It's been a while since my last post, and it's largely due to the Berlin winter. I feel like a hibernating animal, like a bear who is quite content sleeping in a cave waiting for the weather to turn warm and the sun to appear once again.
I have crawled out of my cocoon for a few events over the past few months, one was visiting Greece over Christmas, which was lovely. Here's our mandatory Acropolis family portrait. Interestingly, the Acropolis looks roughly the same as it did when I saw it in 1992.
We spent many days with Christian's brother Cles and his wife-to-be Eleni, and Nonnah. It was a sweet family affair. Cles is the master mind behind The Thing About Greece, a sustainable adventure site and film about how amazing Greece is. Thanks to Cles and Eleni and their passion for all that is beautiful there, we got to ski not far from Athens, visit Hydra, swim in a large hot pool within a bat cave, and celebrate a serenely beautiful New Years Eve on a beach.
And what is becoming our European custom, Christian and I swam in the ocean on the first day of 2018. A good way to start the new year!
The idyllic little island of Hydra, where Leonard Cohen found his inspiration and where time seems to be frozen in a simpler past. It's a walking and donkey island only(no cars).
Once back in the d a r k wet cold of Berlin, I managed to check out a digital media/tech and art festival called Transmediale , where our Italian friend Mitra Azar was speaking. It's an interesting festival that explores the topic of technology, media, politics and art and its impact on our culture and society. I have been working for a few months now on an installation piece that examines our relationship to our world through media and memes and how it shapes our relative understanding of identity.
This installation/sculpture is within a full sized outhouse that I fashioned from my memories of an outhouse I had while growing up in rural Sweden.
While being anti social, which is surprisingly easy in a large urban sprawl like Berlin, I have been working daily on this installation project at an art space called KAOS. This is where we showed the Hand of Man, a very snowy eve at the Weihnachtsmarkt! Both Christian and I rent space within this makerspace/co working space about a half an hours drive from our little apartment. I will dedicate a short blog to my project later.
We also make it out for strange multi disciplinary events like this, where our friends Nova and Grey are creating music for a 6 hour long organic dance and object manipulation performance. It's always exciting to see new ideas take flight and expose Kodiak to colorful performance art.
I leave you with a few observations, one being that the endless white winter skies here provide an unusual and dramatic backdrop for the many leafless trees. Their network of branches are reflected in nature in rivers and water ways, and in our own bodies vascular system. I'm not sure why I find this so intriguing and beautiful, but I get to see it everywhere in Berlin. Below are examples of the trees and an image of rivers seen from space.
It's construction cranes are as iconic a fixture as the bare trees. Due to the destruction during WWII and the division of the East, it has a very unique and hodgepodge style to its architecture and layout. And it's a huge city. Large empty spaces within downtown (which were flattened in the war) and East block utilitarian style buildings lining swaths of the city, mixed in with the historic monuments like the Brandenburger Tor, the Fernsehturm and the many Gothic style churches. I was inspired to make a drawing about this juxtaposition...and also the destruction/construction aspect of the city's history. That reminded me of the movie poster of the 50Ft tall woman,
I have crawled out of my cocoon for a few events over the past few months, one was visiting Greece over Christmas, which was lovely. Here's our mandatory Acropolis family portrait. Interestingly, the Acropolis looks roughly the same as it did when I saw it in 1992.
We spent many days with Christian's brother Cles and his wife-to-be Eleni, and Nonnah. It was a sweet family affair. Cles is the master mind behind The Thing About Greece, a sustainable adventure site and film about how amazing Greece is. Thanks to Cles and Eleni and their passion for all that is beautiful there, we got to ski not far from Athens, visit Hydra, swim in a large hot pool within a bat cave, and celebrate a serenely beautiful New Years Eve on a beach.
And what is becoming our European custom, Christian and I swam in the ocean on the first day of 2018. A good way to start the new year!
The idyllic little island of Hydra, where Leonard Cohen found his inspiration and where time seems to be frozen in a simpler past. It's a walking and donkey island only(no cars).
Once back in the d a r k wet cold of Berlin, I managed to check out a digital media/tech and art festival called Transmediale , where our Italian friend Mitra Azar was speaking. It's an interesting festival that explores the topic of technology, media, politics and art and its impact on our culture and society. I have been working for a few months now on an installation piece that examines our relationship to our world through media and memes and how it shapes our relative understanding of identity.
This installation/sculpture is within a full sized outhouse that I fashioned from my memories of an outhouse I had while growing up in rural Sweden.
While being anti social, which is surprisingly easy in a large urban sprawl like Berlin, I have been working daily on this installation project at an art space called KAOS. This is where we showed the Hand of Man, a very snowy eve at the Weihnachtsmarkt! Both Christian and I rent space within this makerspace/co working space about a half an hours drive from our little apartment. I will dedicate a short blog to my project later.
We also make it out for strange multi disciplinary events like this, where our friends Nova and Grey are creating music for a 6 hour long organic dance and object manipulation performance. It's always exciting to see new ideas take flight and expose Kodiak to colorful performance art.
I leave you with a few observations, one being that the endless white winter skies here provide an unusual and dramatic backdrop for the many leafless trees. Their network of branches are reflected in nature in rivers and water ways, and in our own bodies vascular system. I'm not sure why I find this so intriguing and beautiful, but I get to see it everywhere in Berlin. Below are examples of the trees and an image of rivers seen from space.
And here is the view from our apartment window.
The other observation is that Berlin is always under construction.
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and this is the result:
So for now, Auf Wiedersehen, biß bald!
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