Journey to exotic lands
I graduated from College of the Atlantic in June. My plan was to work to create a rooftop garden in Bratislava along with my two friends. We had been given a grant by the Davis Projects for Peace foundation. Four days before we were supposed to begin, the TESCO supermarket (whose roof we were using) cancelled the agreement. The next two months were spent in finding alternative spaces whilst also holding workshops on urban gardening and ethnobotany. Our aim for the garden was to create a space that would be open to anyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religious background. We were especially focussed on addressing incidents of ethnic violence and of economic minorities being pushed out of the city center.
I believe that this component of our project is why we got the peace grant. Being in Bratislava, as an Indian woman, was a learning experience in itself. It is not a very ethnicallydiverse city and I was always aware of my presence contrasting with the different spaces I was in. Many times, I thought that this is how some of my non-Indian friends must feel in India. Though never aggressive, my apparent ‘exotic-ness’ was something people constantly emphasized and drew attention too. This made me look at myself through their perspectives. I began to wonder what it might be like to come here, to Bratislava, as a refugee or migrant worker Does one inhabit a new space without drawing attention to oneself, wearing the clothes and adopting the mannerisms of the
new culture OR does one live in a small community, isolating one’s ideas of home within a safe and impenetrable social bubble? OR does one acknowledge and thrive within these different cultures, allowing them to co-exist, play with, and learn from each other? There is not just one answer. However, in the context of our project, I began to doubt our social interactions and felt it was instead creating an alternative process of exclusion. During our work, meeting with people and whilst holding workshops, we were interacting with majorly white Slovaks who were young, hip and deeply involved in the cultural scene of the city. There was a sense of priviledge. It made me uncomfortable to become part of an alternative gentrification that was slowly taking place throughout the city (in the gourmet farmer’s market that occured every two weeks; in the vintage, retro-fitted cafes; warehouse-located shared office spaces) and neglect the fact that the actual cultural revitalization was needed in the fringe-areas and suburbs of the city, where people
live in towering soviet-remnants of housing colonies with neither gardens nor communal centres. In the last week of July, I left the project because I could not garden (we still did not have a space at the time) and because of the feeling that I was trying to help people without first understanding how I fit into the city and what my role is. I came back to Switzerland to live with Kaspar and began looking for a project. After a week, I began assisting a gardener, author and landscaper in Biel, Sabine Reber, whilst also further unravelling my experiences in Bratislava. At the same time, I was looking for work with migrants and refugees. However, the more I was searching, the more apparent it became that I have yet to understand my own position within these urban environments and that without this, I cannot begin to understand another’s. Here I was, a migrant of sorts, spending days alone walking through the city, with neither finances, plan nor intention. I started to create a picture composed of different personal and communal experiences, some confusing, some illuminating and
some humbling. I began to play with the idea of ‘exotic’ and what it means in different contexts. Today, I cannot say that I have reached an answer but I deeply believe that we must understand ourselves first before trying to help other. I further realized that whilst writing about the project, my experiences and travelling, I have a tendency to remove the personal aspect of my stories, hiding them behind an analysis. Here, I have tried to find a balance between the two. This magazine is a space for me to understand and unravel, and I sincerly thank those that led to it. A note on the images: I used images from old National Geographic magazines and travel books found in the graphics lab of my college-the images are never complete, having been used previously for collages and craftwork, and create the atmosphere of a place that is both familiar and new, a scenery composed of many elements
and textures; all drawings are from my notebooks that I have filled over the past three months in Bratislava, Slovakia and Biel, Switzerland. Further, I used leaflets found on the streets and pulled of building walls, as well as photography that I did in Bar Harbor, Maine, US; Bratislava and Biel. An list of images can be found at the end of the magazine.
MOVING THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS
SUMMER
SIGHTS TO SEE
Many years ago, my grandparents travelled through Europe. Bratislava was one of the many cities they visited. I recently was reminded of a photo they took of a bronze statue whilst there--a man in a helmet leaning out of a manhole. It was a photo that I looked at each time I visited their home. I had forgotten about the photograph until I reached Bratislava and, whilst walking through the historic centre, wondering why I felt a sense of recognition, I realized that my grandparents had stood exactly where I was standing, taking a photo of the view I was looking at. Over the next few weeks, I saw Japanese tourists take photos with the statue, an old man prod him on the head with a stick and crying babies made to pose next to him.
EXOTIC LANDS The following images were sourced from a series of magazines in the graphics lab of my college. Upon opening the them, I found the pages layered into collages that were created by others cutting out specific parts.
The following pieces recall certain meetings, moments and interactions. I begin with a letter written to my college and colleagues before I left the Davis Projects for Peace in Bratislava.
Letter of Dissent Milan, Italy: September 2013 I was visiting the Giardini degli Aromi, where an old Italian mental institution was home to a beautiful and flourishing community garden. Patients, schoolchildren and local residents worked together to grow persimmons, herbs, vegetables and greens in a sprawling, lush urban jungle. The woman in charge of facilitating the project was tired of community gardening being seen as something that was either about growing large amounts of food or making a statement. She looked at me and in a voice that was both confident and assertive said “look, it is about bringing together people.� To this day, I agree that yes, it is about creating a space where people can work, individually or together, in a project that provides room for both solitude and collaboration.
Although I am not a refugee, persecuted person or asylum-seeker, in Bratislava, as an Indian woman, I am a minority and my experience of life is through this perspective. Having arrived to Maine from India in 2010, though by no means a minority in the US, Maine did not have an Indian community within which I could find the easy familiarity and comfort of a homogenous ethnic group. Through this, I became increasingly aware of my race, nationality and of the differences between me and my predominantly white classmates and began to further develop my understanding of belonging and identity. Early this spring, Boglarka, my dear friend and classmate, proposed the idea of applying for a Projects for Peace grant to our close friend, Ana Puhac, and me. She was in Bratislava doing research for her senior project and had met a group that was keen to start a rooftop garden that transcended political and social barriers. The grant would allow us to expand this garden to integrate it on a larger scale within the Bratislava community, including African migrants, the Roma community and white Slovaks. The idea was exciting and challenging and we worked hard to write a proposal that was eventually selected as one of the Davis Projects for Peace 2014. I was deeply motivated by the idea of working with minority groups in an urban environment and actively bring about awareness of ethnic violence through practical urban design work. We were going to collaborate with Na Streche, a group of talented young professionals from Slovakia to realize our project. The rooftop that we secured was located in the center of Bratislava, on the TESCO supermarket building and we
aimed to have the garden running by mid-July. A few days before I reached Bratislava, TESCO withdrew their offer and we no longer had a space to use. A second option was deemed structurally unfit and the following weeks were spent looking for a new site. After several meetings and planning sessions, we approached the mayor’s office to use the courtyard of their building. Though beautiful and with a deep cultural significance, we were restricted in what we could do within the courtyard since it was in the municipal building and also a heritage structure. Whilst encouraged to finally begin planting, I was sad because the communal aspect of our project would not be possible here, given both the formal nature of the space and the criterion that our design needed to look ‘proper’. Here, I must emphasize that I am not of the sentiment that alternative, DIY design needs to be messy. In fact, I believe we need to encourage the idea that we can all make beautiful and productive gardening systems, landscape designs and outdoor spaces. However, I began to see that this was not necessarily a communal space but more the symbol of one. Rather than upcycling and reusing materials to design planters, we would need to buy new materials from large warehouse stores like IKEA and Hornbach, retail chains that I will not personally support. Secondly, the groups we wanted to create a space for did not live in the center of the city where our courtyard was located. Simultaneously, we planned on our first public workshop on ethnobotany and smallscale gardening for mid-July. Our participants were mostly middle-class white families that
visited the market for their groceries. I began to sense a frustration and unease growing inside me over the groups we were interacting with about urban gardening and foodcultivation. Although the workshop went well and cultivating an understanding of gardening with children is important, I felt that our peace project was being turned into a day activity that lacked the a diversity in cultures and people, myself being the only non-white participant of the day. For the next few weeks, I began to look at whether we were successfully reaching out to people that might not have the luxury of visiting a biweekly market of organic food and local produce. The multi-ethnic component of our project in combination with the practical elements of communal gardening were important factors that made our proposal stand out. I also believe that our proposed ideas to engage with the issues of ethnic violence were compelling and commendable and surely worthy of a peace grant. Simultaneously, I was aware that it was reaching mid-summer and we still had not begun cultivating our produce. Was the garden more a symbolic idea now in itself, with the idea of people coming together in a communal space as the ultimate goal rather than producing food? Perhaps, even though my love for gardening and practical work found this at times hard to accept, it was still in line with our aims of social inclusion and ethnic integration. Whilst we began many starter-trays of vegetables in our modest two-room flat, our aims to produce food that might fuel community meals were slightly high-reaching.
On the other hand, my friends and colleagues were working hard to secure the rooftop of the Slovak Radio building, which we now have to work with and, as per an update from our group, aim to have running by the 17 of August; two debates were organized with school children in the courtyard of the municipal building; and a hydroponic garden was installed in the window of the market-hall where we held our first workshop; organizers from migrant organizations were contacted and further events have been planned for the last month of our Project for Peace grant, which, I must add, does not signify the end of the project itself. Why have I chosen not to continue with the project when my reason for coming to Europe was based solely upon it, my initial aim being to secure a job to fund my graduate school after passing out of college in June? My peers have expressed their disappointment and very rightly suggested that I look at my own expectations of the project and consider the implications of withdrawing from the team to instead work with a landscaper in Biel, Switzerland whilst doing my own research work. My expectation for the project was not to work within the privileged circles of the urban gardening and local food movement and provide agricultural experiences to people that have easy access to such events. My aim was to broaden the scope of where this movement reaches, to the fringe-demographics that work hard to subsist within the urban environment both culturally and financially. As much as I tried, not speaking Slovak made it increasingly hard to contact organizations that might do
such work. I am aware that many minorities do not want their ethnic differences to be highlighted and exoticized and am aware of the sensitivity with which intercultural collaboration should be approached. I also realize the disappointment of my dear friends and colleagues at my withdrawal and accept these sentiments with an open heart. I understand that projects that aim to achieve a great deal within three months will face issues and that, when an issue as unexpected as a withdrawal from a main collaborator surfaces, we must be both creative and resilient in our solutions to this. Furthermore, I feel a conflict within myself because my travel to Europe was funded by the grant. However, to briefly summarize my reasons for withdrawing from the project: Firstly, it is in the groups we are working with that I feel ethically torn. On the one hand, I find that working with anyone to teach them about gardening, food security and urban agriculture is beneficial. On the other hand, urban agriculture today has been taken from something that people use as a means of survival to something that is fashionable.I personally do not see this as the aim of our
peace project.
Secondly, as much as I would have liked to be involved in drafting proposals and participating in official meetings to ask for spaces, I was limited by not being able to speak Slovak and therefore, spent most of the time between the bi-weekly workshops in other ways then that. Whilst I did not expect to just garden, I find that spending more than
eighty percent of my time in front of the computer rather than working with my hands to not be the best use of my time, especially when there are already five capable people that speak fluent Slovak working on this. Lastly, I find that starting a garden in the third week of August when our report is due in the first week of September to be rather late. I agree wholeheartedly that for setting up the infrastructure of a long-term project, which this has turned out to be for the next year, it is alright to take the time to process and explore ideas. However, in the case of our project, I have not spent as much time as I hoped to in gardening and doing manual work. My withdrawal from the project is by no means a disapproval of the work, thought and time put into this initiative. Neither is it blaming anyone for how it has worked out. It is rather a realization that on ethical and practical grounds, I cannot find a place within the framework of this project to apply myself to. Whilst I regret not being able to participate further, I look forward to working with asylum-seekers in Biel, Switzerland, as well as assistant to Sabine Reber, gardener and book author, for the duration of the summer. When I decided to leave, I was told that if everyone acted this way, nothing in the world would work. However, I believe that as long as there is an interest for something it will survive and our peace project is a perfect example for this. Although I have left, others have found their place within the project, ensuring its long-term survival and sustenance. With the utmost respect for my friends, colleagues and college, and with heartfelt gratitude to the Davis foundation for their financial support towards our ideas, Zuri Camille de Souza / August 2014
T
he first time Kaspar and I saw him, he was excersizing on the grassy river bank. His skin was dark, tanned by the sun. His haircut was straight out of the sixties, long in the front with sideburns and neatly cut at the back. His thick, black-framed glasses completed his character. He would swim for a moment and then excersize, and then swim, and then excersize. We looked closely at him because of his impressive routine. As we were leaving, he asked us the time, in German that has an accent from perhaps Western Europe, we assumed. The next time we went to the river, he was there again, repeating his excersize routine. It was an interesting collection of peopletwo German girls, sunbathing and listening to music; a Swiss man; a man I thought might be from West Asia or South East Asia; the swimming man, Kaspar and myself. The german girls and the East/West Asian man were having a conversation in broken english. After listening for a few minutes, I found out he was from Afghanistan. Lying in the sun, on a concrete picnic table, I began to wonder what it must be like to come from Afghanistan to Switzerland and began to realize how much I don’t know about this country though I have always had a longing to visit it. After a while, the excersizing man came up to us and said, in an excited, laughing voice, “es ist kalt(it is cold)”. “Yes”, Kaspar replied, “but you are still swimming!” We began to talk and soon found out that he too was
from Afghanistan. He had come here from Greece, after travelling for six years, leaving behind the wars and political turmoil of his home-country. He was now an asylumseeker in Switzerland and lived in one of the asylum centers in Derindingen, a small town a while away from where we sat. We spoke for a while, about Afghanistan and swimming (he liked the lake in Biel and the city too a lot more than where he currently was). When we asked him why he went there, he said he was in a big truck that just took him there without telling him what to do or where to go. They opened the doors of the truck and let out the people onto the highway, leaving them lost in a place they had never been to. Living in the asylum center was hard--he was given 10 Swiss Francs each day, to cover all living expenses including food and transport. I found this unbelievable since this is how muchone would either pay for a train ticket from one city to another or for a meal, but not both. He asked Kaspar how his German was and said that he was taking lessons in a school here, along with the other Afghani man that was there earlier. Soon, he asked us what time it was, took a last swim, and left. He had to report back to his asylum center every evening before a daily curfew.
M
adam, are you from India? The shopkeeper asked me as I was paying for the raw peanuts and rice flour. I replied that I was. I was in the Mama Indian Shop, one of the many “Asian-Indian-African” shops that fill Biel. The shop had Parle-G biscuits from India next to Fufu and Amaranth leaves from Africa next to rice flour from China. The shop was in Biel-Bienne, a bilingual French/Swiss town in the Seeland region of Switzerland. I was staying in Biel now, after leaving Bratislava, and working as a garden-help whilst doing my own projects. Before coming to Biel, I asked Kaspar how it was. He had studied here for four years and lived here for a while too. He told me it was the most dangerous city in Switzerland and that his roommate had seen a man being knifed in the morning a few years ago. . Now we lived in a shared flat next to a chinese take-away opposite the police station. Like its colourful Twenties pastel-shaded apartments that were painted a depressing brown in the sixties, Biel is a grimy, joyful city. Once the first Socialist town in Switzerland, it still carries a sense of independence, much like what I felt about Maine when I lived there. I enjoy Biel because it is so incredibly diverse, both culturally and ethnically. Many people live here because it is cheap, urban and open to anything, almost indulgent to strangeness. The Mama Indian Shop was one of the many shops started by those that ended up here via a ship, road, container, blindfolded in a car, by plane or simply, by birth. The other Indian shop I know is run by a Goan who grew up in West Bengal. This one, I found out, was actually not an Indian shop after all. When the shopkeeper asked me where I was from, by the way he looked and the Hindi he spoke my instinct told me that he surely was not from India,. I was right--he was from Bangladesh, as was his colleague. Sadly, they would never call their store a “Mama Bangladesh shop”- it wouldn’t sell. We began speaking in Hindi mixed in with Urdu and English. They asked me why I was here and whether I could work to earn money. I could not, legally, on the visa that I had. When one asked me if I had applied for asylum, the other quickly corrected him, saying that Indians cannot do that. They began to tell me about how I should find work, contacting companies via a fax machine in the store across the road. If that did not work out, they said, I should find a swiss man to marry. The simplicity with which they said it struck me and I asked them how I should find one. They told me to look for an older man because the young boys just want to have fun. Their exact words were “usko sirf enjoy karna (they just want to have fun)” and we all began laughing because, yes, that was also true.
A
re you new here too? He asked me, when he saw the ticket I showed to the conductor. We were in the train from Zurich to Biel, I had spent 8 hours in train from Bratislava and was looking forward to a warm shower and sleep. The ticket I had was a long-distance ticket and looked like an airline ticket--long and narrow with several pages stapled together. I replied that I was not, and that I had been here before. We were sitting in adjacent seats across the aisle of the train and after 8 hours of silence, I welcomed the conversation. I forgot his name, it was either Eric or Tony, and he was from Tanzania. He had taken a bus down from Berlin to Zurich. I laughed when he told me because I took a train last year the same way and it took 9 hours but he said it was much cheaper than the train and its probably true--I was paying from Zurich to Biel the same amount I was paying from Bratislava to Zurich! When he heard my name, Zuri, he asked me if I knew that it was Kiswahili. Of course, I replied. My father was born in Nairobi. There was the East African connection, he said, and the fact that my mother lived in Zambia, I added. H had been living in Berlin for the last 17 years, running his own business. He started off as a landscape-assistant until he hurt his back from lifting to many things the wrong way. He was married to a woman from Detroit, and she lived there now with his 2 children. He asked me about my plans and whether I could work or if I had come here to work. Many people assume that I am
here to earn money but I am not--without knowing the language fluently or a workpermit, it is exhausting to find a job. He loved Berlin, many people too. Having lived there for 17 years, he must have seen it at a different time when it was still a radical and unpredictable melange of concepts and emotions. Today, I feel Berlin is more a state-of-mind than a city, in the same way that New York is an identity that one finds being adopted by young people around the world, whether in India, Israel Proper or Italy. Talking to him, I began to realize the ease with which it is actually possible to start a conversation with someone and began to wonder why I did not do it enough. Recently, I was at a lunch with a friend of Kaspar. She is Indian but has lived in Switzerland for many years now. After a fantastic meal, we began talking about trains at home over cups of tea. Trains in India are social spaces where bodies share a common space whilst people exchange their life-stories with one another, fueling the trade with a constant supply of food. Kaspar could only laugh. The last time we had travelled by train, we were sitting on top of a luggage shelf in the general compartment on a train from Pune to Solapur for five hours.
L
ake Biel on a warm day is filled with people. There are people sitting in the parks by the water, sunbathing and swimming. The smell of chips being fried hangs heavily in the air, mixing with the smell of instant grill fires and meat burning on open fires. I spent many, many days drawing and swimming, observing people and listening to their conversations. There are some characters that are always there--the peg-legged Tibetan man that plays badminton and his friend in the hammock; the middle-aged Arab men that sit in their white undershirts on hot days whilst their wives sweat under layers of fabric and the African families roasting meat on open fires next to the Swiss teenagers smoking joints. The other day I was practising Poi in one of the small parks by the water. The park comprises a simple stretch of grass, bounded on either side by two private residences. In one corner is a small wooden room with toilets and a shower. Three wooden platforms with steps leading down to the water are the only other constructions. A Willow tree hanging into the water creates a beautiful rustling sound everytime the wind blows through it. Kaspar was lying in the sun, relaxing. Many people would pause and watch as I practised, fascinated by the patterns and colours the tassle-ended Poi make. One man stopped and watched for a long time from the road. After a while, he sat down near us and opened a can of beer. I thought he was one of the alcoholics from the train station that had come to relax on a Sunday afternoon by the lake. Once he had finished the beer, he asked if he could try playing the Poi. Amused, I gave them to him. He began to spin them around, moving and dancing as though he was painting in the air. He was incredibly agile and it was beautiful to watch. Kaspar and I were in awe. He saw our surprise and started laughing. His name was Eric and he spoke very little English. He was from France and had been living in Switzerland for a while. We talked for a while about what he was doing here. He had travelled in India and Nepal for six months and had learned to do poi seven years ago at festivals and on the beach. Now, he told us, he had quite his job as a plumber and his backpack was his home. Whilst we talked, he took out an old aluminium vegetablepureeing machine--the old kind that one turned using a handle on the side. He looked at us, took out a small pouch from his bag and started to roll a joint, using the funnel from the machine as a mixing bowl. I realized that whilst we try to reclaim spaces as artists and squatters; activists and preservationists; urbanists and architects, there are people that, with each and every one of their actions, constantly giving new meaning to the spaces they inhabit, without organization or intention. In the end, we need to do this for ourselves through the everyday practise of movement, work and relaxation outside the home.
summer:
places to see:
decades:
1. Maine, US
1. Bratislava, Slovakia
1. Bratislava, Slovakia
2. Maine, US
2. Bratislava, Slovakia
2. Bratislava, Slovakia
3.Biel, Switzerland
3. Bratislava, Slovakia
3. Bern, Switzerland
4. Biel, Switzerland
4. Bratislava, Slovakia
4.Biel, Switzerland
5. Maine, US
5. Solothurn, Switzerland
6. Maine, US
6. Biel, Switzerland
7. Biel, Switzerland 8. Biel, Switzerland 9. Biel, Switzerland 10. Solothurn, Switzerland 11. Bratislava, Slovakia 12. Solothurn, Switzerland 13. Biel, Switzerland 14. Biel, Switzerland 15. Biel, Switzerland 16. Bratislava, Slovakia