I’ve been a little slow to start going through my photos from this Summer’s two-month trip around the Iberian peninsula.
I stayed for about two weeks in the town of Carballo, which is 35km from A Coruña, 45km from Santiago de Compostela and 10km from the nearest beach. It’s a small, quiet town full of empty buildings, half-finished or abandoned, slapped together with an obvious disregard for any kind of building code. Most of the bars are mostly empty most of the time, and presumably they couldn’t stay open at all if they had to pay the kind of rent you have to pay for premises in places where people want to live. There is life and music if you know where to look, though, and it’s an easy enough journey to the beautiful beaches.
A clear stream runs through Carballo, past the bus station. close to where I was staying, with fish and bats and dragonflies. It leads quickly out of the bricks and concrete, into the woods, like an artery. The air is fresh, and the hazelnuts you can pluck from the trees in late summer are like a taste of heaven.
The last night I was there, I was woken by a mighty rainstorm battering against the thin roof of my attic flat. It’s the rain, above all, that makes Galicia so gorgeous, once you get outside of its depressed not-quite-seaside towns – the rain that feeds its lush forests and sustains its wide green fields. The countryside throughout northern Iberia is stunning; you might miss the sunshine, but it’s worth getting wet for.
I spent much of this summer travelling overland around the Iberian Peninsula – the parts of the world commonly known as Spain and Portugal. I was teaching and looking after kids at a summer camp in the Basque Country for two weeks, and then I had about a week and a half travelling in a south-westerly direction before turning north to attend the ‘Bridges‘ conference on maths and art, in Coimbra, Portugal, where I was showing my interactive exhibit known as ‘Kenneth‘ and a large canvas print of one of my generative artworks. Finally I headed further north, to Galicia, and spent about two weeks there before looping around to the East and spending a couple of days in Bilbao before going on into France on the way back to Britain.
All of these places warrant proper writing about, but here are the major stops of my journey, in inevitably-misleading bullet-point, key-word form, in any case – if nothing else, this will act as memory aid for me:
- London:
Family time
- Paris:
Long night
- Irun:
Fiesta; oops
- Gorozika:
Summercamp, burnout
- Las Rozas:
Forest, pool
- Madrid:
Heat, galleries
- Cordoba:
HEAT, mosque
- Cadiz:
Breeze, banyans
- Sevilla:
Wall, Macarena
- Lisboa:
Tiles, trams
- Coimbra:
Conference, hills
- Carballo:
Stream, emptiness
- Santiago:
Pilgrims, curlicues
- Oviedo:
Mists, wandering
- Bilbao:
Fiesta, gays
I crouch below the eyeline of the crowd
Half-watching Water dance, half in-camera.
The drumming and the wash-rags beating loud
I strive to trap in electronic amber.
With flashes or by squatting frozen-still
I take away the movement of the night.
This festival of Nowness on the hill
Distilled in slices, slides for future sight.
The energy of life in human form
Is tumbling before me, painted red.
The spirit of the forest is reborn!
I’m turning dials and living in my head.
The bonfire smokes the wastage of last year
And sparks a blaze in me – and now - I’m here.
(more…)
Climate Camp (or the Camp for Climate Action, in full) is a reaction to the failures of our governments to take anything like the steps that science tells us will be necessary to avert catastrophic climate change, and to the failures of our democratic system to represent dissenting voices. When even majority opinions are readily ignored if they conflict with the plans of the ruling powers, people are encouraged to take politics into their own hands.
(more…)
One day, many years ago now, I was taking my dog for a walk on Hampstead Heath when I met two men who had just hauled a bicycle up into this tree.
I think that’s as far as their plan went – they didn’t have a camera to record the moment for posterity, or anything like that, so it was probably quite lucky that I was wandering past at that moment.
On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever put the picture online until now – and though I’m pretty sure I gave them my email address, they never did get in touch to ask for a copy.
