The Paper Crane

A meet­ing the other night with a play­wright research­ing char­ac­ters for a piece on Berlin has inspired think­ing about the city itself as a char­ac­ter, a per­son­al­ity and then draw­ing a con­nec­tion to the indi­vid­u­als liv­ing here.

The meet­ing

Last night I was apart of a panel dis­cus­sion lead by Sheila Callaghan a playwright/screenwriter from New York.  She cur­rently writes for Show­time for the series United States of Tara, a com­edy about a woman with mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties.  Her new project is writ­ing a play based on Amer­i­cans in Berlin, sort of a take-off on Amer­i­cans in Paris, and it will be a musi­cal comedy.

I heard about the dis­cus­sion from the Berlin Schol­ars Yahoo Group (which by the way if you ever decide to move to Berlin this Group is an invalu­able resource).  The post was a search for artists that have been liv­ing in Berlin for less than six years.  I can be very hermit-like this time of year but I was curi­ous to meet other artists as  I still feel like I don’t know too many here.  I replied and though I came up with a mil­lion excuses to myself (it’s Sun­day night, its late — 9pm, its cold, its dark, etc.) I ended up going.  I am so glad I did because every­one else seemed to show up too.  A full table.  I was –the only– visual artist.  The group broke down like this — one visual artist, one com­poser, one writer, one poet, four actors, two direc­tors.  Evi­dently many of the actors/directors of the Berlin Schol­ars noticed the con­nec­tion with the The­ater Group and that was an attraction.

The Berlin Story

As part of the indi­vid­ual intro­duc­tion, we each had to recount our ‘Berlin story’ in a sum­ma­rized ver­sion.  It was inter­est­ing to hear everyone’s.  I’ve told mine so often I can almost say it ver­ba­tim with­out think­ing but for those of you won­der­ing how I got here and why I came I will give an expla­na­tion. ~ Com­ing off a year long artist block, and a feel­ing that it was time to leave Chicago after 10 years,  I had two oppor­tu­ni­ties draw­ing me to Berlin -  work­ing for Kavi Gupta’s new sec­ond loca­tion and  a show with a Berlin-based gallery, Bir­git Oster­meier.    The gallery closed after two months at the end of 2008 (just re-opened Sep­tem­ber 2009 in another loca­tion in Berlin) and so I hus­tled and found com­puter free­lance work, babysit­ting, and yes at a des­per­ate hour cat-sitting, and made it happen.

What the other Berlin sto­ries had in com­mon was the peo­ple that did not have time to suf­fi­ciently pre­pare for the move — i.e. spend a year or more study­ing the lan­guage before­hand — had a harder time over­all.  The Ger­mans see a lot of for­eign­ers mov­ing here and evi­dently the con­sen­sus is not many know the lan­guage and the per­cep­tion is that they aren’t try­ing at all or hard enough.  So it cre­ates this gen­eral annoy­ance?  not sure what the right word is here.  Dis­gust would be too strong.  And Amer­i­cans are seen to be the typ­i­cal exam­ple of this type of for­eigner.  And I, unfor­tu­nately fit this model though I am try­ing to learn the lan­guage! really, really.  I find it a dif­fi­cult one and I think I am an inten­sive or two away from being able to hold a proper con­ver­sa­tion.  For now, I do well say­ing short sen­tences, which means I am able to order in restau­rants and cafes, make an appoint­ment over the phone, and so on.

Expec­ta­tions

Now I know there are dan­gers in hold­ing expec­ta­tions. I try not to have them.  But for big things like mov­ing to a new coun­try its like a blown up ver­sion of NYE: you pre­tend to not have expec­ta­tions while secretly hav­ing expec­ta­tions.  This panel brought up the sub­ject and yes, a good sub­ject point for the blog.  what did you expect when you came here? and what is dif­fer­ent from what you expected?

- adjust­ing

I have to say for the sec­ond ques­tion I didn’t expect it to take so long to accli­mate here.  I still feel like I am tran­si­tion­ing and still feel like a vis­i­tor.  I have an Amer­i­can friend that I have known for a long time (who by the way is flu­ent in the lan­guage) and he has been liv­ing in Leipzig for 8 years. I men­tioned that same thing to him and he said It doesn’t go away.  It sen­tences like those you can almost see ring­ing out into the uni­verse and then feel the hit as they come back towards you in a jar­ring way.  One other thing to men­tion is I had cir­cum­stances that caused me to move four times in one year which is very unset­tling to say the least and doesn’t help too much with the accli­ma­tion process.

- with mak­ing art

My other point was that I didn’t expect it to be so hard to find a stu­dio here or for stu­dio space to be so expen­sive com­pared to the fairly cheap apart­ments.  It is hard to find stu­dios under 200 euros, roughly 300 USD (I, as well as some friends of mine, have been on a con­tin­ual stu­dio hunt.  I have a stu­dio (Finally!) start­ing Novem­ber 1st but its only for 3 months so I am still on the look for some­thing after that.

Aside from the stu­dio dilemma, I have talked to other Amer­i­can artists here about mak­ing work and every­one seems to agree it’s dif­fi­cult.  A friend of mine men­tioned the fact about need­ing a cer­tain level of com­fort to then be able to really focus on your work.  There is a uneasi­ness, unset­tling qual­ity that i men­tioned before that is per­va­sive and I know this sounds dra­matic but I feel it every­day.  Ear­lier this year, I had my own apart­ment for about 5 months (not count­ing the time I was in the US this sum­mer)  and I worked in an adjoin­ing room to my bed­room but to be hon­est nearly every­thing I made was a com­plete fail­ure some­how.  I feel really inspired by a lot of the Ger­man artists whose work I have seen and I cer­tainly have a lot of  my own psy­cho­log­i­cal ‘stuff’ to work from. That said, I think the artist block I felt in Chicago is offi­cially over and has been.  But i just hope now, to have it all come together and to find the magic again that has hid­den away while I was deal­ing with some seri­ous issues of the sur­vival sort .

I want to clar­ify that I think the uneasy feel­ing comes from a vari­ety of fac­tors — being a for­eigner, not know­ing the lan­guage suf­fi­ciently yet, not hav­ing a sup­port sys­tem yet, work­ing at home which is iso­lat­ing, etc.  Those things which just require effort and patience.  To talk about unset­tling, uneasi­ness is maybe to also talk about uncer­tainty and I found this pas­sage inter­est­ing from the Ger­man The­ater Abroad site (GTA the co-moderators of the panel dis­cus­sion)  mag­netic cities which attract immi­grants, tem­porar­ily or per­ma­nently, for finan­cial and polit­i­cal rea­sons, as well as for artis­tic rea­son.  Uncer­tain in their iden­ti­ties, these cities are in search of their def­i­n­i­tion and the mean­ing of their his­to­ries.  They do not belong to the ‘natives’, they are cul­tur­ally open for new arrivals. …With their promises of per­sonal freedom…gives its mem­bers the oppor­tu­nity for self-realization.  They are the sites of the ambiva­lent promise of mod­ern free­dom in which indi­vid­u­al­ity can be redis­cov­ered or lost.

On Novem­ber 9th this year  is the twenty year anniver­sary of the wall com­ing down.  Twenty-years.  This city that is still rebuild­ing itself what a metaphor for all the artists, all the dream­ers arriv­ing here.  But amidst all of this change and in the mass of oth­ers, in the city with­out a cen­ter, one can eas­ily get lost.   There is fragility in a state of a flux but also tremen­dous pos­si­bil­ity.  And of pos­si­bil­ity, I have to remind myself that is why I am in Berlin.

- Sarah Nesbit

post-script

Okay I have just pre­sented some of the chal­lenges to liv­ing here how­ever future posts will be more high­lights of cul­ture.  And if you find your­self look­ing out­side at a gray dis­mal day and hav­ing just read a bit of a downer arti­cle — click on this link http://www.ichwerdeeinberliner.com/post/224842130/6-cafes For a funny take on the cafe cul­ture in Berlin.

***I am still gath­er­ing info for the sec­ond part of Hid­den Spaces***

Posted by Sarah Nesbit on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 7:47 am. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.