The Latest at Goethe

In September five scholarships holders from Germany moved into Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto. They will be able to work on their projects in the artists’ residence for three months. However, concentration and confusion are often at close quarters here. A workshop report by Franz Anton Cramer.

Experience overseas has become a kind of daily bread, not only for artists and participants in residency programmes. Yet the mobility offered by globalization is only one side of the coin, for in most cases people travel to places near and far on the globe to prepare exhibitions, take part in festivals, hold lectures, play concerts and carry out workshops. There is a clearly defined job to be done and some local experiences are then possible surrounding that job.

To travel without any such specific job and for a longer period of time is, by contrast, a new experience – at least for me. After the first few weeks as a scholarship holder at the Villa Kamogawa I have compiled an abundance of notes, programmes from theatre and dance performances I have seen, emails, flyers and draft texts. By the time my stay here comes to an end, they should have become organized and reached a result.

Photo gallery: Reactors, reactions, faces

But, what result? It gets ever harder to say the more intensively I experience my time abroad. For the plan with which I came here – to better understand the function of the term “contemporary” in an artistic context and in particular to confront it with traditional forms – was generated, of course, without the knowledge of what would await me here.

If the implementable task of such an overseas stay is to sharpen one’s own questions and update the ideal material taken along, to adapt it to the “quiet course of reality” (as François Jullien calls it in his study of Chinese aesthetics), then it first involves letting go of the preconceived subject. Yet because the subject becomes blurred, the questions gain clarity.

Too beautiful to be true

Kyoto, I had heard many a time, is too beautiful. It is a city with too many sights, too much history, too much spirituality – a Japanese museum, but not a place where life is pulsating. Now, one can understand many different things as “pulsating life.” The fact that one can only park one’s bicycle in specially marked places, frequently even for a parking fee; that every purchase at a supermarket for those who are unfamiliar with the language becomes an adventure because one never knows what is actually inside the colourfully labelled packages; that the taxi drivers wear uniforms and white gloves; that dried octopus tentacles are served as snacks to accompany a beer – all of these are tourists’ anecdotes.

Yet to discover the precision with which everything is regulated and how seriously a wish, a concern or an idea is taken in every case is what is more formative for the development of one’s work. This makes one first reconsider what one says. For once it is said, a concern is out there and pursued until it is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

This comprehensive feeling of responsibility for a circumstance, an agreement, a process or an idea may also be the deeper reason of the sometimes-bewildering courtesy with which one is treated. But most of all it is a quiet challenge to concentrate. And this concentration on what must be done opens up new fields to one’s artistic, or in my case, essay-writing activities.

Pending change

The impressions, experiences and stimulation that one receives result in only as much meaning as one is able to give them from the context. The more unfamiliar and confusing this context is, the more difficult it is to put it all together correctly.

In Kyoto this gap between my own paradigms and the influence of the surroundings is particularly large. Yet it is from this gap that I gain more space for new perspectives. I look less strictly at my defined subject and this allows me to work on it with more detachment. The research questions change their aggregate state and the answers remain pending. Nonetheless it continues: precision in liquefaction.

Villa Kamogawa is named after the Kamo River, which flows beside it and through Kyoto, on the banks of which the residents meet for athletic activities, to practice trombone, to fish or eat lunch. Its bed is very shallow and in rainy weather the water level rises immediately, sometimes by half a metre in thirty minutes. This, too, can mean pulsating life.

Where other residency locations are oriented to the dawn and claim their pathos of beginnings or simply a superlative of their own, Kyoto has a river. You can set your subjects afloat on it like paper boats, or like the paper lanterns at the yearly Obon Festival. They will go very far, but I am certain they will not get lost.