Living with the gods

Last year I created several artworks inspired by Melusina, the two-tailed mermaid, a figure that really fascinates me – the Melusina is an old matriarchal symbol uniting the erotic and the motherly aspect of the female nature, two aspects we have been gaslighted by patriarchy to perceive as a contradiction but which, of course, always have been two sides of one and the same coin. 

These are two of my favorite works, an aluminum sculpture I created after a papercut and a lithography. These two were ordered together by an art collector from Vienna. In the last years, a few collectors have mentioned to me that they feel that certain artworks they purchased from me protect and guard their homes, and I have to admit that my artwork being perceived that way makes me happy – because sometimes, some of my figures also remind me of old guardian spirits. 

It is, of course, not difficult to tell where they come from. What has influenced my work the most are my journeys, and what I discovered on them: From ancient temples on the Arabian peninsula where weather and time has washed away the faces and limbs of deities to the archaic smiles of greek goddesses after being kissed by Buddha, to the endless strips of Italian Frescoes repeating the stories of their holy book over and over, Islamic miniature painters veiling the faces of their saints with flames, and mythological creatures in the patterns of carpets, to deities so old that their names have been forgotten by everyone and new ones had to be invented, and most importantly, the thousands and thousands of deities living in India. 

For most of the time in human history, art and religion have been closely intertwined. Religion always has needed art, but art doesn’t need religion and has turned away from it, for the best reasons. But as enlightened as we might be, or think we are, there is and always will be a great need of the human soul to surround itself with magic. 

In the West though, we no longer feel the need for deities, and much less to lend a face to them: Our gods have started to fade away. Sometimes we go into a church and in the dim light of a candle we see a blackened altarpiece that depicts the gods and goddesses of yesterday. They look half-asleep, turned away from us, as if they were behind veils. They have become museal. It is clear that they are not amongst us anymore. 

In other places in the world, the gods are still alive. Just go South, perhaps to some Mediterranean islands, and in every corner you find shrines where a candle burns day and night, burning for the Virgin Mary, who once was Venus, who once was Aphrodite, who once was Al-Uzza, who once was Inanna. 

Big bright gods are ruling now great parts of the world, each of them ruling in a totalitarian manner that leaves no space for any other god, much less a goddess, but the dark corners he (it’s always a he) spares, because he doesn’t like darkness and he doesn’t like corners, are the place where small deities live. 

In the East, you find all sorts of creatures protecting spaces humans have created for themselves – rooms, households, temples, streets. They live on the margins of our lives in their niches and tiny houses, almost like the small animals sharing the spaces of us humans, and I must admit that it has happened to me that I mistook a god’s house for a birdhouse. Everything and anything can be a god, because god, of course, can be everything and anything: A bird, a stone, a sexual organ even.

Unlike the big god, this old monopolist, who’s grown so tall he has become out of control, a caricature almost, these small deities co-exist in some kind of spiritual democracy with humans, and with other deities. They‘re not aloof creatures who sit clouds and judge, but they live amongst us, and their tasks are humble and important. They are our spiritual housemates: If you feed them, they teach you that what you nourish nourishes you. They provide company, blessing, protection, mutual care, characteristics in which they, again, resemble certain pets. Others are mirrors of aspects of ourselves or of aspects the world we like to be reminded of, some even are a way for people who have died to continue to exist in some way. 

There are many reasons for a god to exist. 

But most importantly, they are representatives of the other, or however you might call it, they lend a human face to that which is faceless and make it something you can face, something you can address: They are a way to communicate with to something that is too big to be communicated with. You can talk to them, and they stand and listen, and I think this is their most important aspect: 
They are an embodiment of a sentiment human beings need to survive: That on this earth, we are, essentially, in a safe place. Through them, our deepest inside can communicate with the farthest outside.

You don’t need to be religious, and not even spiritual, to have a god. The moment you see a thing as more than a thing, the moment you attach a sentiment or a meaning beyond its mere function to it, you have created a god. 

I’ve seen many goddesses and gods on my journeys through the East, and some even in the West. I’ve seen their faces, which sometimes looked as astonished as mine, sometimes their features were washed away, some where alive and some were dead, and sometimes it was a stone that was worshipped, a stone onto which someone had painted an eye. 
I’ve met deities in lively churches and dormant temples, in street corners and in museums and in books, and sometimes in the houses of people. I’ve been a guest in houses of gods I’ve never heard of, local deities that only exist in a city, or even only in a single household. I’ve met many strange deities, while others, like the face of Botticelli‘s Venus, always has been as familiar to me as the face of my mother. And somewhere, deep inside of me, I’ve stored all these glances, these faces, these personalities of this enormous family of beings that exist, and don’t exist. They all sleep inside of me now, and sometimes when I make an artwork, they become alive and real again, and I recognize their faces in what I just drew, or sculpted, or painted.

And other people recognize them too. Maybe not as what they were when I saw them, or as what I intended them, or thought that I intended them to be, but as whatever they are meant to be now, and god knows what that is. And if they are meant that they bring a spirit of protection to some household, if they’re picking up that old, honorable godly duty of guarding over something, I’m content with it.

Melmedas – a story from Hormuz Island in the Persian Gulf

Some days ago an Iranian friend told me about Melmedas, a two-tailed mermaid from Hormuz island.

Hormuz Island, a small island in the Persian Gulf, is largely unknown nowadays, but once, it was one of the most important harbors in the middle east and one of the richest trading cities in the world. Hormuz Island was legendary, a well-known metaphor for wealth in the Western world.
The island is small and completely barren – it’s all rocks with a few shrubs here and there. There is no source of water. The sun is hot and white all year round.
Hormuz island still has some treasures: Its colored rocks, a fascinating landscape of deep red, ochre, and blue, which makes it unique in the world and beloved by Iranian artists.

Due to some strange circumstances, a few years ago, I ended up on Hormuz island.

The sun was about to set in Bandar Abbas when I entered the ferry to Hormuz island. It was a small ferry, and there were not many people on it. There was a congregation of bearded Mullahs and a few women wrapped in flowered hijabs, hiding their eyes behind masks that were clearly of African heritage.
Many people who live here are descendants of African slaves. You can sense Africa and India, on their food, in their clothes, in their music.
The South of Iran is a confusing place. I’ve been to many cultural melting pots, but this place, maybe because it is so desolate, so barren, gives you a feeling that is hard to describe. You cannot describe this place as a “melting pot”, because what you see does not feel whole, it feels fragmented.
It somehow makes the needle of your inner compass spin restlessly. You walk through the bazaars, one moment you think you are in India; the next moment you are in Africa. Things feel familiar, but the place as a whole feels infinitely foreign, foreign to itself even. You feel like you are everywhere, and nowhere.

On the ferry, there were some women. We tried to talk, but their English was worse than my Farsi, which already was barely existent. They couldn’t believe that I was alone and kept asking me about my shohare, which means husband in Farsi.

Before I had reached it, I knew that this island was a very improbable place to find myself in.

There was no hotel or restaurant. I was sleeping on a carpet in an empty room next to the ocean and ate in an informal restaurant in the living room of some family. Hormuz Island was a few houses, a small port, and a couple of fishermen on the beach. And the rocks.
There were landscapes of blood-red rocks and metallic beaches with silver sand so hot that you almost couldn't touch it. On the coast, men were carving huge fantastical ships out of wood that seemed out of space and time, and there was a sad Portuguese fort, decayed, displaced, almost gone, infinitely far away in time. Inside, you found a couple of stray dogs.

There was not much more on this strange island.

But now I know that two-tailed mermaids live on this island as well. What fascinates me about the Melmedas is that unlike the Melusina, two-tailed mermaid from Northern Europe, who has spread her tails joyfully in a gesture that feels almost sexual, her tails are folded over each other, which gives her an air of reserve, of prudence, maybe of hostility. They remind me of scissors. Like other female water spirits, embodying lust and danger, the Melmedas favorite pastime is to entice men. They appear in the shape of a beautiful young woman, hiding her two fishtails under the water. Once the man is in her net, turns into an ugly old woman and rips him into pieces with her fishtails.

I wonder what the fishermen from Hormuz would have told me about them.

Seven years

I made my first ceramic sculpture in India, seven years ago. I was at an artist residency in the middle of the jungle of Baroda, working with a group of artist friends. There were cobras who shed their skin in front of our houses before dawn, monkeys who stole our bras, and peacocks who sang their lonely songs from the dark foliage at night.

I remember the studio buildings as stunningly beautiful, giant palaces of red bricks, and I was working in the printmaking studio, which was on top of a hill overlooking the jungle and which you could reach by climbing up a long and steep stairway that seemed endless under the white sun of the tropics.
On the foot of that hill was the ceramics studio, where Deveshi Sahgal, an artist whom I met there and who has become a great friend since, was working on huge sculpture, alone.

I don’t remember much about what clay I used or which glaze or what tools. I have no idea what I did, and that's probably because I had no idea what I did.
I remember Iria Do Castelo, another artist who came down with us to the ceramics studio, creating a precious head at an incredible pace, and told me that later she would cut it off and empty it, both of which amazed me, her working pace and the cutting off.
I, working much much slower, was amazed how my artwork, which was all line and flatness, translated into the third dimension. I have never been able to draw hands, but I learned that I could sculpt them. Also, I was surprised by the realism the third dimension brought to my artwork.

For whatever reason, one of the sculptures I made was a pregnant woman, and someone bought it at our exhibition we later held in New Delhi. Someone with a pregnant friend, I think. The one you see my working on the photo is called “horny woman”, she took me ages to make, and I still have her.
During the following years, traveling around the world, I worked in many printmaking studios, but I did not get in touch which clay again. It just was nowhere to be seen. But it stayed in my head. Not at the forefront, but somewhere in a dark spot in the back of my head.

The seed was sown, and it took seven years to grow.

During these years, I was a person with wings, I flew around a lot, carrying nothing but a sketchbook, and occasionally, some aluminum plates. Light stuff. I ask myself why I only started ceramics last year, and I imagine that maybe, working with ceramics requires some kind of roots. It is heavy, earthy, inert, it needs a lot of space. It needs roots, something which took me a long time to grow.

And so it happened that I started to work in ceramics after I spent a lot of time in my home country in the Austrian Alps. While the pandemic has stirred up the world, it brought a lot of calm to my life. Things have slowed down. I don’t travel as much. If I’ve been a hunter, now I’m more like a fisher. The pond does not move, but it becomes wider and deeper. One year ago, I started to work with clay, this summer I started to work with porcelain.

Ceramics, surprisingly, has a lot in common with printmaking. The suspense, the element of chance, the sense of serendipity. It can be immensely frustrating and it is incredibly satisfying. It can be the best, and it can be the worst (it is a lot like life itself). Another thing printmaking and ceramics have in common is that in these fields, you never stop learning. It is like a cosmos, a cosmos that is vital, fertile, and infinite, you can never fully explore it, and this is the beauty of it. You can walk around it forever and still encounter things that make you wonder, and make your hands feel brand new. I have just begun to walk around in it, and it makes me think of a poem I once wrote on a later stay in India:

Half of the world

When I die
I want to be able to say:
I explored half of this beautiful world
and left the other half
to my beautiful imagination

Photo: A&Y

If you want to see more of this creative India episode, here you can find SAVARI, my sketchbook from that journey

Veils - Notes from the Thar Desert

When we came to the camels‘ watering hole, the herdsman asked you who you were, and when you lifted my green scarf you had wrapped around your face he told you that he had known you as a small child, and pulling the water out from deep under the sand he asked you: Why do you cover your face?

– I’m not used to the sun anymore as I was as a child. I live in the city now and my face can’t be burnt black.

I wandered around these steep, long-legged animals as if they were tree trunks of some dry and ancient forest, and all of a sudden I had the overwhelming feeling that I was a small witness of something earth-old, something that was reaching back so long in history as the names Sirius, Aldebaran and Rigel were tall, something that had been there for thousands of years and had been repeating itself over and over ever since. And for the tiny, but endless circle of a split second I understood there was no such thing as time.

– What is he saying?

– The water is getting less every year. Soon there won’t be camels anymore. People are moving away from here to the city. Because nothing is here.

You show me the house of your grandparents in the distance of the horizon, hidden behind layers and layers of dry fields and thorny shrubs.

In the late afternoon we walk through wide fields of green wheat, lush and unexpected in the desert like an oasis, and under a huge acacia tree we would sit down and become a temporary part of the landscape.

The horizon remains enormous in every direction. And how many stories there are hidden in this leaden, forbidding land, silently waiting, longing to be told, like nests in which birds with colored plumage are hiding, improbable and marvellous in this dry, faded land.

– When my grandfather got married, he did not see the face of my grandmother for months because during the day there were other men and at night there was no light

That story to me was so far away in time, in space, in everything, that it seemed unreal, almost like a myth. But then I remembered how close their house was and that I had just seen it with my own eyes. Did that mean that we were unreal, too?

The last hours of the afternoon bloomed until all of a sudden, dawn approached and erased another day which later I would remember blurry like your face now is for me, veiled by layers of new days of which you were not part anymore.

(Thar Desert, 29. February 2017)

The image shows the artwork “the escapist”, an hand-colored aquatint etching. It is available here

My lover is waiting behind the door: The poetry that annoys the Taliban

(für den deutschen Text nach unten scrollen)

In 2018, I visited Pakistan for the first time. Arriving with a broken hand in a cast and not being able to paint, I concentrated on collecting stories. I was so fascinated with the storytelling culture I encountered there that I decided to return the following year. This time, I was invited to stay with a couple in Lahore, well-known intellectuals and both of them well beyond the age of retirement, but still working relentlessly, spending entire days out of the house, engaged in all sorts of cultural, artistic, and development work all over Pakistan.

On most days, they would only appear late at night, when we would meet around the kitchen table for dinner, delicious dishes served by their delightful maid with whom I could only communicate with wild gestures and smiles, and who I’m sure would also have had a lot of stories to tell, would we have had a common language to communicate with each other.
It was during these nights that the old couple told me the most fascinating stories about Pakistan, some of which were funny, some of which were sad – most of them were funny and tragic at the same time. So at night, I would listen to their stories, while I spent the mornings on the the rooftop, painting artworks inspired by these stories.
One of the most fascinating stories they told me was the story of Dappa.

Dappa is the secret and defiant oral poetry of Pakhtun women in Afghanistan and West Pakistan. It is practiced during daily tasks such as fetching water from the well and which (both women leaving the house for whatever task and practicing poetry) naturally did not delight the Taliban.

Some examples of Dappa are: You’re talking about the honor of your daughter, until the money jingles in your pocket, or When will you leave the house, old man, my lover is already waiting behind the door to kiss my rosy cheeks. 

In one village, a Western NGO decided to “improve” the life of the people and install running water in each household. The result was that the women had no reason to go out anymore and had to stay at home (because god beware a woman walking around only for her own enjoyment), which naturally pleased the Taliban, but not the women, who complained with the NGO: You thought you were improving our lives, but you have destroyed our culture.

But there is a somewhat happy ending to the story of the women of this village: They found another place, where they could, undisturbed by the Taliban and other men, practice Dappa. 

This and similar stories from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa I was told last year in Pakistan, where I made a series of paintings inspired by my stay, including this one. It’s a woman in traditional clothes with water pitchers painted with symbols alluding to themes of Dappa poetry. The word Dappa itself is an onomatopoeia, coming from the sound of the waterpots being rhythmically beaten to accompany the spoken word.

It is very dangerous to travel to KP, there is a lot of terrorism, and the risk of being kidnapped is extremely high for foreigners. In fall 2020, I would have had a safe opportunity to travel to KP and to collect Dappa verses, which I was extremely excited about. But then, the pandemic happened and I couldn’t go.

One day, roaming in the poetry section of a Muslim bookstore in Singapore, to my great delight, I discovered a little treasure called Songs of Love and War – a wonderful collection of Dappa verse gathered by an Afghan scholar and poet named Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, who was assassinated in Peshawar in the 80ies.

In Lahore, I had only heard poems about love – funny, tender and, given the cruel circumstances female life is subjected to in Pakhtun culture, deeply tragic. Majrouh collected poems from war refugees in refugee camps in Afghanistan. The Pakhtun people always have been warriors: The different tribes are always engaged in war, and this culture of violence obviously does not stop at the house door. Also in these circumstances that make every woman double victim, both of war and of domestic violence, she keeps her defiance, cleverly turning the tradition of the glorification of male violence against himself: Man, if you don’t win this war, don’t even bother come back home.

Her words become her weapons, they are her only weapons. This is the power of poetry, which is manifold and which here becomes a means of survival, a way to speak and live a woman’s truth, of retaining her dignity and sanity in a world of brutal and senseless male oppression and violence.
The water hole and the poetry that is practiced there becomes an oasis in a wasteland: Where there is poetry, there is hope. There exist thousands and thousands of these oases, in which a world that is not allowed to exist, but which has to exist, is created, recreated, through language – or rather, preserved.
Because it is not a new world that is described here, it is a world that has always existed, and always will, even though nowadays it’s an invisible world, hidden behind veils. 
This world is the foundation of human existence, essential and precious, it’s the fertile soil underneath the stage on which the shadow theatre, that great drama, the tragicomedy of the male rule is being played. 
And even though this hidden world is already and always present – in the oasis sleeps a great future. Its time, which will mean flourishing and revelation, has not come yet, but it will come. In the meantime, it’s blooming in the oases of hope, where it is being spelled out over and over, being evoked in the rhythm of the clapping of the hands, in the slower rhythm of the fetching of water, and finally in the great, all-embracing rhythm which underlies One day, the great drama of men, which feels like our past and our present and our future, but actually is nothing but a dark pause between two beats of the great drum, will end, the source of water will break open and flow into the desert, and flowers will bloom. 

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Mein Liebhaber wartet hinter der Tür: Gedichte, die die Taliban ärgern

Dappa ist die geheime, aufsässige Dichtkunst der Paschtuninnen in Pakistan und Afghanistan, die beim alltäglichen Wasserholen, eine der wenigen Tätigkeiten, für die Frauen das Haus verlassen dürfen, praktiziert wird und welche die Taliban naturgemäß wenig erfreut. Beispiel: Du redest von der Ehre deiner Tochter, bis das Geld in deinen Taschen klingelt. Oder: Wann gehst du endlich aus dem Haus, Alter, mein Liebhaber wartet bereits hinter der Tür, um mich auf meine rosigen Wangen zu küssen.

In einem Dorf kam es zu einer so unglücklichen wie unfreiwilligen Allianz einer westlichen NGO mit den Taliban, als erste beschloss, das Leben der Menschen zu “verbessern” und jedes Haus mit fließendem Wasser zu versorgen. Die tragische Nebenwirkung dieser Maßnahmen war, dass die Frauen keinen Grund mehr hatten, außer Haus zu gehen, und nun zuhause bei ihren Wasserhähnen bleiben mussten.

Die Taliban freuten diese Umstände naturgemäß, die Frauen weniger, und die NGO musste Schimpf und Schande über sich ergehen lassen: Ihr habt unsere Kultur zerstört! 

Die Geschichte dieses Dorfes ging noch halbwegs gut aus, und die Frauen fanden letztendlich einen anderen Ort, wo sie ungestört von den Taliban und anderen Männern Dappa praktizieren konnten. 

Diese und ähnliche Geschichten aus Khyber Pakhtunkhwa erzählte man mir letztes Jahr in Pakistan, wo ich dieses und andere Bilder, inspiriert von Geschichten aus Pakistan malte. Dieses Bild zeigt eine Frau in traditioneller Kleidung, auf ihrem Kopf stapeln sich die Wassertöpfe, die mit Symbolen bemalt sind, die an die Themen von Dappa hinweisen. Das Wort Dappa selber ist eine lautmalerische Nachbildung des mit den Händen auf die Wassertöpfe Schlagens, mit dem das gesprochene Wort mit Rhythmus unterlegt wird.

Letzten Herbst hätte sich mir sogar eine Möglichkeit eröffnet, mit einer Delegation in relativ sicherem Rahmen nach Khyber Pakhtunkhwa zu reisen (denn einfach so kann – oder will – man da nicht hin: Das Entführungsrisiko für AusländerInnen ist extrem hoch) und Dappa-Verse zu sammeln, ein Vorhaben, das leider durch die Pandemie verunmöglicht wurde.

Im Frühjahr 2020, kurz vor dem Ausbruch der Pandemie, fiel mir in der Lyrikabteilung einer muslimischen Buchhandlung in Singapur das Buch Songs of Love and War in die Hände – eine wunderbare Sammlung von Dappa-Versen eines afghanischen Gelehrten und Dichter namens Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, der in den Achtziger Jahren nach Peshawar, eine Grenzstadt zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan, ins Exil ging und dort ermordet wurde. Die Gedichte, die man mir in Lahore erzählte, handelten von der Liebe, waren lustig, liebevoll, oft auch – angesichts der Umstände, unter denen paschtunische Frauen leben müssen – tragisch. Majrouh hingegen, sebst Paschtune, sammelte seine Gedichte in afghanischen Flüchtlingslagern. Die Paschtunen sind kriegerische Stämme, ihre Kultur ist seit jeher von Gewalt und Krieg geprägt. Die von Majrouh gesammelten Texte zeigen, neben der Lust und der Liebe, noch ein anderes, gewalttätige Gesicht einer Stammeskultur, die sich seit Jahrhunderten und Jahrtausenden in einem unaufhörlichen Krieg befindet, ein Krieg, der, naturgemäß, vor der eigenen Haustür nicht halt macht und stets als Dritter zwischen der Beziehung von Frau und Mann steht: Mann! Wenn du diesen Kampf verlierst, brauchst du gar nicht mehr nach Hause kommen.

Dieser Vers ist mir im Kopf geblieben: Er zeigt, dass selbst unter diesen Umständen, die die Frau zum doppelten Opfer der Gewalt machen, der sie als Frau sowohl drinnen und draußen ausgesetzt ist, sie im Geiste aufsässig bleibt und die Poesie dazu verwendet, die unheilbringende Tradition der Verherrlichung männlicher Gewalt und die Logik des Krieges, den er führt, gegen den Mann selbst zu richten. Er zeigt wohl aber auch, dass sie – wie könnte es anders sein – selbst in Logik des Krieges und der Gewalt gefangen ist.

Die Waffen einer Frau ist die Dichtung, das Wort – es sind ihre einzigen Waffen in diesem Krieg. Und hier zeigt sich die Macht der Poesie, die hier zu einer Überlebensstrategie wird. Die Dichtung bietet einen Raum, in dem eine Frau – gemeinsam mit anderen Frauen – ihre Wahrheit aussprechen, leben und sich ihrer immer wieder vergewissern kann, in der sie sein kann, was sie ist: Die Poesie ist die einzige Möglichkeit, ihre Würde und Eigenständigkeit gegenüber dem Mann, und sei es nur in ihrem Innersten, zu bewahren und so ihren Verstand nicht zu verlieren in einer Welt der brutalen und sinnlosen männlichen Unterdrückung und Gewalt.

Das Dichten an der Wasserstelle wird zu einer Oase in einer wüsten Welt: Wo gedichtet wird, gibt es Hoffnung. Abertausende gibt es von diesen Oasen, in denen eine Welt, die nicht existieren darf, aber existieren muss, durch Sprache geschaffen, oder vielmehr bewahrt wird. Denn es ist keinen neue Welt, die da beschrieben wird, sie hat immer schon existiert, wenn auch heute heimlich und unsichtbar, hinter Schleiern. Sie ist die notwendige Grundlage allen menschlichen Seins, das Essentielle, die fruchtbare Erde unter der wackeligen Bühne, auf dem das Schattentheater, die großen Inszenierung, die Tragikomödie der Männerherrschaft gespielt wird. Und trotz ihrer Allgegenwärtigkeit schläft in ihr auch eine große Zukunft: Ihre Zeit, die Blüte und Offenbarung bedeuten wird, ist noch nicht gekommen, aber sie wird kommen. In der Zwischenzeit blüht sie in den Oasen der Hoffnung, wo sie beschrieben wird und ausgesprochen, wo sie immer wieder evoziert wird, im schnellen Rhythmus der Worte und dem Klatschen der Hände, im langsameren Rhythmus des Wasserholens und schließlich im größten, allumfassenden Rhythmus, der alles bestimmt: Eines Tages wird die große Inszenierung der Männer, die gefühlt ewig dauert, aber in Wahrheit nichts anderes ist als die Pause zwischen zwei Trommelschlägen, enden, die Wasserquelle wird aufbrechen und ungehindert in die Wüste fließen, und die Blumen werden wieder blühen.

Travel sketchbooks: Capturing ephemeral countries

This is a portrait of my fellow artist Barbora. I met her in the North East of India, and for one month we shared a room in the jungle-covered hills of Meghalaya, where explored the fascinating culture of the Khasi together and became friends.

When I met her, I was immediately intrigued by her enthusiasm – she had just arrived from a long and complicated journey from Finland but instead of being exhausted, she seemed to burst with energy. Her eyes were beaming as she told us that she had, god knows how, managed to ride on an elephant on the way from Guwahati airport up to the hill, five hours on a bumpy dirt road, which was exhausting enough alone. 

I admired her way of seeing the world, her refreshing personality, which was a charming combination of straightforwardness and tenderness, and I was particularly fascinated by the instant and special connection she had with the Khasi, and I documented a part of her very special story in my book "Meghalaya".

I like to explore countries, cultures, and communities with my sketchbooks, but as much as they are travel books, they are also personal diaries. As much as I am interested in learning a lot about a culture and trying to tell stories about it, for me it is equally important to tell about the context in which I travel and tell about the things that happen in and around me: I am interested uniqueness of the moment. Sometimes I like to compare myself to a sponge, absorbing it all, and I also like to let myself carry away into all sorts of different directions - for example, my Meghalaya book is full of stories not only about Meghalaya, but also contains lots of stories about Assam, because that particular Meghalayan microcosmos I visited was inhabited by an Assamese storyteller whose beautiful stories for me became an important part of the experience. I like that sort of eclecticism because this is just how the world is, chaotic and marvelous. 

My travel sketchbook is not only about observations, but also about relationships, and a fellow traveler at some point becomes as much part of the place as a native – places express themselves through the people who live there, but also through the ones who travel through, and the story that develops between them, like the story of Barbora and Arrowstar, a young archer and soldier from the Khasi hills. 

I hold the pen in my hands, but what speaks in my sketchbooks is not only my voice, but the voice of many. I like it to be a place where everything can be object and everything can be subject. On the same page, you might read things I hear and other things I think in my head, and you might not even be able to tell whose story I’m telling. The story I’m telling is not linear, it’s associative, it’s fragmental, and whatever information is missing is filled out effortlessly by your fantasy: The drawing of Barbora reaching up to the blossoms of a tree and telling me “my heart is too big” only hints the love story that unfolds on a subsequent page. We don’t need to know everything, because sometimes, and especially when it comes to traveling, imagination is more delicious than knowledge. 

Imagine you’re wandering through an exotic market and there this mix of noises and images, you pick up snatches of conversations here and there and you smell things and you see things and there are so many impressions that they start to become blurred: This is the sensation I like to convey, not just this is this and that is that, but something of a more multidimensional, intangible nature, a bit like the way our perception and memory works. 

I am not an observer, I am what happens at a certain place at a certain moment, and it is precisely this experience that I like to capture – or to approach, because it is impossible to capture. And what we call “country” or “city” is a construct that only exists at that moment you step into it – while you believe you exist in it, it exists in you, and only exists in you. It is an experience, it is completely fluid, it is but it is many countries and many cities overlapping, you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends: A place, a country, a city is something that is made of moments, it is ephemeral, and in my sketchbook, I want to convey that taste of this ephemeral, precious place that only exists for a moment, with its voices, faces, stories, patterns. This place that only exists once and then never again. 

This book is the home of a country called Meghalaya that only exists between the pages of the book, the Meghalaya of Barbora and the Assamese storyteller and many others, humans, and spirits, who for a short while, or for an eternity, live between the magic mountains and enchanted forests of Meghalaya: This is a country that ends with the last page. And starts to live again somewhere else, as something else. 

My book Meghalaya is available here.
And this is Barbora.