Islands

Then later, when I was living in Manhattan → I always felt it had a particular energy because it is an island. As if the place was energized by the omnipresence of water.

→ I used to go to Fire Island → on Long Island, which is a queer place, a mythical place. → It’s been a gay beach since at least the 1940s. There’s a poem about it written by Frank O’Hara (“A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island”). I loved going there, the kindness of the environment, the body-positive attitude of the people. There is a deep sense of acceptance in this community which I think also comes from the ocean itself. Fire island is quite wild + sometimes you
can see deer on the beach. It’s about 3 hours by public transportation from NYC. You get the ticket directly from Penn Station which includes the train, taxi and ferry rides.

I love maps + I am obsessively drawing sea monsters. The birth of an island is seen as the appearance of a sea monster. If a volcano is next to the sea → the lava goes into the water + the land actually expands. My whole relationship to the ocean at the moment is closely linked to my work with volcanoes.

In my adulthood, I traveled to Polynesia and I spent many months hopping from island to island living with locals in small villages. I then made a long Super 8 film called Fiji View-master which used a children's toy slide viewer as a visual prop and special effect generator.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

I love beach holidays: I just spent a few days in La Gomera.:Swimming in the sea there gave me a certain feeling of liberation.

In Bonaire, the sea is very transparent. When swimming out into the sea, there is a point where all of a sudden the bottom of the sea deepens so abruptly, it goes from seeing the seabed clearly, to a huge black hole, without any transition, it completely disappears from view. Reaching this point left me feeling really scared. Even though it has no physical consequences for my swimming on the surface. Still, I almost did not dare to swim past this point. I felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

My mother → was (born on) an island but I had few connections to the ocean myself.

Like in the Orkneys → which is an island group above Scotland. On one of the islands is the Old man of Hoy which is, essentially, just a very tall and long rock surrounded by water. A car commercial was shot there, for which the car had to be flown on the rock by a helicopter. The driver had to climb into the car from a hole underneath it because there was no space on the rock to enter the car from the side.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

T.v.A. When you’re in a place like Fair Isle, wildlife is just there, it’s a part of where you are.

T.v.A. I was there on a writing residency. When I work on a new play, I choose to go and work by the sea, usually on an island. This is not on purpose. When I write, I do not want to be disturbed by normal life. I am not attracted to mountains nor to warm countries. I end up in places like the north of Norway or the islands of Great Britain or Newfoundland.

T.v.A. Arriving is ok if the community is small enough. For example, in Fair Isle: you can only stay at the birds observatory: Breakfast, lunch + dinner are at fixed hours.

A lot of the islands I have visited have migratory birds passing through them. It’s nice to sit there on an island and to have the bird-world passing by and over you.

There are around 30 people on Fair Isle. When you meet someone they ask: Are you a bird person? or an island person?

People leave the island from the age of 12 to go to school. The school in Shetland only has 12 children. Once I met an older man on Fair Isle who told me: “I came back to die here.” – it made sense. People spend their active life off the island and only go back there to die.

On Fair Isle, the sheep belong to everybody. Once a year, all the sheep are gathered up → the non-productive ones need to be slaughtered. But they cannot be slaughtered on the island. So all the sheep go on to The Good Shepherd – first alive and then dead. Everybody on the island gets a number and according to that they are allotted a (dead) sheep.

One of the most amazing things that happened to me on Fair Isle was the following: I was standing on a cliff (it was not dangerous.) I had binoculars and was looking through them at birds all around me. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could touch the birds because I could not see the land through the binoculars, it was covered by the black edges of the viewers.