‘If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world …’ (Virginia Woolf)
At times like
this, when so much feels divided and broken, when public discourse has
dissolved into a cacophony of colliding opinions, and our politicians seem to have
ground themselves into an acrimonious stalemate, there is something genuinely necessary
and moving in Action Hero’s intimately epic project Oh Europa. In a gently playful and invitational way, their reimagined
mapping of Europe in a time of apparent unraveling seeks to affirm connections
and exchanges between people, through an affective cartography of places,
encounters and feelings given resonant body in hundreds of love songs. All of
the materials in this multiform art work – the 6-month journey undertaken by
Gemma and James in their motorhome last year, the songs they collected, their
video ‘postcards’ along the way, the live performances after the journey’s end,
and this video installation with its ‘atlas’ detailing the location of the 41
beacons transmitting songs across Europe – all of these things celebrate our
differences as well as a deeply felt sense of what we have in common, across
borders and languages. The event of love, and the resilience and compelling
mystery of its deep currents. Longing and its tangled relations to belonging
and to ‘home’. The courageous intimacy of song as an embodied address to
others: singing as soul-portrait, a gift of oneself in which breath becomes
music and calls us together in the heart-land.
The choice of
locations for the beacons was determined by a number of different conceptions
of threshold, border and edge. To date beacon placements have occurred at sites
of current administrative, political or cultural divisions, or of disputed
territory; liminal spaces, hovering between territories; sites of encounter,
blurring, mixing or integration – of rivers, seas, cultures; deep-time
geological structures or rifts; sites of historical protest or activism in the
emergence of democracy; redundant historical borders and archaeological remains
at places of past conflict; sites bearing traces of cultures no longer in
existence, or of unfinished projects (the disappeared ‘dreams’ of the past);
rivers and former connective routes between zones, now disappeared or closed;
and territories with mobile, fluid or indeterminate boundaries (notably, in the
far north of Europe, the shifting position of the Arctic Circle, and the
uncertainty of the Sami people’s geographical terrain).
The beacon
locations detailed in this atlas offer an alternative mapping of Europe that is
off-centre, and complexly layered in time and space. Conventional fixed notions
of ‘centre’ and ‘edge’ are reconfigured here; old hierarchies of place give way
to something plural and in flux, and many supposed edges reveal themselves to
be singular and interconnected centres in their own right. Cumulatively this
mapping produces layered networks of places and people in relation, rather than
the fixity of discreet territories. Some of these places are ghosted by their
social and political histories, but without melancholy; for alongside the
presence of the past – the re-membering of conflicts and divisions, ancient and
recent – there lies a quietly insistent invitation to actively imagine other
possible futures. Other ways of being in relation to others. The journey, the
sharing of songs and the placement of the beacons are all interwoven elements
within an art project that is both poetic and political; they each perform the possibility of connection,
passageway, repair, change and exchange. Like acupuncture points on the body of
the land mass of Europe, marking a diversity of thresholds, fault lines and pressure
points, the beacons seek to vibrate and reanimate circuits and flows that risk
becoming blocked, forgotten or overlooked. In this way, sites of separation can
become contexts for the staging of reparation and free, unimpeded movement.
After watching the
video from each of the beacons in turn, I was struck by the dynamic presence of
different kinds of water in so many of these contexts, and the degree to which
landscapes are sculpted and territories defined by bodies of water and their
flows. The videos invite us to contemplate various seas and inland lakes (Lake
Virmajärvi, for example, on the border of Finland
and Russia), as well as watersheds, confluences and many individual streams and
rivers that ultimately find their way towards the seas, and wider connections
and dispersals. All four of the cardinal points in this atlas – the extreme
north/south/east/west edges of Europe – are liquid, as is Europe’s epicentre.
Fittingly, Action Hero placed a beacon at the very heart of Europe’s land mass,
beside the triple watershed of the Lunghin Pass in Switzerland. From this point
on the so-called ‘roof of Europe’, invisible streams from melt water eventually
grow in size to become the Rhine, the Po and the Danube, major arteries which
run their meandering courses through different countries to three different
seas: the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. The transmission of
songs from beacons in these watery contexts, and others in this atlas, brings
to mind the astonishing gesture of Tibetan Buddhists releasing material from
their exquisitely crafted sand mandala paintings. Once the painting is
complete, the monks dismantle it by sweeping up the sand and releasing it into
a neighbouring river. These particles are carried away by the river’s
gravity-fueled flow to be dispersed in the world’s oceans. For the monks, each
grain is animate and continues to pulse, containing as it does the full image
of the original sand painting in miniature: a peaceful, reverberant anti-toxin
or prayer circulating forever in the world’s blood stream.
Like the songs
themselves, the videos are also invitations to an attentive listening that is
actively receptive. Each of the videos registers a still point in which
everything moves: the sky and its weather systems, vegetation, animal and human
life, vehicles, light. Each sequence reveals a place to be a complex
world-in-process. The only video which comes close to immobility presents us
with a surviving section of the Berlin Wall in close-up. However, the wall’s
apparently immutable inertia is offset and destabilized by the layered
background dynamic of bird song, human conversation, slowly drifting clouds in
the small strip of visible sky - and of course the knowledge of the wall’s
ultimate demise as impenetrable barrier. Its residual survival here acts as
memorial and hope-ful testament to the ephemerality of imposed division.
In addition, the
ambient sounds recorded by the camera reaffirm the complexities of place
through the dynamically layered ‘songs’ of ongoing life. Each video offers us
an auditory ‘situation involving multiplicity’, as John Cage said of Robert Rauschenberg’s
combine paintings. Chance compositions draw on wind, sea, river, trees, birds
(almost always there), insects, traffic, sometimes voices and fragments of
passing conversation in different languages. We hear the sounds of the rural,
the urban, the littoral, the elevated, the remote, the ongoing and the
fleeting. A chorale of the world’s vibrant murmuring.
Listen, for
example, to the dense overlay of city, traffic, riverboats, human voices and
lapping river water at Margaret Island in Budapest. Or the chance aeolian
percussion of flags and their guy ropes in the breeze at Juoksengi in Sweden. Then
there’s the haunting spiral of bird song at the woodland ‘language border’
between Wallonia and Flanders, in Belgium, or the dog bark from a passing
vehicle in Beremend, Hungary. Or listen to the brilliantly unself-conscious bee
that buzzes the camera, then lands and explores the frame of the lens in the
meadows at Trójstyk Granic, near the
border tripoint of Lithuania, Poland and Kaliningrad. The placement of a beacon
at this and other policed border zones enables the love songs to be heard in
different territories. In this way the ‘travel’ of the songs, their reach as
transmissions, renders such political separations porous, permeable,
insubstantial – as does the movement of birds, or bees, and all such creatures
whose passage ignores the arbitrariness and artifice of human borders.
To date this atlas
remains unfinished; perhaps it is unfinishable, like all of the richest art and
life projects. Further journeys, encounters, recordings of songs, beacon
placements and video postcards ‘from the edge’ are planned. The travel/travail
of mapping, tracking ‘the feeling of the singing of the real world’, placing
matters of the heart at the heart of the matter, continues …
Text published as 'Mapping the heart-land', an introduction to Action Hero's book Oh Europa: Postcards from the Edge, an annotated 'atlas' accompanying the Oh Europa installation, alongside performances of RadiOh Europa. On tour in the UK and Europe from May 2019: premiere at Transform Festival, Leeds
For further details of Action Hero's Oh Europa project, and touring/performance details, see here and here
For a Guardian interview with Action Hero about Oh Europa, 'A Love Song for Europe', see here
Photographs by David Williams
Photographs by David Williams
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