apartment blocks. Efficient square blocks, with neat apartments tightly arranged around a central core, not a square metre wasted. They work to their own square and fair logic, and do not yield to the existing irregular pattern of streets and buildings.

city portrait 02

city portrait 01

Bitumen Lamb

Bitumen Lamb (or slightly more elegantly - Le Gigot Bitume) is a French building site tradition, a kind of cousin to the topping out ceremony, where a tree is often hoisted up onto the highest point of a newly completed structure.

In France there is none of this messing around, it is straight to the important business of lunch. I arrived on site (a secondary school refurb/extension in the western suburbs of Paris) just as the champagne aperitif was being served. We were shortly taken outside, to see our lunch being prepared. The charcoaly smell of fresh bitumen was overpowering. I have always quite liked the smell of roadworks, but never really in a way that gets my appetite going. Anyway, lunch was apparently in the bottom of the boiling and steaming bitumen mixer. To much cheering our chefs lifted a wire basket out, placed it on the ground and dowsed the five or six black parcels in it with cold water. Then it gets a bit like pass the parcel. The black bitumen rock is tapped on the ground like a boiled egg to break it open. Underneath are layers of brown paper, and once these are peeled back, layers of silver foil, and finally, a delicious joint of lamb, roasted with tomatoes and onion. Slightly disappointingly, I couldn't detect any background notes of bitumen in the meat.

Jardin Austère

Last Sunday was a day of crystal clear skies and a bitingly cold wind. Looking out of the window on the train out to Versailles everything looked bleached under the brilliant sunshine, as on a hot summer day.

It was a perfect day to see the gardens. Their naturally austere and rectilinear nature is exaggerated to an extreme state of at this time of year. It is a garden, made of things that we think of as 'nature' - trees, grass, other plants, water. Yet it doesn't really feel like a garden, more like some strange abstract world of planes and lines. A giant minimalist sculpture.

The fountains are off, their pools empty, their sculptures petrified.

The statues are wrapped up in fabric and tied with string, as if Christo had been by.

The unwavering hedges are sparse and brittle - made of twigs and dried curled up brown leaves.

The trees are bare. The plane trees make tree shaped drawings against the sky with their silver barks. The other trees remain neatly cut into long oblongs. Grey and brown, and some, if seen from the right angle, a deep red.


Le Jardin de Versailles
Sunday March 7th 2010

EuroPlaques

Versailles
07.03.10

argh!

Plaster casts of gargoyles.
Cité de l'architecture
Paris 75016

space with undesignated use

Here is a curious space. On the roof of a shopping centre in the predominantly Chinese and south Asian neighbourhood of Olympiades (13th arondissement) a space of about 5 by 10 metres is delineated by a low wall. So low I'm not sure it qualifies as a wall. It has a clear entrance, carefully positioned to bring one in to the space diagonally.

Perhaps it is a space that was supposed to become another Vietnamese restaurant, or a shop selling brightly coloured plastic kitchenware, flourescent pink fake lotus flowers, and those ornamental cats with a waving arm.

At the moment it is a space for doing whatever you want (within the realms of what is acceptable to do in any public space).

above and below

Quartier des Olympiades, 75013.
20.02.2010

street poem

passage de la boule blanche white ball passage cour du bel air bel air courtyard passage du chantier building site passage cour du nom de jesus jesus' name courtyard cour de l'etoile d'or golden star courtyard cour des trois freres three brothers courtyard cour de la maison brulee burnt house courtyard cour de l'ours bear courtyard passage de la bonne graine good grain passage cour du saint esprit spirit saint courtyard passage de la main d'or golden hand passage

passages and courtyards along the rue du faubourg st antoine, 75011/12 M bastille / ledru rollin

The Fishmonger House

This house is just around the corner from the 1980's house, in the rue de la Mare. It struck me as a sort of distant cousin - another curious part mosaic facade expressing a collision of ideas.

Even in its original state as a fishmongers there is something a little odd, the mosaic fish are ordinary goldfish, rather than appetising salmon, trout or sea bass. Domestic goldfish. As if the facade was already prepared to become a house.

The transition from fishmongers to house looks like a disjointed process. First it stopped being a fishmongers and the shopfront was blocked up. Then it became a house, and instead of using the wide original opening, a standard window, like the windows above, was just punched through the new wall. A window sitting uncomfortably in a window.

rue de la Mare, 75020
07.02.2010

Passage du Plateau

This is the passage du Plateau.

It is 105m long and a little over 1m wide. The narrowest measurement I took was 103cm (at the rue du Plateau end), and the widest 123cm (quite near the middle).

There are fourteen doors and gates to houses and flats along it. Six on one side and eight on the other.

If you pass someone you have to slow down, or slightly turn your shoulders, or not mind brushing up against them. Or all three at once.

Passage du Plateau, 75019
06.02.2010

London Peripherique

Can a road define a city?

Paris is notoriously squeezed within the confines of its peripherique. Thirty four kilometres of six to ten lane motorway. Thirty six years old. Hidden in a tunnel in the wealthy west. Its red and white stripes of traffic exposed for all to enjoy in the poorer east. Twin towers, shiny towers, towers with names, the Eiffel tower seen from all sides, all sizes. Approximately 2 million people live within the peripherique. Beyond it lie the banlieues - the suburbs. Are they not Paris too? No. They are the banlieues. They are separate.

London is also circled by a motorway, but it is way out beyond the edge of the suburbs, a tarmac ring running through the 'green belt', the zone of golf courses, farmland, stately homes, go-karting tracks, glittering shopping centres, Victorian asylums, woodland, industrial estates, and airports (see London Orbital by Iain Sinclair, Granta 2002, for a detailed exploration, on foot, of the M25 environs). The green of the green belt merges into suburb, densifies to grey, it is all London. London is a collection, an association, a series of towns and in between places.

2010

the 1980's house

This house is about halfway along the rue des Envierges in the twentieth arrondissement. I walk along this street quite often, it leads to the lookout at the top of the parc de Belleville, via a great boulangerie. A favourite Sunday afternoon walk. This house always caught my eye. The 1980's house. It is an awkward collision of normal terraced house with willful colourful geometry. Ordinary tiled roof, chimney, drain pipe, front door and garage door : bright yellow diagonal stripes crashing into a nearly normal window, separating bathroom tile facade from crazy mosaic tile facade. It is not beautiful, but it is curious, and it has gradually endeared me.

rue des Envierges, 75020
17.01.2010

(or as sophie said, the aladdin sane house!)

scene from a dream

A small group of people are gathered at the facade of the south gallery of the Pompidou Centre. There is a lot of giggling, a few gasps, a shriek of laughter. Everyone is trying to see through the gap between the black curtains.

There is a woman on a stage, talking to an attentive audience. The room is packed out, people are sitting closely and standing all around the sides and at the back. A pair of black high heeled shoes lie on the stage beside the woman. She is entirely naked.

Centre Pompidou 23.10.2009
Andrea Fraser Official Welcome

punk choreography in retro futuristic city

Last night we took the lilac coloured metro line (number 8) all the way to the final station, Creteil-Prefecture (those e's are missing accents but I am writing with an english keyboard). It is eight stops beyond the official limit of Paris, the peripherique. I will save the topic of the peripherique for a later post, all I want to highlight here is that we were in the 'banlieues' - the suburbs, not in Paris. From the metro station we followed signs to the Maison des Arts. Across a car park and into a shopping centre. Along the internal streets, shops closing, the last shoppers heading to the car park. Out through door 26. Onto a raised pedestrian walkway, past a Chinese restaurant. It is dark, and very cold for mid October. This central part of Creteil appears to have been entirely built in the 1960's and 70's. It is a dense ensemble of apartment blocks and civic buildings, knitted together by high level walkways and plazas. The Maison des Arts is on the place Salvador Allende (good name, Chilean connection), whose wavy black, white and red striped paving brings to mind Bridget Riley's paintings. It is beautiful. A shimmering graphic pattern, across which dark figures are making their way to the arts house, to see the new dance piece by the Michael Clark Company.

six dancers wear dark blue, two wear white :::::: they are moving from right to left across the stage, walking, slowly, legs stretched out, kicking out in front :::::: the blue figures disappear and the white pair remain :::::: the blue figures reappear on the right and continue across the stage again :::::: a shaft of white light moves slowly across the stage from right to left

White Light / White Heat by the Velvet Underground :::::: loud, louder than you could ever have it at home, so loud so that you listen to it differently :::::: the stage is bare, a black floor and a white backdrop :::::: on the left of the stage a dancer wearing brilliant shiny silver leggings appears, she runs a jerky strutting run, she runs a tight circle and disappears :::::: then the same on the right hand side of the stage :::::: then more dancers in the same metallic leggings, running, strutting, the stage is full :::::: white light reflects off their legs, white light dances across the stage

later on / the white screen has turned orange, the orange light reflects off the black floor :::::: dancers in bright orange :::::: Aladdin Sane by David Bowie ::::::: a vigorous dance, energy accumulates :::::: until one male dancer is left on the stage, suddenly the music changes :::::: The Jean Genie :::::: and the orange screen snaps to turquoise :::::: the lone orange figure against the glowing turquoise is an image that is seared into my consciousness

These are tiny extracts from the two dance pieces we saw. The first was Swamp from 1986, and the second was come, been and gone, Michael Clark's newest piece. This latest piece is a hommage to the 'holy trinity' of rock music - Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Hommage isn't quite the right word, it takes the music as a starting point and develops something new and quite exhilarating. Previously unknown or unheard layers, melodies, sounds are extracted from these familiar songs, they are explored and excavated, their insides and hidden corners revealed. Partly because we are listening to the recording super loud on a very high quality theatre PA, partly because the dancers pick out sounds and melodies and dance them.


MICHAEL CLARK COMPANY / SWAMP / come, been and gone

17.10.2009 CRETEIL Maison des Arts

On tour for the next year or so. Go see...

http://www.michaelclarkcompany.com/

we must cultivate our garden

photo: Liz Nall / Bella Edgley

Nathan Coley: 'we must cultivate our garden'

This is one of three artworks by Scottish artist Nathan Coley, installed for the night of 3/4 October as part of La Nuit Blanche in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Paris. The other two read 'there will be no miracles here' and 'gathering of strangers'. Last year in the Folkestone Triennale I came across a similar piece saying 'heaven is a place where nothing ever happens'.
I like the deadpan quality of the phrases. And I love love love the photo that Liz and Bella took.

white night : full moon : the surrealists favourite park in paris

above: Noel Dolla 'chauds les marrons'
below: Rune Gunneriussen 'don't leave the lights on'

la nuit blanche
03 october 2009
parc des buttes chaumont
75019 Paris

the wall

behind the wall are bright lights
disco lights
behind the wall is music
shouting
behind the wall is an ice rink
a swimming pool
behind the wall are people gliding sliding wobbling laughing
in goggles and swimming costumes

in front of the wall the street is bathed in flat streetlamp light that manages to be both orange and grey at the same time

in front of the wall are several people, looking closely at the wall
maybe at the world behind the wall, but also at the wall itself

it is a very thick wall, sturdy and strong

it is also light and delicate, a kind of fuzz of a wall

(La Piscine-Patinoire Pailleron, 30 rue Edouard Pailleron, 75019 / Marc Mimram Architecte / 03 october 2009 / la nuit blanche)

splendid regards

Journées de Patrimoine/Open House/Dias del Patrimonio/European Heritage Days

Last weekend 19 20 September. Indian summer sunshine. European Curiousity Days, European Nosy Days. An international pouring over of pdf print out guides; picking out of buildings; working out of routes; sprucing up of courtyards and hallways; queueing and squeezing; peering and listening.

We wanted to keep it simple and stay in the neighbourhood. A staircase leads from our street rue de l'Ermitage down to the rue des Cascades and at the bottom when you turn right there is a small stone building with a pitched roof made of the same pale sandstone. Four years previously this building was open and we had a memorable visit. Inside is a small channel of water, gently stepping down under one's feet. A tunnel big enough to crawl along disppears up the hillside. It is lined with candles, their light reflected by small stream. It is a magical world beneath the hill we live on. Always there underneath our route to the boulangerie, to the metro, to the supermarket or the bus stop. We are high up up here, approaching the summit of the hill of Menilmontant (the highest hill in Paris) and the geology - layers of chalk and clay, has created two 'nappes' of water - natural underground reservoirs. Since the 12th century this water has been captured and channelled, initially for drinking, to supply a nearby hospital, and then to supply the fountains of Paris. This building is one of several. Known as 'regards', they are simply places where the water could be inspected. Today there is still a small trickle, as the geology remains the same and the water still comes naturally from the ground. But most of the channels and aqueducts have been assimilated into the sewer system. The buildings are classed as historic monuments and are cared for by a loving association - 'Les Sources du Nord'.

This year we wanted to see the 'Regard de la Lanterne', the grandest of all the regards, at the Place des Fetes on the top of the hill. We had to queue for a while, during which time we were entertained and educated by a very entertaining and informative Monsieur. The Regard de la Lanterne is where three channels of water from the nappe feed into a small basin which in turn feeds the aqueduct of Belleville - the principal channel in the system. Again, the function of this building was nothing more than to allow for inspection of the waters and channels. As our guide drily emphasised, if such a system was built today, then nothing more than a 50mm pipe would carry the water, with a small box for inspection, all hidden away. But this system was built in another era when things were done differently. There was more grandeur and more ceremony. There was a desire to celebrate technology. People wore big hats and cloaks and the buildings they built had to accomodate them properly.
So intead of a pipe and a box, there is a cylindrical stone building with a dome. Inside one steps onto a double staircase that curves around the pool of water under the lantern of the dome. It is splendid and beautiful.

new feet, fresh eyes and curious ears

After far too many months languishing in the cupboard the thin shoes have been put back on. This time a rather more chic pair than those that walked me round Chile. These shoes are in Paris.

Four years in London and now I'm back in Paris. It is quite strange to return. To mix the familiar and the foreign. A new job, the same flat. A different morning bike ride, the same boulangerie in the evening. New flats and new families in the courtyard out the back, built around the same tree that has a beautiful name that we have both forgotten. The same market stall holders (the lady with a soft spot for Memo, the man with a long beard who sells fresh herbs), a new community garden full of flowers and tomato plants.

Proper posting will start soon.. (once the camera charger has been located amongst the flotsam and jetsam of moving house).

The Moon (Three)

Close to San Pedro de Atacama is a valley called la Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley). It is an utterly barren and dramatic formation of rocks and sand dunes, that glow red at sunset, against a backdrop of snow sprinkled volcanoes. It is spectacular, but was the least moonlike of all the places I visited in the desert. Everyone who goes to San Pedro visits the valley at sunset. The supposed moon is dotted with white minibuses and camera laden tourists from every corner of the world. You walk up the giant dune to the best look out point for the sunset, one of a great stream of others, and then jostle to find a ledge upon which to perch to watch the promised show, which you must then try to photograph as an empty desolate and dramatic scene, tiny you in a vast and alien landscape.

The Moon (Two)

Three weeks ago I was in the far north of Chile. Five days in and around Iquique, a coastal city (industrial port and beach resort) about 1800km north of Santiago, and then five days in San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town on the altiplano of the Atacama desert at 2400m above sea level.
The landscape of the north is out of this world, and is thus frequently likened to that of the moon. Flying over it or driving through it, however you witness it it is hard to accept how vast it is. It is like trying to imagine infinity. And in this vastness there is nearly no life.
There is mechanical fuel powered life, the huge trucks and the air-conditioned coaches that plough up and down the Panamericana (the north south road that runs the length of Chile, but more on that later), but they are always on their way somewhere else.
There are occasional signs of other industrial lifeforms, railway tracks and roads connecting mines in the mountains to the coastal ports; electricity pylons.
There is a fair bit of road side detritus, archaeological evidence of recent human presence - coke cans, fanta bottles and plastic bags that will be beautifully preserved in the gasping dryness of the desert.
There are geoglyphs. More traditional archaeological traces of human culture. El Gigante de Atacama is over a 100m tall, a strange rectilinear creature with a four pronged head, he simultaneously manages to appear very ancient and extremely futuristic. Near San Pedro there were llamas barely bigger than hands carved into the rocks, probably marking livestock transport routes.
There are occasional abandoned villages, abandoned after an earthquake, or as a local mining activity ceases to function. There are many reasons to abandon settlements in this environment.
There are occasional microclimates such as the Pampa del Tamarugal, where scrublike hardy vegetation manages to survive on mysterious waters drawn from deep deep underground.
There are very occasional oases. With bougainvillea, lemon trees and fig trees.
It is not really a sandy desert, there are very few smooth and seductive sand dunes. It is a rocky, stony and dusty desert. It is mostly a greyish brown colour, though when the sun is low in the sky it becomes orange, red and pink.
It is a wonderful and terrifying cinema.

The Sun

Like the moon, the sun in the southern hemisphere moves from right to left across the sky rather than left to right. Of course it still rises in the east and sets in the west. It is a strange phenomenon to get used to because the shade moves in the opposite direction too. On about our third or fourth day in Chile we spent the afternoon at a house with a swimming pool. It was very hot and I settled down on a sun lounger shaded by large parasol. The shade didn't last long though and soon the sun was beating down on my ankles, my knees, my left arm. I felt utterly confused for a second, why was the sun was moving backwards?! Once settled again on the sun lounger, on the other edge of the shady patch, assuring an hour or two more out of the fierce glare of the Chilean sun, I started thinking about the interesting relationship between the sun and the earth... and drifted off to sleep...

The Moon (One)

The moon in the southern hemisphere is not quite the same as the moon in the northern hemisphere.
I noticed two main differences. First, there is no man in the moon in the southern hemisphere, and second, in the south the moon appears to moves from right to left across the sky, east to west via the north (rather than east to west via the south).
It would appear that in the south one sees the other side of the moon - the back of the man in the moon's head, or under his chin, rather than his face.
After a lot of pondering and a little bit of internet research that just drew me into the complexity of the whole issue (the tilt of the earth's rotation axis / elliptical orbit path / the sun's gravity / and more..) I am still not exactly sure of the orbit path of the moon around the earth and its relationship to the southern and northern hemispheres, but I did discover that the moon waxes and wanes and opposite directions - in the north the new crescent moon is seen on its right edge, in the south the new moon starts on the left.
This is not the place for a technical discussion of the moon's orbital behaviour, more a place to note these relatively small but interesting and particular changes in the stuff that surrounds us. If you look at the same thing from another angle you see something else.

Now that I'm back I imagine I might blog a little more..

Several thousand miles, 1027 digital photos, 4 35mm 36 exposure films, 77 days, countless buses, seven aeroplanes, four trains, three full moons, two bottles of suncream and one earthquake later...
And I am back in the land of winter... Our flight involved a stopover in Milan, and arriving there early yesterday morning it seemed like an exciting and unfamiliar new world of crispy misty air and busy people with important things to do wearing shiny leather boots and smart warm jackets. Winter in Europe seems far more interesting and exotic than I had ever previously noticed.
I guess I am trying to say its not so bad to be back! Though I could have happily spent many many more months in Chile and feel that I have just seen a fraction of it.. But I think we will go back..
In the meantime, I have many blogworths of stories and notes bubbling around in my head and hope to post them up over the next week or so before they all start to fade and blur...
Winter in Europe seems like a place more suited to writing words indoors on a computer than summer in Chile. The notebook and the pen worked better over there, easier to use under a tree or in a hammock or on a bus.
More soon!

the Andes to the Pacific

part ONE : the mountains : about 10km from the border with argentina : about 2000m above sea level : termas del flaco : tinguiririca valley : almost too hot to bear suplhuric smelly and magic all healing water : mud : the valley where the plane with the uruguayan rugby team crashed in the 70's inspiring the film 'alive' : tiny intensely coloured flowers : dust : a wildly swinging and swaying bridge over an icy very fast flowing river : waterfalls and boulders : dinosaur footprints in the rock : a mine : statues of the virgen mary in impossibly desolate locations : impeccably well dressed huasos (chilean cowboys) : scratchy prickly plants : rainbow coloured rocks : stars and satellites : flocks of noisy yellow and blue parrots : condors that remained invisble







part TWO : the central valley : santa cruz : a small town amidst a sea of vineyards fruit trees vegetable fields : bustling and wealthy but also rural and simple : single storey abode buildings : the classic central plaza full of palm trees and monkey puzzles : a museum with a glittering display of mapuche jewelry and just about everything else you could imagine : breakfast of almond cake and a juicy juicy peach sitting in the plaza : the usual lunch of avocado tomato and cheese sandwich in the incredibly friendly panificadora : horses and carts clip clopping down the main street : a constant parade of flat wide brimmed 'huaso' hats




part THREE : the ocean : pichilemu : a seaside surfing town : a chilean newquay : a wide curving bay of dark grey sand : a rocky headland : white frothy waves and a steely grey sea : thick sea fog rolling in off the ocean : outer space monster seaweed : sad llamas with hats being paraded up and down the beach for people to have their photo taken with : empanada capital : a vague air of faded grandeur : a hilltop promenade of palm trees and topiary that has seen better days : an old abandoned casino covered in scaffolding and being done up : arcades : gokarts : a rickety funfair : a delicious dinner of grilled fish and tomato and onion salad with a huge glass of freshly whizzzed papaya juice served by an extremely kind and very old woman with a wicked sense of humour and a glint in her eye