These weeks I spend together with a group of people – or rather: friends, since we have known and appreciated each others for years, mostly. It is very much alike the NUrope community in some aspects – such as the friendliness and the communicative atmosphere – but unlike the merited persons who constitute NUrope (and other institutions), these friends have often been spoken of as ‘disabled’… which may be logical from some normative point of view, but certainly not as a general characteristic, or – especially – when it comes to the creative exploring of invisible space… which is our common venture here.

participants’ self portraits; wax crayons, watercolour on paper

calling Apollo; construction with armoury irons, dyed silk fabric, rope and thread, 5 x 5 x 2,5 metres

Finally, it’s there: a zikkurat (since one of us, Ayad, is of Iraqi origin) built in fairly cheap and easy-to-handle materials (since we couldn’t hire a thousand construction workers from Kuweit) to honour the honey-coloured light. It has been hard work, and pure joy.

Measuring and dyeing.

iron construction with dyed silk sample

Gathering in the morning in the Blue atelier; now we are beginning to close up. Since each one of this small group has been working independently during the last weeks, we now share experiences and show pieces of work. When our friends and colleagues return to school next Tuesday, we will welcome them by displaying what has been achieved – in the two chosen sites as well as in the greenhouse situated between them.

Before leaving for the weekend, we recreate the Symposion: each student has in advance read one of the speeches which constitute Plato’s story; no one, though, has read the whole text. We take turns in referring the different views on Love: the young man’s and the more experienced, the physician’s, the comedian’s and the orator’s tales; they are all retold and, through the referrer, become altogether contemporary. I improvise Diotima, the old woman, speaking through Socrates – before the symposium breaks up… in the text by the arrival of Alkibiades, in our group just by quiet dissolving into private life… but we are not all finished yet, we’ll meet on Tuesday. So, until then: thank you all, so far!

Another day under the sun. At times, this is a logic construction stretching towards a radiant sky while the plummet is a silent reminder of weight and matter – at times, it is rather a sprawling chaos of armoury irons and steel wire. A salamander slips through the dry grass of last year and stays a short while.

iron and silk; construction work for the hilltop site

Our colleagues and friends in Greece send us greetings: in Athens, Delphi and Epidauros they experience the remnants, the reminiscences perhaps, of antiquity – while we in Järna enjoy the sweetness of a new spring. Sap is rising and trees are coming into leaf in the garden. The beekeeper is busy working by the hives, and so are the bees – golden dots whizzing back and forth in the sunshine. The return of Persephone and presence of Apollo is easily imagined here. And wasn’t Apollo’s priestess once known as the Delphic bee? Didn’t Apollo learn from the Thriai to become a seer?

Thriai or bee-goddesses; golden placques from Rhodes, 7th century BCE; photo Jastrow/British Museum (Wikipedia)

Apollo speaks to his brother: “There are certain holy ones, sisters born… three virgins, gifted with wings: their heads are besprinkled with white /barley/ meal, and they dwell under a ridge of Parnassus. These are teachers of divination apart from me, the art which I practised while yet a boy… From their home they fly now here, now there, feeding on honey-comb and bringing all things to pass… ” (Homeric hymn IV; to Hermes, 4th century BCE?)

And, even before the times of Apollo, there was Gaia; “For they say that in the earliest times the oracular seat belonged to Earth, who appointed as prophetess at it Daphnis, one of the nymphs of the mountain… The Delphians say that the second temple was made by bees from beeswax and feathers, and that it was sent to the Hyperboreans by Apollo.” (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2nd century CE; Daphnis was one of the ‘virgins, gifted with wings’ or Thriai)

At this hyperborean shore, today we bow to Gaia and to Apollo.

beehives under the hilltop

At the hilltop: catching the light that travels invisibly through air.

in a low place/from a high place

One hidden, nameless space sheltered by rocks and trees, with graceful patterns of shades and light flickering over the ground all covered with spring flowers; a sweet secret.

And the other site much like its contrary – the very highest spot on this ground, and the oldest too: the first to rise out of the sea thousands of years ago. Climbing up there, one is exposed to winds and sun, and the landscape below in its turn exposed to one’s view. A place of clarity.

Now, from sounds to things: the qualities to be sensed in these two different places are what we have to work with. Each student has set up her/his own task and chosen the materials to be used – techniques ranging from watercolour and acrylic painting to felting. Some of the pieces are to be installed in situ, others are studio work.