memories

At the 'Marché aux puces de Porte de Clignancourt' in Paris I found a box with old black and white negatives.

These negatives show photographs of the same man and woman, sometimes accompanied by a black and white dog or another woman, probably a friend. They pose for each other in front of a rose bush, a pond, an old house.

The men's shadow is sometimes visible in the image; in some you can see his hat.

The man and the woman are probably a couple; the intimate settings suggest scenes of their daily life.

At home I have scanned some of these negatives and I have to think of my grandmother's house " 't Nijendal".

The setting reminded me of 't Nijendal; the big garden with the pond, the surrounding trees, the sunshine.

't Nijndal is a container in which memories of my youth are stored. I guess most people have a container for specific memories. For me it's this house with rooms and gardens and a forest where many little stories took place, for others it might be a specific place like a bed or the corner of a street.

Some time ago I went back to my grandmothers house (have a look at Saturday 8 May on my blog). She had died and the house was about to be sold. I went back one last time to stay there for a day and a night. The house was completely empty. I took pictures of the empty rooms. The house was not an inhabited place anymore and I wanted to experience it now purely as a space - to get hold of its exact meaning for me. I realized that the house was in my head and had traveled with me to many other places, filled the rooms with new experiences. I found some of it back again in these black and white negatives at the marché aux puces in Paris.

A la recherche de Georges Perec

Today at seven pm I drank a glass of red wine together with my boyfriend at café de la Mairie at 8 Place Saint -Sulpice in Paris. In October 1974 Perec sat here and observed the street for his text “Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien”.

We sit down at a small round table at the right side of the cafe and order our drinks.

I ask the waiter with the round belly if he has ever heard of Perec. He asks me if I am looking for brasserie “Georges Perec”. I guess he has never heard of him. I ask some of the other waiters who work here but none of them has ever heard of Georges Perec. Though one of them tells me that many writers come here to write.

I look around me and see some men bent over their Moleskine or laptop. They must be the writers the waiter was talking about.

You can imagine Perec sat here, observed the street. the passers by, the cafe, the traffic, people crossing the square etc. and wrote down what he saw.

Café de la Mairie has a glass wall on the right side (after entering, with your back turned towards the door) . Small tables are lined up against the glass window. The window gives view onto a side street of the Place Saint - Sulpice. The whole frontpart of the cafe is made out of glass. You can sit inside and look left, right and in front of you. Although nowadays a plastic tent is placed in front of the café as a roofed terras, probably this wasn't there when Perec sat here and wrote down his observations. From here Perec probably had an overall view of the square Saint-Sulpice with the church on its left side (sitting down facing the square).

People keep coming in and going out. Waiters wear their classical black and white outfits. Lovers kiss softly. A grandmother a daughter and a granddaughter enter the cafe. Outside the light is slowly disappearing and the streetlights appear. People outside are smoking cigarettes and are lit by a reddish light coming from the upper floor of the café.

We finish our glass of wine and decide to have dinner here tomorrow.

Hands

My hands are always quite red. They look like they have been used for manual work, or washed in terpentine many times. There is some truth in that, but most of all my hands reflect something of who I am. I look at other people’s hands obsessively.

Today I saw a man in the Paris underground. The skin of his hands looked like fragile cracked paper. It was light brown. His fingernails where white and clean. His hands were folded on top of his bag. I could not resist staring at his hands; they where so beautiful.

Coat

I exited at Saint Philippe du Roule. I saw an old woman searching for something in a garbage bin. She was wearing a long coat decorated with illustrations of raindeer and something that looked like a golden thread. Her coat fascinated me and so I slowed down my pace to take a closer look at her. She was wearing red lipstick and her fingernails were painted red. Two scarfs were draped elegantly around her neck and she wore a small handknitted flower on a cord as a necklace. This woman was someone else one day; her clothes were the traces of her past.