the end

my flight home had technical problems and so I was forced to stay in LA for 24 hours.
without a spare pair of knickers I was, understandably, a bit upset. but now I think it's a god-send.

this trip was unexpected. I often feel that the art I desire and make doesn't quite fit in the australian dance scene. so while I was desperate to go to paris, it wasn't something I was counting on. the irony of me getting something at the right time hasn’t gone unnoticed.

this trip to paris has been life changing. everyone goes through a time when things are imperceptibly wrong and we (australians) have so little to complain about that sometimes we just keep pushing.

coming back through the US and being forced to stay longer in a lonely city has allowed me some time to reflect on this trip. there are artists and discussions that have changed me. paris has changed me. new and old friends have changed me. talking each day with you has changed me. and I’m hoping to find that those changes stay with me.

I want to thank the australia council for keeping this strange studio and this rare open time for artists. It’s very brave. and quite spectacular. paris is not really a city for making contemporary art and so the space becomes a city of thinking and experiencing.

if you can't click on the above video, I've decided to make a short film about paris with some of the left over photos I took. I'll send it through as soon as I can.

thank you for opening your hearts to me. you can never know how much safer I feel and how the ground beneath me feels like it might be solid again.

love clare x

day 165

last day in the US, so I thought I'd meet some performance artists to see what was happening here in the portland underground. I went to a funky local coffee shop where lee kyle (left) and kaj-anne pepper were working, hanging out and talking about art.

lee currently has a one man show where he covers himself in blood while singing show tunes and burning the american flag. he showed us some pictures of a recent performance where he added a interesting twist (literally) where he removed all of his clothes and then inserted an oscar up his rectum.
funny thing is he seemed super nice over coffee!

last day of my adventure tomorrow. not sure what I'll find in transit but I've adored looking for things to share with you...

day 164

after lots of art today, two pageantry choreographers (think marching band / dance team), took me to the gorgeous columbia river gorge. my american dreams came true when a stretch-hummer (above) arrived and spewed out a gaggle of 70+ year olds with champagne, attitude and walking sticks to see the view.

after the nature, we had cocktails at a strange gay 'cheers' bar (where the waitors wore towels and nothing else) to numb the memory of the portuguese dance where the solo performer 'inhabited' a paper bag for 30 minutes. the festival is super fun...

day 163

tricycle on the corner of martin luther king and freemont...

today was a jérôme bel day: firstly an artist talk and then a performance - his duet work 'Pichet Klunchun and Myself'.

so much to say - I was in paris for five months and I had to come to portland to hear and see this french choreographer reveal himself. stunning work. stunning words. it was quite liberating and I'll come back tomorrow to talk more.

day 162

as we were driving next to her, ophelia told us that she got this gorgeous bike for her 8th birthday. she was on her way to open her downtown boutique where she specialises in sunglasses for every occasion...

day 161

I'm in portland for the TBA Festival and it seems very different from houtson. of course, everything is so different from paris that I'm not sure how to interact with it.

I miss places that are old: places where age isn't noticed.

but here, it's new. super new, like us - we are essentially new. even with very old cultures that influence us, our architecture and cities, they are new, and it's apparent everywhere from the building materials, to the width of the streets...

day 160

reflecting in the reflections of downtown houston...

day 159

I spent the day at Diverseworks, a multi-discipline arts space in houston where I will be working next year. this place feels right: like art is meant to be made here. it's housed in a re-claimed warehouse with a series of commissioned art works hanging outside. this work 'mickey' was made by joyce pensato...


I'm not sure I will have time to really look at this city properly, but my first impressions are that although paris is now like a beloved old coat, houston is so shiny and new that it reminds me of australia: empty spaces, strips of reflective buildings, large concrete roads and no one on the streets...

day 158

a day transiting from an old familiar city to a new alien one...

day 120 - london

digging your mother in east london...

day 119 - london

wired for sound in hackney, east london...

day 118 - london

east london sign with optical illusion bricks...

this part of london was completely bombed in WWII and the 1950s reconstruction seems to have a charming linking thematic of 'ugly'. this delight is waiting to be pulled down to make way for progress but ironically it's now so 'out' it's almost 'in'...

day 117 - london

simon ellis (a new zealand choreographer working in london) has been commissioned for the place prize. he is creating a gorgeous solo about a conversation with an icon of australian dance, which has become a duet with a predecessor, an influence and a ghost. after watching rehearsal I saw him off at the tube station (click to see more)...

day 116 - london

alex in his market stall in soho. I asked if I could take his photo and he said he was an old hand at being in the centre of a good shot. are you loving his fruit décor...?

day 115 - berlin

the television tower and the world clock: two iconic images of the GDR and the successes of east berlin. iconic buildings that represented different stereotypes depending on where you saw them from.
and now, they are have been re-absorbed into the 'new berlin' but are still traces, scars, reminders...

day 114 - berlin

it's impossible to convey the power and brilliance of daniel libeskind's jewish museum in berlin. the architecture has been created to evoke physical responses: narrow uneven corridors, voids without lighting or heating, sloping walls and spaces that can be seen but not accessed. it's one of the most astounding buildings I've ever visited. and I visit it every time I'm here.

last time I came however, there was an addition of an installation in one of libeskind's 'voids' - a space that runs the height of the building and has no lighting or heating. the installation is called fallen leaves and today I took some pictures...


the work was created by menashe kadishman and is both a memorial to the holocaust, and also dedicated to all innocent victims of war.
the artist asks you to walk over the hundreds of faces made of sheet metal. but when you do, they echo and reverberate throughout the space and so once you are walking in the installation all you want to do is get out. but if you leave quickly there are ramifications: more noise and a difficult uneven surface. this work is eerie, and makes you quiet and reflect on the faces you are walking over. it's a profound experience, in a profoundly experiential building...

day 113 - berlin

after the 'wall pickers'...



these sections are now being preserved before they disappear entirely...

day 112 - berlin

'the kiss' depicting Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (USSR) and Erich Honecker (GDR) greeting each other.
the original photograph is equally as passionate although not in a trabant...


these images were taken at the famous east side gallery which is a 1.3km stretch of remaining wall that was painted by artists in 1990 to celebrate the wall's collapse. it's a bit worse for wear now, but I'll put up some more images here in the next few days...


this piece of the wall is at potsdamer platz which was leveled after WWII and then became a large part of the anti-facist protection barrier during the GDR.

this piece is in front of the new sony centre and says: at this point the first gap appeared in 1989 in the Berlin wall

day 111 - berlin

the government has meticulously documented traces of the wall and the anti-facist protection barrier and so yesterday we went to find some of them.

these 'goose neck' light posts were designed specifically for the death strip and the numbers printed on them marked the limit of the patrol area. this is limit 35 in section 13...


the photo on the left is a void left in the hinterland on gartenstraße next to the railway. the old wall next to the train lines was used as an additional part of the protection barrier, but we had to climb it to see this void. I knew the void was there (from the government website) but the train wall seemed to present a difficulty in finding it. kindly someone had thought about that and had left foot markings and ropes to get up and over the wall! everything is an adventure here...

day 110 - berlin

there is a 'wall memorial' on Bernauer Straße in mitte that has re-constructed a section of the wall, the death strip and its installations and barriers.

on the left you can see how the wall looked and behind it, you can see one of the many cemeteries that was decimated to make way for the death strip. the 'no man's land' photos I took on the first day come from this area. on the right you can see the renovated wall from the western side which would have been convered in graffiti...


this is one of the electrical control boxes situated in the death strip. in the 4th incarnation of the wall (it kept getting improved) there were automatic weapons triggered by trip wires in addition to the numerous guards in the watch towers and flood lights...

the memorial information talks about this section of the wall: "Bernauer Straße became especially symbolic of the inhumanity of the Berlin Wall: Because of the way the border was drawn in this area - the houses on the southern side of the street were in the Soviet sector, while the sidewalks in front of them belonged to the French sector - the Wall had an especially dramatic impact here. When the border troops started walling up the windows on the ground floor of these houses in August 1961, people attempted to escape to the western part of the city through the windows on the upper floors. Pictures of these escape attempts were seen around the world. Later the tenants living on this side of the street were evicted, and the houses were torn down in 1965. Only the ground floor façades remained; these were used as part of the border wall until 1979."

day 109 - berlin

I've been riding around trying to capture the traces of buildings that have been lost. there are so many.

there are such clear scars of buildings that have been bombed or pulled down because of damage or because they were in the way of the 'protection barrier'. it's quite disconcerting when you come across holes in the facades that reveal such a clear action. what is even more disconcerting is that although most have been left and are obvious in their disappearance, often things have just been built around these holes (rather than them being re-built which is happening more now), making something completely new, that isn't quite new...


there is this gorgeous michael ondaatje poem about scars which questions whether you would tell a new lover about a scar from an incident in the past. do you hide it? or tell them the details about something they can never be involved in? I'm not sure what the answer is in this case...

day 108 - berlin

back at the demolision site of palast der republik - this major scar within city is still causing controversy.

this building housed the government of the GDR (and cafes, discoteques and even a cinema) that was built on the even older site of the berlin city palace which was damaged in WWII and consequently pulled down. during the cold war, east berliners used this building to meet, socialise and experience life. it was more than just a government building, it was a symbol of normal (and interesting) life.


but after reunification the building ceased to have a use and was re-claimed by artists. it became a haus of experimentation, innovation and amazing experiences. so this symbol of repression also housed hope, experimentation and was the funkiest place in town in two different decades.

a torn city has inhabitants also torn about what should be kept, what is a symbol of opression, what is a symbol of transformation and who should make these decisions...

> go to a lovely film about the palast looking at these ideas here...

day 107 - berlin

one of hitler's bunkers built for the people in berlin that also housed anti-aircraft guns on its roof.
this bunker is now almost hidden by trees in Humboldt-Hain park...


after reunification, the government tried to dismantle this bunker but found the infrastructure too solid.
so, they piled the rubble from the aborted attempts near the remains, forming a small hill which is now covered with trees. the remaining half has been left for rock-climbers and the curious...

day 106 - berlin

this watch tower (click to enlarge), now surrounded by pink apartments, is one of the few left in berlin. the official GDR name for the wall, these watch towers and the 'death strip' that had automatic weapons triggered by trip wires, was the anti-facist-protection wall.

the remains of the jagged wall that was part of this anti-facist defense system is about 300 metres from this rare remaining watch tower...


this watch tower is now a memorial and is called after Gunter Litfin, the first person shot on the anti-facist-protection wall on the 24th of august 1962 – 11 days after the wall was erected...

day 105 - berlin

this building has been left untouched since WWII and still has bullet holes everywhere...


when I first visited this city ten years ago, there were bullet holes in buildings everywhere. it's not so common now, but the front of this building on oberberger str. in fashionable mitte, reveals a trace of the unrest that was here for so long. the buildings either side have rendered these traces away, but three doors up, a renovated building has left two large bullet-riddled sections of their facade as a reminder...

day 104 - berlin

this small ten day project is about berlin scars. so an obvious place to start is with the death strip and the berlin wall. in mitte, the geographic centre of berlin, and part of the old east, the wall took a leap into the west to annex this old centre.
after reunification, this part of town became super-hip. brad pitt has an apartment here. but right in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate in town is part of the old no man's land between the walls, which has still not been re-claimed... (click on images to enlarge)







lest we forget: there is no forgetting here. when the wall was erected, all the buildings in this grassy area were removed to make the 'death strip' and the buildings that were left (including these) had their windows blocked up to stop 'escape' - people were even forced to start entering their houses from the back door.

wherever the wall was, the foundations have, where possible, been preserved. this is another angle of the same area on bernauer str. with the edge of the wall scarring across the street as a permanent reminder. this area was one of the most famous streets during the divided city as the walls were so close you could see into the gardens across the 'street'...

day 94

the construction in the middle of this picture is palast der republik which was built in the 70s to house the east german government. it was built on the site of the berlin city palace that was bombed in WWII and then demolished in the 50s. but now, for a number of reasons (including asbestos walls) it is once again, a building in the process of demolition, symbolically taking years to disappear.


but most inhabitants of this city take this kind of change for granted: when I asked what had happened to the empty centre of this church, the unemotional answer was: an american bomb.

day 93

this cafe on schwedter str. in mitte is so über that is has no name. while I joke that things in paris are fabulous, berlin-nonchalance cannot be reproduced lightly...








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day 92

tonight was the final of the euro cup 08 (yep, that's a soccer game - I had to ask too) and we went to an old dis-used transmissions factory in prenzlauer berg to watch it: 800 german fans willing deutchland to be victorious over spain. alas, they lost...


the line to get into this exclusive venue and remanent of the past went around the block. they locked the gates two hours before it started and inside there was nothing but beer, chorizo and national spirit...

day 91

finally in berlin for a few days of inspiration...






I just love this city - it's so comforting. while it's large and unwieldy, it's also like a small town.
it's a city of contrasts and contradictions and scarring. and somehow it's captured my heart...

day 90

during a 12 hour transit in london en route to berlin...

day 70

fred's niece anaëlle on the river mayenne in the west of france...



and her gorgeous sister éléa...

day 69

saint michel has been built on an island with a massive tidal range (which can reach 15m), so during the day you can walk around it on the sand, but by 7.30 at night the car park is flooded. although there are more tourists here than at eurodisney, the inside (80m above the sea) is as spectacular as the outside...


during the 100 year war, this was the only place in northwestern france not to fall to the english...

day 65

last day in burgundy started with having breakfast in dijon - the mustard capital of the universe - where we were seated next to this portly young man smoking up a storm and drinking beer at 9am. we were only envious for a short minute though as the day held mustard tasting poured on tap, medieval towns, an active abbey since the 8th C and perhaps some more wine tasting. some of my favourite things...

day 64

still in bugundy and after a morning strolling in between phesants with their feathers still on, cheeses by the truck load and meats that were unrecognisable, we decided to go to one of the famous wine caves.

while the english word cave is grotte in french, and the french word cave simply means cellar for us, the dampness, cobwebs and black widows guarding the entrances, meant these words clearly overlapped.
while the caves (and their owners) were freaky, the wine was delightful...

day 63

we went to burgundy for a few days and did some of my favourite things...
goat's cheese wrapped in proscuiutto, garlic snails in butter and a new cheese to accompany each wine.

day 35

today we went on a day trip to belgium. brugge is a small town called the 'venice of the north' and is so charming even the tourists look inviting. new streets are built to look 400 years old and the basilica has a 'blood soaked cloth with the congealed blood of christ' which you can line up and touch, for a price.

en route to one of the 678 shops selling hand made chocolate
where the makers have shaved their hands so as not to spoil the chocolate...