My trip to Cuba this summer (22 August – 12 Sept 2011) was framed by three books and a text. One of the books was about history (Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung/Visitation), the other about family, and the last about travel (the ever so detailed Lonely Planet to Cuba – I really don’t know how they do it!). The art text A Sea without Boats was  by our great mentor David Harding who visited Havana in 2005. All of them were quite randomly (apart of the guide book of course!) given to me just before we left.

The Zeiske-May family en route, Day 1

We – Nick (my husband) and our children Rachel, Deborah and Michael – left Huntly’s non-existent summer behind on a Virgin plane and arrived at our lovely Casa Particular on Calle Aguilain Centro Havana in the late afternoon. After a couple of days in La Habana with all the colonial houses, the chocolate café, the Patisseria Francesa, (a great people watching place, shame just about all the young girls in the hands of wrinkly males from Manchester, Munich and Milano) our first week was already planned out: a cycle trip from the capital to Viñales in the West of Cuba.

We started on the Maleçon, Havana’s 20k long waterfront along the Strait of Florida  - so well described by David Harding – in scorching heat; but luckily cycling offered a welcome breeze and refreshment from the temperatures that we are so not used to. Against all our ambitious cycling plans the first day we only managed to get to Playa Baracoa full of Cubans having fun; no tourist in sight. A decision had to be made: from tomorrow onwards we start at 7am at the latest.

The area west to Havana is very lush, green and hilly, signified by tobacco and sugar cane plantations, the very stuff that formed the great misery of Cuba after the fall of the Berlin wall, when the Soviet Union pulled out from their economic treaty. The Cubans call that time the ‘special period’, which brought a lot of poverty and in some regions even hunger due to the valueless monoculture. But now – thanks to a land reform in the late 1990ies – which gave campesinos small patches of land, you find all the delicacies that the Caribbean tropics have on offer: avocados, mangoes, papayas, rice, it is all there.

From Baracoa we passed the industrial town of Mariel along the coast and got to the superb eco-park of Las Terrazas where already in the 1960ies a grand reforestation programme was launched which now forms a great jungle.  At Rio José’s natural pools we found some nice huts populated by Cuban holiday makers and played some crazy games of charades. The next day presented us with an early flat tire which Michael very ably fixed at a small restaurant with the best ever toilet (see picture for the view from its window!); and a broken chain for Nick.

Toilet at Las Terrazas

But the area was so hilly that we had to push anyway up; down he could just roll until we met some very handy Cubañeros on the road side who were able to fix it while we sipped some coke and rum (or a hot version of Cuba Libre). Rolling into Soroa we found a most lovely Casa Particular (the Cuban version a B+B) called Don Agapito; the owner and his wife – Juan Carlos is a mathematician who works for a seismic station – really bent over to give us the best of food that Cuba had on offer: lobster, fresh fruit, fresh juices, rice with beans, and, and, and….  But in the afternoon a big rainfall (normally a welcome refreshment) came which caused a flush flood, in which Michael and Deborah almost got stuck at the other side of the river. Luckily a nice guard helped them back to habitation.

early morning start in Soroa

From Soroa we rolled down to the autopista, where we stayed for a while alongside other cyclists and a few cars to get onto the caretera naçional. The scenery offered scattered farming settlements, with campesinos on horseback and oxen-driven carts. We took a break at a shop which had bread, but not for us as we had no tokens – no problem, we had a giant avocado and a clutch of bananas instead. What more do we want?

The route like the house in Visitation slowly unfolds the 20th century history of Cuba.  Like the work  of the gardener in the book the thread that binds the landscape together – is the periodic activities of agriculture, large-scale plantations of sugar cane and small scale watering, pruning, composting, etc. As the decades pass and the fields get eaten away by misuse and decay, the campesino’s patience, pragmatic labours become what is unexpectedly moving here. One could not stop thinking that only 25 years ago all one would have seen was sugar cane to feed the cakes and teas of people in the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany, maybe even the inhabitants of the lake-side house in Visitation. The special period radically transformed Cuban society and the economy, as it necessitated the successful introduction of sustainable agriculture and decreased use of cars, and overhauled industry, health, and diet countrywide.

Our arrival in San Diego de los Baños an old mineral spa town was delayed by a giant but very welcome rain fall. How refreshing to get totally wet! Here we found a cigar workshop where we were shown the making of Cuba’s most important export product from start to finish. Most interesting the old Hotel Saratoga, not really for westerners, but they did let us in for a beer (which might have been our stomach’s fate the next few days). The hotel certainly had its former glory, but I loved the crumbled charm, it would have been a paradise for a photographer interested in colonial architecture with absolutely stunning art deco throughout.  San Diego would certainly be the place where I would like to test out the town is the venue if I was given a chance to. I love it: lots of undiscovered features with a great pinch of old-worldliness.

The next day we landed in Viñales at the Villa Las Vegas (10 CUC per room) where we were a bit tummy troubled but I rolled up with my book about the sociopathic American youth; the evening we ended up at the Casa de la Musica with some superb local rhythms. Viñales has a lot to offer, we went into a cave where the boat man picked us up in the middle (the rest we walked on our own – it would be a health & safety officer’s night mare) and a tobacco rolling coop (women only with a lot of stages of fermentation going on), the kids went horse riding and we bought a couple of little artworks in a local gallery; but mainly it is all about scenery.  With a little regret in my eye we left it for Havana. If there ever is a next time, we should stay here longer and spend more time in the area, or cycle even further west.

Vinales

Back in Havana we visited LASA, a project in the neighbourhood of St Augustín. This is a project set up by Aurelie, a French curator and her husband Candelario. They make their living from producing Martí sculptures for housing developments and through this subsidise LASA which focuses on socially engaged and street art projects in the St Augustín neighbourhood, which is predominantly signified by council housing. The idea really is to give the place identity. They started with a census – not dissimilar to our cultural audit. We returned to Havana with our white Cabriolet taxi to the famous art school ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte) which is designed in the form of the body of a woman! Cuban architect’s Ricardo Porro’s art school was/is a deliberate suggestion of the female form complete with a fountain shaped as a mamey, or papaya—an overt reference to the female vulva. It has been very lovingly described by David Harding questioning whether we talk about it in polite company.

At night Havana becomes one heaven for music: Rumba, Samba and all the other Latino sounds mixed with their African roots is what one finds here in the bars, cafés and teatros. We went to the Teatro Americano to see a kind of variety show that featured poetry, singing, rumba, dancing and sound, the show in the exquisite art deco building got better and better as the night went on.

One of the (many) highlights of our trip was our drive to Trinidad, for which we hired a 1948 blue Chevrolet taxi with all the old features (and Hyundai motor!). I got behind the story of all the old cars: till today it is not allowed to sell property or cars; hence people can only keep or inherit it but putting in new motors is not a problem. Given the tank-like making of them there was never a problem with rust and therefore Cuba has all these wonderful best-kept vehicles on its quite roads.

Chevrolet fro Trinidad

Trinidad is often seen as the pearl of colonial Cuba. It is, but it is therefore also a bit touristy. But really here we listened to the best of music in the whole of the trip: Los Piños in the town’s Casa de la Cultura. It was just magic. I wished I had bought their CD; the trumpeter appeared to be German, but he was a very assimilated one. Another interesting feature about Trinidad is its restaurants which look like antique shops. The rest of the evening we spent at the Casa del a Musica on their steps next to the cathedral watching and listening and dancing to (not me) Salsa and Son. Wild taxi ride in a R4 to our Casa at the La Boca beach, a small village populated by Cuban holiday makers only.

Another highlight of our trip was the Las Caletas beach west of La Boca – we walked the 6k to it in training for our forthcoming marathon in Berlin –with fantastic snorkelling for corals and fish life and all the place to ourselves despite a lovely little bar for our cokes. Sadly Kevin was always accompanying me, even here at the beach. I also got a very odd seaborn tick there.

Another best bit was going up to the Toppes the Collante hills; steep up to the 850m our first stop was the coffee house there and a little museo with the history de la revoluçion, as Ché and Fidel spent a lot of time here hiding and fighting. From here we walked the Sentiero Batato where we found after an hour some caves with some magically cool pools. This would definitely be the place to stay longer if we ever came again, just because it is so much cooler and therefore one can do the most fantastic walks. You think you are in a giant botanic garden here. I picked some papyrus and some mimosas on the way, deciding to get into house planting once back in Huntly (never happened, sorry). On the way back we discovered the great hyperrealist landscape painter Tomás Sánchez whose tropical forests come from inside his mind – in a small gallery en route.

Our last step before returning to Havana was Cienfuegos a sea side town of former glory, where recently the UNESCO world heritage status came to rescue. We got a Casa in Punta Gorda called Ana Maria, which had its own beach on one side and a sea side view in front of the house!! So you could observe both sun set and sun rise from the place. Like Erpenbeck’s house in eastern Germany this house is oozing with history, while the Caribbean sea replaces the Mecklenburg lake, the happenings of the 20^th century carved out its spirit today. Lets hope the impending events that increased capitalism will bring to Cuba will not kill its charm, or even replace it all together. After a swim in the bay and Guava juice for breakfast we faced the 37+ C to explore the town and it’s amazing colonial architecture, including an ancient necropolis, while at night we explored more music in the local Casa de la Musica.

Back in Havana I finally finished with Kevin. He has done the long anticipated horrible act it in the penultimate chapter. The last chapter reconciled the whole book; his mother Eva Khatchadourianwas looking into the police car with cupped hands asking ‘What have you done?’ He searched hard in her face, but she did not know for what. The reflective chapter made up for it all in the end.

The last few days we spent exploring more of Havana and more of its artists. In the Havana Biennial office at the Centro Wilfredo Lam I was presented by some 8 young artists with their splendid and refreshing work. Highlights were the work of Celia Gonzalez Alvarez and her  work partner Julien Aguiar Perdomo, who married and divorced six times in an attempt to analyse the limits of government bureaucracy. Given that it is not allowed to buy property other than a grave they made one in a backyard. They also matched a trip in Tobago with the one of the coast line in Cuba (only to discover that as Cubanos they are not allowed to stay in the hotel they investigated of course).

Carlos Martiel bound himself onto a running horse and sewed an English gentlemen’s suit on his body in an attempt to discover racial and social relations through a mix of violence, love and hate.

Grethell Rasún Fasiños works with human left overs: snot, hair, finger nails, shit, pee, menstruation blood… She makes jewellery from hair and foot nails, paints shanty houses with a mix of pee, clay and chalk in a plea to find the truth between the beautiful and the ugly. Next to this she makes the most hauntingly beautiful photographs looking at Havana houses that have been bit done up, but mostly crave for attention, colour juxtaposing the range of grey of the colonial facades.

Renier Quèr made a most eerie film about his father’s (who was an active member of the revolutionary army in the 1950ies) sleep, haunted by frequent nightmares.

Nick and I also undertook a studio visit in the Playa area visiting the artist René Francisco. He showed us his paintings where paint has been layered on canvas with a spatula, using a painstaking, pointillist technique. Most of the works have sociological and political themes; some of them show masses of indistinguishable faces in black-and-white. Also the people sculptures made of lead tooth paste tubes from the Russian era. We were particularly taken by one work that included a picture of some American soldiers taking Göhring’s paintings in Germany. René is very popular also due to his unorthodox teaching methods at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). His determination to create interaction between students and professors led him to create Galería DUPP, DesdeunaPedagogíaPragmática. René talks admiringly about the ISA, which isn’t for him only a school to learn to paint, but a school of ideas, where the professors try to shape the students.

René has also done a lot for the cause of conceptual art and community development; he has a great commitment to El Romerillo, one of Havana’s most infamous slums. Once he received a grant from a German art foundation which he used to help residents by renovating Rosa Estévez’s house (Casa de Rosa). He also turned the yard of Marcelina Ochoa, who everyone in El Romerillo called “Nin”, into a garden. The documentation of El Patio de Nin was exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 2007.

Our stay was rounded off with a night at the wonderful La Guarida Paladar (restaurants in private houses which started in the ‘special era’ but are now providing a great counterpart to the normally state-run restaurants) on the 2^nd floor of a full tenement building. After that we went to the Casa de la Musica for a great Rumba and Salsa evening where Rachel and Deborah could show us their newly acquired skills from the dance lessons that morning.

I am endlessly jovial that Rachel, Deborah and Michael went with us. It has been a revelation to me to discover them as adults and not as children. I have been busy the last 21 years to bring them up, and when you start off, you don’t know where this road will take you. A question that was raised too much with the book that accompanied me on this trip (and on return I discovered became a bestseller movie, which I watched with Michael the week before he turned 18). But now I know that they can stand on their own feet, while being your children, your friends and great travel companions at the same time.

And only on the flight back to London, I finally managed to get to the last pages of the Lonely Planet too. This made me realise that there is much, much more to do another time.

Bueno – Hasta la vista!; or – Haste ye back Cuba!

(Deborah proof read this text. She epilogued that somehow I must like Kevin. I am not sure that is true. But I certainly know that did not like his mother).

bye-bye to Havana on Jose Marti airport

I am just back from the UK Border walk + talk which I undertook with my friend and artist Rocca Gutteridge. We walked in splendid sunshine dressed in short and t-shirt from the small hamlet of Upsettlington on the Scottish side of the inner UK Border to Shid Law, an even smaller settlement in England to the Scottish Border town of Kirk Yetholm. In this town closely associated with the last king of the British gipsies we held an artachat. This discussion was conducted by Rocca and attended by a wide range of art practitioners from England, Scotland and Ireland. The embazzling situation for artists wanting to come from abroad to the UK was brought up through bureaucratic facts and nightmare anecdotes.

The last stint of our walk to the hill of Hungry Law was sadly interrupted by another front: the Scottish weather.

After some kind of an ordeal of a journey I arrived alive and kicking in Addis Ababa. Due to a series of unforeseen circumstances (the details of which I spare the reader) I left Huntly before the crack of dawn, flew from Aberdeen to Amsterdam where I missed my connection, got rescheduled to London, where the plane to Nairobi was delayed, got to Nairobi only to be told that I missed the next connection but that I can go some 12 hours later via Djibouti to Addis. Djibouti! I am thinking all day, do I know anything about that place – it’s a port, the Bader Meinhoff group hijacked a Lufthansa plane in the 70ies in Djibouti which then was invaded by the special Unit GSG9… I can’t think of more, oh yes, they speak French. I think there are some links with the French legionnaires étrangers?

Anyway, Kenya Airways kindly furnished me with a nice wee hotel room in down town Nairobi where I caught up with a couple of hours sleep and then had some lunch with ugali and cooked goat. I made the most of it and looked around Nairobi, it was a bit like a homecoming, some things have changed, others just looked the same like when I lived there for a spell in the mid 1980ies. I made a short visit to the National Museum, where they had a good summary of Kenyan history, including the 1990 riots, than saw the grand mosque and the market where I got some Obama kangas for back home. The city really felt on the up, people where in their ever good mood and loved testing out the remnants of my Kiswahili with me. David, the nice KA taxi driver told me that the crime level has reduced considerably, which if he is right would make the city a great place to live. Crime began to be a great worry when I lived there.

Saturday, 15 January

Unbelievable but true, I arrived in Addis an hour early, but Teddy my pick up came soon after I left the security controls and took me to the ZOMA Contemporary Art Centre www.zcac.net, designed and built by artist Elias Sime. Got a good sleep and then met two of my other workshop companions Pauline Burmann a director of the Thami Mnyele Foundation www.thami-mnyele.nl/ in Amsterdam and Vera Tollmann www.veratollmann.net, a freelance art and environment consultant from Berlin (the other workshop members that joined us later were: Zoma Wallace – an arts curator from Washington DC; Wanja Kimani – an artist from London/Nairobi, Ahmed Zekaria, a museum specialist affiliated to the institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis University and Dawit Benti an architect interested in sustainable housing). We got picked up to go to Kaldi’s coffee house a Starbucks look alike with delicious Ethiopian coffee, mango juice and croissants, i.e. the world is in order again. A quick tour around the city showed I have completely lost my bearings (the guide book tells me that many of the streets may have 3 names, like people may call it Hailes Elassie Avenue, but the road sign says Mengistu Avenue and the map again calls it Revolutionary Avenue…!). Hence I give up quickly and hand myself over to our driver.

I change into my outfit from Ahmedabad and we go to the opening of the exhibition Ants and Ceramicists which takes place in four cultural institutes. After taking in a quick lunch, where we also meet another travel companion Wanja an artist that lives in London and Nairobi. We start the exhibition tour at the British Council. The exhibition is curated by Meskerem Assegued who is also our host, and all the work was made by Elias Sime. The work brings old and new together playing like ants on human’s obsessive business with things, making, accumulating and disposing them. As seen from a bird’s eyes view it’s like the ongoing production of ants. What’s happening to all the stuff that we produce? Amassed things like redundant plastic slippers in the British Council juxtaposed with a collage of coins on body, clay pots in the Goethe Institute, scrap boards of computer chips in the Italian Institute and masses of wired ants in the French, come together to one highly organized hotchpotch of things. Remnants of industry gadgets and carefully handmade household item join law and order in what seems cluttered left over at first sight.

I am thinking of the meaning of having the show in the four cultural institutes. Is it purely practical due to the lack of other venues or potential for sponsorship or support, or does it lend meaning that we are traveling like ants from place to place in a greatly amassed group of people from all cultures.

What I have not told yet is that we were given tea and shortbread at the British Council, sausage and beer at the Goethe, pizza at the Italian and – yes you guessed it – wine and cheese at the French… But then almost everybody that knows me, knows that I like kitsch and don’t fear stereotypes. Here they certainly added to the meaning and ambience of Ants and Ceramicists. And … to get there we were driven around by a double-decker bus (Q: lets guess who sponsored that?).

At the end of the day we went to a great wee restaurant. We had Injira the traditional Ethiopian dish a kind of giant rubbery pancake with all kind of delicacies meat and vegetarian that one eats together, all from one plate by rolling up the pancake from the side.  This was accompanied by traditional music and dancing with quite mesmerizing movements. Thanks to Meskerem and Elias for a great day.

Sunday 16 January

We got an early pick up to go to the MERCATO, which my guidebook describes as the largest market in Africa. Because it is Sunday, it is officially closed, but still busy enough for us novices; we quickly adopt an older man who has worked a long time in Djibouti and guides us around the market. This way we saw some of the hidden gems and I bought some coffee, frankincense and handmade paper bags from children, After another lunch visit to Kaldi’s we go to ASNI village where we meet a number of artists who work here. They have laid on slide presentations of their work. The artist I am most taken by is Meredith X, a young woman who has already worked in Palestine and who did a fascinating project asking people to swap their old shoe strings with new ones.

In the evening we go to the Gion Hotel, where there is an international music festival with a good mix of Ethiopian and world beats. We round the evening off with a visit to the Hilton, where we buy stamps and get a shot at the internet to tell our beloved ones we are still alive.

Monday 17 January

The pickup is at 5am, to fetch the 7 o’clock flight to Dire Dawa. Breakfast awaits us in the hotel there with the local delicacy fatira (a kind of stuffed pancake with egg and honey) and my beloved Mango juice. From there the adventure begins and we go to ZOMA Harla, a small village ca 20km away on the road to Hadar, where Meskerem is setting up an ecologically sound artist in residence space. The village I am told has some 3000 inhabitants (but I think it must mean village and administrative surrounding), it sports 2 shops (one has Pepsi the other Coca Cola) and a school. The area is very rich in cultural heritage, but to date largely undescribed and recorded. People live of subsistence farming, and some cash crop (coffee and Chatt – a hallucinating greenery that is chewed by men and women and highly sought after for export). Meskerem shows us the house she has renovated with great care, using local materials only. We learn about the building qualities of cactus juice, which acts like cement when mixed with clay and lime.

After lunch in Meskerem’s house in Dire Dawa we go back to Harla and have our first discussion. The conversation at first was a bit discursive, but after some difficulties on where to start – it became quickly clear – that we cant solve the world in three days – we decided to focus on Harla, which in itself is one of the very few ecologically intact inhabited places in our world. There is no electricity here, people wear second hand clothes and buildings are minimal and functional as are all other materials. Simply no superfluous gadgets in sight. This provides us with a good context and starting point for an ecologically sustainable center to work from.

At night – back in the hotel – I managed to skype with Nick and attend to my 100+ accumulated emails.

Tuesday 18 January

In the morning we went to the ancient cave paintings along a very narrow rocky road, which took about an hour with a 4×4 car. We split the group into 3 parties each of them discussing one of the key topics of the Harla concept: Community – Environment/Architecture – Art: Organisation and Vision. This proofed a very effective way forward, both in terms of time management as well as in terms of moving on the discussion. I shared the car with Zoma and Wanja, but we were also lucky enough to have the Head of Tourism of the region with us, who provided us with viable information. En route we passed a school and a police check point, numerous mud hut settlements and some interesting bird life.   

The majority of the people here are Oromos; Oromo has only been given a written language in 1995. In contrast to the rest of the country (which uses Amharic as a script) Oromo is based on our Latin script.

In the afternoon we drove to Harar, a most interesting ancient walled city with UNESCO world heritage status. On the way we came through the town of Aweday which seems to flourish due to its half black, half tolerated Chatt market. The turnover here both in goods as in money we are told is phenomenal (I was given some amazing figures, but won’t quote them here, as I am not sure how reliable they are). On arrival in Harar, we saw an Epiphany procession, a very beautiful event with people dressed totally in white and lots of drums and other musical instruments walking on a city long red carpet covered with palm tree leaves. Epiphany replaces Christmas in Ethiopia, interesting also that it is almost a fortnight later then our Epiphany (6 Jan) like the whole of the Ethiopian calendar. Just to confuse the issue, the time is 6 hours back (they start counting the day at 6am), the years 7 years back and the months are 13 (12 of 30 days each and another very short one) – apparently this is due to the fact that Ethiopia has never changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one.

Ha r is a mostly Muslim community with the old town surrounded by 5 meter walls built in the 16th Century.  Inside the walls are 368 alleyways squeezed into 1 square kilometer with 82 small mosques, tombs, shrines, and traditional Harari (Adare) Houses. Harar one can only enter by foot, the alley ways are so narrow. The interior reminds one of a very medieval town where traders of all sorts are bustling along the alley ways: basket makers, tailors, silver smiths, fruit and spice sellers. We visited the Hailes Selassie museum (the emperor came from here) and Arthur Rimbaud’s house ( the writer stayed here for many years) and then we went to our most wonderful guest house, an old Adare house which is covered with household items such as pots, pans, baskets and colourful enamel. Here I showed my Deveron Arts slides to my co-travellers, which fitted well in the context of the Harla conversations. And now one of the ‘highlights’ came: we went for a visit to the hyenas. Outside the town gates a kind of shaman is attracting every night around dusk a dozen or so hyenas to the town, after they were fed a bit of meet, they are requested to roam the town for left over food and thereby clean up. I must say, I was deeply suspicious if not frightened of the whole exercise (especially after Phyllis our lovely Huntly travel nurse urged me to get my rabies vaccination if I keep on traveling to these kind of countries).

After a quick meal in a nice wee restaurant we went back to the guesthouse and tried to bring our discussions to paper. Things nicely came together under the overall umbrella of sustainability (community, art and environment).

Meskerem, Pauline and I stayed in the center of the guesthouse among the many household paraphernalia and had a very sound and cozy sleep under the mosquito net.

Wednesday 19 January

Got up nice and early and had again the wonderful ‘fatira’ for breakfast. By 9 am we were on the road to Dire Dawa to catch our flight back to Addis. On the way we passed by Harla in the hope to discover the much discussed ‘chinese coin’; sadly the person who apparently had it, was not there. But Ahmed has good hope to find it one day, which would put a very different slant onto the history of the place. At this point it might be worth mentioning that the Chinese are putting a lot of development aid and commercial activity into Ethiopia, which whether one likes it or not by far exceeds western development activity; they for example are fixing the railway from Addis Abeba to Djibouti and are building a new mega dam to supply electricity for the country.

The flight back to Addis went smoothly and back at ZOMA Addis we continued our talks by bringing together all the points of the three discursive discussions. At this point Meskarem also explained the history of Harla, and actually why Harla? It became clear that she had done some anthropological research there and this way became acquainted with the villagers, who gave her the land. She hired the house which she has done up in a traditional way; so it in the meantime can serve as a basic artist in residence place.  Her plans are to bring architects and artists together to build the workshops and living accommodations over the coming year. The Goethe Institute and Heinrich Böll Foundation seem to have already made some commitment towards this.

After a meal in an Indian restaurant we fetched some beer to drink at our lovely courtyard at ZOMA.

Thursday 20 January

We started the morning with lovely freshly squeezed orange juice (the juices are by the way a real treat here: mango, papaya, etc – just heavenly). Pauline and I had a quite emotional discussion on the steps of the courtyard about arts management, and all the things that come with it: board, payment, work load management and so on. Often one has to take stock and see whether the way we are working is still the way we want to be working, whether it is still effective, whether we still like it or whether we are actually still valued.

The morning was spent making a SWOT analysis, a powerpoint presentation for the evening at the British Council and tying all the loose ends together of the talk. We divide the talk up, and I had the share about community – talking about a bottom up approach which can only be realized in a place like Harla, where sustainability is still an unprecedented reality. Matching this with a sensitive approach towards development is the challenge. This was complemented by Wanja talking about the role of children, their dreams, abilities and prospects could be the guiding leitmotif for Harla’s work.

The talk at the British Council went really well. A very interesting crowd made up of artists, journalists development workers, historians diplomats was discussing the prospects of such a development as ZOMA Harla, and no minute was spared to cut the discussions short. It could have gone on into late at night…

Elke Kaschl from the Goethe Institute has organized a last supper at a marvelously situated restaurant overlooking the whole of Addis. It was quite emotional when I had to hold the farewell toast and thanks a few minutes before I had to take the taxi back to the airport to embark on my flight back to Aberdeen  via Khartoum and Amsterdam ( this time without any major troubles, Deveron taxis was waiting for me in the morning). It was nice to see my colleagues and Nick again and tell them all about my wonderful new experiences, acquaintances and learnings.

Thanks to:

Pauline Burmann for being such an inspiring resource on African artists, I am looking forward to working with her in the future, we will start with her in a Shadow Curator role for the Baudouin Mouanda project.

Vera Tollmann,for giving us so much insight in the art and environment discourse. I see you soon in Berlin to look at the great greenhouse on the roof in Wedding.

Ahmed Zekaria for providing us invaluable background in Ethiopian history in particular about Harla and Harar.

Dawit Benti for loads of inspirations about sustainable building – a necessary ingredient for the success of ZOMA Harla.

Wanja Kimani for being so much fun,supplying so good photos and considering to come to Huntly as an intern, it would be great.

Zoma Wallace for great intellectual inspiration, and doing such a brilliant job in writing the discussions up where would we have started otherwise?).

June Wallace for all the invaluable background work with documenting the discussions.

Elias Sime for a wonderful exhibition at the four cultural institutes; especially the work at the Italian cultural Institute will be hard to forget. 

British Council for allowing me to visit Ethiopia and attend the Harla talks. Special thanks to Barbara and Meron.

My husband Nick and my colleague Anna for letting me go.

And above all: Meskerem, the powerhouse who brought it all together. You deserve all the support you can get to bring this unique project off the ground.

Thank you all. I hope to come back before long; next time with Nick to discover all the wonderful mountains of Ethiopia and revisit Harla and Harar.

Really sorry that I am only now getting round to putting pen to paper on my India trip. But in fact that is not really true: I kept a detailed pen to paper diary during my travels, but translating it to type has just not happened… Life back home took over: project with Maider López the week after, lots of funding reports, snow and Christmas baking, all the children home (and my mum too, lovely) and then Hogmonay the real Scottish way with ceilidh, whisky and all the other paraphernalia with some good old Huntly friends. But now with all the happy New Year’s resolution kicking in, I was finally going to do this, only to find out that Anne Petrie one of my wonderful co-travellers has already written the most splendid and detailed blog about the whole trip. Have a look here.

So: for all the many details I am referring to her writing. It would be very hard to do a better job then Anne.

However here are the snapshots of my ups and lows:

UPS -The ten best things:

1. Meeting the group of other curators; they were a great inspirational bunch and splendid co-shoppers of all those wonderful things we were exposed to. Thanks to Louise, Angela, Katy, Judith, Juliet, Dawn, Kathryn, Eleanor and Anna for all the camaraderie.
2. The two organizers Barnie and Jeremy (together they form the cultural practice A Fine Line); the trip was superbly researched and they brought us to the most interesting, remote and far flung places, many of them we were unlikely to ever have found ourselves. Thanks Barnie and Jeremy also for the great amount of patience with the shopping extravaganzas.
3. Also Lokesh an artist designer from Ahmedabad, who has been assisting and introducing us to so many places in a most informed way.
4. Meeting Priya at the Sanskriti foundation. Priya is a textile artist based in Delhi, who I would like to work with in the future. Her interest lies with the communities of darners which are living an almost invisible life in rural Indian communities. Their trade has largely been invisible and their craft brought to the edge of their own sustainability. Priya showed me their work on shawls, which had been handed down for generations; often the darning work has been totally invisible, as are the craftsmen’s cast. I feel this could be an interesting opportunity for a cross cultural, cross generational project. In our communities the older generations have learned how to darn, and kept it up as a necessity. The younger generations have not used this skill, or not even learned it. But with an increased interest in upcycling there is room for common ground. If possible, I would also like to introduce Priya and the darners to Paisley Museums. Paisley, I understood during my trip was the downfall of the textile crafts in India, as there they started weaving the materials with machines, which flooded the Indian market, and therefore made the elaborate handicraft too slow and hence obsolete.
5. Arts Reverie, an oasis in Ahmedabad. Very stylish, greatly situated and the most lovely hosts (especially when you are ill, like I was, but they made me recover quickly).
6. The train journey from Ahmedabad to Buij: I love train journeys anyway, but this one made me meet a nice family from Hyderabad, who told me a lot about India and Buij. I wished all journeys had been by train.
7. Seeing elephants walking on the streets of Jaiphur (this was when I already got totally used to seeing cows and camels walking on the highways in Delhi).
8. Being able to skype my son Michael on his birthday, linking up with him in Norway, my daughters Deborah in Munich (staying with my mum) and Rachel in Edinburgh and Nick back in Huntly. It felt the world has become smaller.
9. The crazy Cinderella carriage on the last evening in Bombay: made me want one of those in Huntly, more people would come to visit and be driven round town like this.
10. Snow back in Huntly – went out skiing the next day.

But best of it all of course were the artists, artisans and craftsmen and women we saw: I won’t go into all the details here, as Anne has already so eloquently described the list of places we visited in detail. But the places that were most interesting for me were

•  Jai Mahal palace on the lake in Jaiphhur: www.jaltarang.in, it showed the most incredible craftsmanship still alive, long lost in our hemisphere.
•  the weaving workshop that I visited with Luise Butler and Lokesh in Ahmedabad; an incredible atmosphere of comradeship among the women there interwoven with the bright colours of the wool and loom.
• the quilt makers in Haza/Kutch – time was far too short there
• Kala-Raksha a workshop of traditional textile arts in the earthquake area of Sumrasar/Kutch; thanks for showing me the patchworks; they were very moving.
• but the very best was the Ajarakh workshop of block prints by Ismail Mohammad Khatri in Kukma. This is double sided print, where every side needs to be done in 13 processes (hence 27 processes if one counts the first wash in); it was the most amazing handicraft process I have ever seen. Here we were also introduced to the making of the dyes, like indigo and other plants, woods and stones (rhubarb, pomegranate, marbelum…).
• There are many more to mention: like Toffan Raffai – an artist who follows Ghandian principles; Dinesh Rojan – who makes garments without sewing made me a dress from a cloth with stones and elastics), Siddharta Das – a designer who seems to be able to turn his hand to anything.

LOWS – The worst things:

Can’t think of any (maybe being sick in Ahmedabad, but then Monna and his mate fixed me up quickly again).

All in all, a really great mix of gaining professional contacts, both in India and among the group of curators I was traveling with, seeing a new and incredibly fascinating country, and learning about craft – a discipline I had not engaged enough with so far.

Thank you all who made this possible:

• Nick and Anna for giving me the time off
• The curator colleagues for all the interesting conversations and fun companionship
• Jeremy and Barnie and Lokesh for all the organising
• Creative Scotland for putting the finance towards it
• The craft makers and people and India for all their hospitality

This autumn I had the good luck to combine the Manifesta circus with my other passions of traveling and trekking. I joined Deirdre McKenna from Stills and her colleague Cheryl on a flight from Prestwick to Murcia. On the way to the airport I had the good luck to meet Jonathan Baxter, my current Shadow Curator to undertake a quick-debrief of the Red Herring events back in Huntly the previous weekend at Dundee station for which he needed to abandon briefly the Public Art symposium at DCA.

We whisked around Murcia and the highlights were the installations at the old Post Office, particularly impressive where their dealing with health and safety issues – integrating them completely in the curatorial process. The artist I was most interested in was Kajsa Dahlberg a Swedish artist who collected hundreds of postcards from Jerusalem to Stockholm written over the whole of the 20th century. The work was also beautifully displayed on top of a mirrored table, which allowed people to both read the content and see the postcard. But where was the promised dialogue with North Africa? Luckily our old friend Colonel was there who stirred that question up by offering his space to any of the few people from the North African region who were there.

Two nice features were to be found on the Manifesta square: a woman cooking North African food in a very exuberant colourful stall and a bunch of arts students from Amsterdam, who ran a biennial tourist memorabilia stall. A good meet was also Prof John Kennedy from Toronto who introduced me to a Turkish artist with visual impairment.

I left the Manifesta circus behind to embark on a 12 hour bus journey to Algeciras, from where the boat goes to Tangier. On the boat I had the good fortune to meet a group of Austrian truckers on their way to Mali, who kept me interesting company. On arrival in Tangier I hired a taxi and 2 brothers showed me round the town and its sights. Beautiful but also sad to see was a viewpoint to look over to Tarifa in Spain, out of reach for many of the people who sat there admiring the view.
Lovely in tangier were the old art deco cinemas, still fully in their heydays.
From there a most comfortable sleeper train took me straight to Marrakech where I threw myself straight into the Marrakech Art Fair, a very different kind of experience then Manifesta. The international circuit was very French / Spanish dominated and on show were a mixed kind of selection of works from mainly Moroccan and other North African artists. Sadly my French let me down during the symposia, so I decided to join a group to Dar Sabra , an unbelievable designer hotel with art works all over the place instead.
At night I picked up Nick who came in from Edinburgh and we went straight to Hassan Hajjij’s exhibition opening at the Hotel Bab.
Marrakech itself does into need the town is the venue. It is all there already. The big square transforms at night time into a spectacle of dance, food, music and other happenings; a real feast for the senses.
Deborah joined us the next day from London, which of course was lovely and made shopping n the Medina endlessly exciting. A most intricately woven Berber runner was the highlight of our purchases. For a day we also swung by Essayoura at the sea with its wonderful seafood.

And then we left for the Atlas mountains. We started our trek in Imlil with at mule, a guide called Ibrahim and a fantastic cook called Hassan. No need to tell the scenery was stunning and the food and service just brilliant. The refuges are a bit basic, but its all part off it. On day 3 we embarked onto Mount Toubkal (4200m) at the crack of dawn and later that day went all the way back to the valley full of orchards.

Back in Marrakech we took the train to Fez, which claims t be the oldest university town in the world, but what it really has to offer is the most amazing Medina which takes some 3 hours to get from one gate to the other. We stayed in a riad, which felt more like an Islamic museum then a hotel for all the mosaic, wood carving, fountains and stained glass it featured.
The highlight here like in Marrakech were the craft makers of all sorts. Most unbelievable were the tanneries, the sights and smells of which were more something out of a medieval history book. One spends one’s day wondering about all this hustle and bustle just interrupted by the lovely mint teas.

We flew back to London, where we stayed with our daughter Deborah in her Kensington flat. The next day I went to the Whitechapel Gallery, where I met with Peter Liveridge to discuss a residency opportunity in Huntly, and also with Rebecca Page who now works there; a stiff career move from being a young artist in Aberdeenshire not that many years ago.
The next day I had the very good fortune that my Mali-compagnon Kerryn Greenberg has organized a symposium with no less then 8 African curators, which was absolutely splendid. I was particularly interested in the work of Abdellah Karoum from Morocco who curated a project on the border between (now closed) Algeria and Morocco, an event that took place on both sides, thereby ignoring the enforced boundary. And then back with the sleeper to Scotland, where back in Huntly my lovely team has spread out all over my office copies of the long awaited ARTocracy book.

Hamish Fulton visited us here in Huntly to start his walk 21 Days in the Cairngorms from our town square. We had the privilige to accompany him on 18th April and then to meet and greet when he arrived 21 days later at Glenmore Lodge, the Scottish National Mountaineering Center. Despite almost 21 Days of what most of us would consider pretty bad whether the project was brought with one rucksack of provisions (inlcuding tent, food and all gear) to a succesful end. The next day we joined Hamish for a 1 hour carpark walk at the Cairngorm mountain funicular, at which we were asked to walk 3 meters over one hour!

The African Photography Biennale was a real feast merging Cultures and political boundaries.

The highlights for me were the studio visits of Bamako based Abdoulaye Konaté whose work is a powerful commentary on political and environmental affairs. And also the one of Malik Sidibe, where we tried to get our portraits taken.

The shows I enjoyed best were the fantastic installation of Hassan Hajjij in the (can I have the Coca Cola boxed sofa for our new ly refurbished office in the Brander) and of course the panafrican show in the National Museum. Here it was the imagery of Ali Mohamed Osman that I want to follow up; his work around Port Sudan what goes out and what comes in needs to be seen.

I am also a long time fan of the work of Ursula Bieman and was glad to be able to catch up with her and see the very powerful work The Maghreb Connection.

Follwoing the African Photography Biennale, the trip around Mali was just fantastic and I am still recovering from all the visual and sound impressions I was subject to. Three of us, Kerryn from Tate Modern, Sarah the Curator for African Art at the Museum of Scotland and I tagged an extra week on the African Photography Biennal to travel the country. We flew first to Mopti, an amazing trading town on the Niger. A real visual feast, where we took a pirogue (a sort of Malian version of a Venitian Gondola) trip across the Niger to see some of the temporary settlements (people leave once the rainy season kicks in around July).

After that we went to Dogon country, and this is really where my good old Anthropologist’s heart was beating harder. A world full of ancient customs, trades and rituals. Only slightly infused by modern gadgets (although I read later that 3 of the 16 million Malians have a mobile phone that must certainly be one per household). Interestingly for our Calabashbank (www.calabashbank.com) project with Gemuce back home, cash and money seems still to play a minor role here. The world seems still to be ruled by self-sufficient farming and small scale trading/bartering. The key cash crop are onions which are produced in the tiniest fields. Otherwise one sees here a multitude of handcrafts: indigo making, weaving, pottery and of course farming. The little Dogon villages, like Tireli where we stayed are all homogenously made of mud; key features are the straw covered graineries, but also the intricately carved doors, the masks and other ‘fetishes’ as well as the villages ‘navels’ and the menstruation houses. We slept at Opomi’s, the chief in the village under a star-littered sky, only the wind waking us up from time to time with its relentless carriage of red sand.

I particularly enjoyed my first bowl of millet, the staple diet here.

On the way back we went first to the amazing mud town of Djenne; with its even more amazing mud mosque, a must for anybody to see who is even vaguely interested in architecture. The vicinity of the mosque is surrounded by a very vibrant (if not exhausting (for us country bumpkins) market, with literally every trade under the roof of the world. I managed to buy a cloth that celebrates Obama, which was turned into a shirt for my son Michael who had his 16th birthday the day before I came back (earlier on I saw the english artists Marticn Parr in one at the Photography Biennial). I think he liked that better than the laptop he wanted so much.

After Djenne we had another night in Segou, another trading town on the Niger, where we had the luxury of a small swimming pool to get rid of some of the dust at least temporarlily. And then another highlight: we visited a traditional weaving workshop. This was an incredible and memorising sight. The cloth they produced was most intricate, I don’t dare to think of how cheaply it might be soldat IKEA or Habitat.

Back in Bamako, I had to handle the Calabash business. They were sitting there in 2 large boxes in the court yard of the trader; which after a bit of negotiations we managed to get on the Air France plane back with me to Aberdeen. Luckily Anna waited at the airport to fill her Fiesta to the brim with calabashes in good fresh and even sunny Aberdeenshire air.

Thanks to Kerryn and Sarah for accompanying me. Thanks to Kathryn Standing for organising the trip to the Bienniale where I made loads of interesting contacts for me to follow up now, with artists, curators and other people in the african photography and film making realm. Plenty of emails were awaiting me for this.

First thing this week I will follow up with a funding application to SAC (due on friday) where certainly some of the contacts and experiences are written into.