GlogauAir
The idea was a basic German Kaffeeklatsch, Kaffee und Kuchen style, but this being a bit of a Spanish enclave, there were all sorts of exotic goodies being prepared in the kitchen and aside from fruit salad and strawberries there was hearty stuff too, since it was more a late lunch for some of the crew... created a situation that was more picknick like than a stayed and haughty Kaffee session, but valid enough... so we got under way with a simultaneous reading of the newspapers people brought with them, beginning with mutterings on current affairs to downright incredulity on the sports page, ending up in a mixed verbal brawl and the throwing of crumpled newsprint across the table at each other... after which cacophonous exchange we all fell rather silent.
Julien C. then used the calm to explain his morning walk and his harvest, now being hung on the clotheslines suspended across the rooms... where also the crumples newspaper, after being de-creased somewhat, were hanging... next came Lise D. with here packets of seeds, including the marigolds she had been planting along the way, for each and every one of the participants to continue her effort to cover Berlin in soucis... this might take a while she explained, especially since it is on the basis of free will rather than directive from above. Explaining at length the life of plants, humans the stellar conjunctions and the philosophical ramifications of some simple truths, also crumpled and thrown into space for anyone to retrieve at will she made notes on the window as she had at Grüntaler9, so as to connect the two in a spiritual way rather than merely physically and empirically...
We had an interlude of fashion trials, exchanging clothes designed and sent along for the occasion by Daniel Von Weinberger, Antwerp jewelry and costume designer, and did a few flights of fancy down the runway illuminated by the video of Dialogist-Kantor’s Bowling patchwork at MAC’s Grand Hornu... this took a while and made for some pleasant exchanges...
The video was turned off and Julien C. presented a series of head projections, celebral slides - investigating the workings of interiorized thought, considering the space in which ideas dwell and come to fruition as well as wither away, as the case may be. Once on this intellectual roll, we continued our forray into academia with a seminar or the spiritual dimension of the boulette, presided by the eminent authority on the subject Michael L. assisted by his ravenous co-researcher Carina G. who took it upon herself to illustrate the theoretical framework being put forward with practical hands-on demonstrations.
This was the central premise to our excursion... the complex interrelationship between the boule, boulette and berliner ballen... as seen from the cosmopolitan monument of atomic progress towering over the city of Brussels, (les bouls de bruxelles) where the European Commission as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ponder the significance of a reunified Berlin in the sense of how then US-president Kennedy succinctly put it at the height of the Colsd War: “Ik bin ein Berliner” slightly baffling the then still stable anglo-french allies... ‘je suis un boule de Berlin’ and evoking quizzical glances from the international press corps... and sending a shiver of anticipation through the Soviet intelligence community... what does he mean? Fearing it might be something like “Nuts” the Nazi panzerdivisions received as answer to their siege of Bastogne in 1944.... this could go anywhere...
No lucky for us, this exercise was purely theoretical, and the slight wisp of the spiritual illustrated by the slight vapour rising from the boulette is question was but a figment of the imagination... nonetheless we proceeded to partake in a duo-dialogist ritual with the accompaniment again of song and chant, this time inducing more than just a few to join in as Dialogist-Kantor cantered about the place under hobby-horse chairs and moveable tables, unwinding headdress and revealing table-clothes... timed just right for the evening peal of bells from a nearly church.
To finish us off Irene P. and Viviane K. collaborated in a drawing and painting performance in which after intitial to-and-fro both merged and also merged into the physical presence of the painting becoming live art sculpture as well as performed video dance... irene disappearing behind, but then reemerging fragmentarily cut out of the canvas still being coloured by Viviane, painting over body parts revealing the budding motherhood and life burgoning inside, arms painted blue offering to each other and ultimately the public that most coveted of fruits: the apple of paradise or what you might want to make of it... rolling half-eaten across the wooden floorboards.
With a thud.
Cleaning up went well and easy since all joined in, emptying the bar and fridge of excess foodstuffs as we went along and ending up all together at a large Italian place around two corners offering the largest pizza’s I ever did see. Here too it was song and merriment.
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