(Tuesday, 21st of May)
It is difficult to perform practice. As soon as I am asked to do it on purpose, I stop doing it and I start performing the doing. I tend to question the meaning of such activity and therefore I fail. I feel certain dose of joy, mixed with anger, while watching those who do it so easily.
How to re-perform the practice that I already had troubles performing? How can I perform something that happens elsewhere, something that is done and experienced hours or weeks ago, in other places. I need to cut it into pieces, to see it as fragments, that is - to observe it. Something, instead of practice. I say ‘something’ instead of saying ‘practice’.
In Venice, some weeks ago, I observed sight-seeing.
I watched people being told where to look and what to do. I watched the people who show them where to look and where to go.
I watched people from safe distance and I felt distant.
Irony is a signal for being distant, a signal of inability, even fear to overcome the distance. Self-irony helps me to go the opposite way.
In Venice I worked with the question:
When does a place become a sight worthful seeing?
What brings me here today is a doubt:
Could I ever re-create an experience?
-----
I find a fanzine I made in 2009.
My secret Viennese ritual.
It depicts Starflyer, a ride in Prater, that I discovered when I moved to Vienna. From a distance of ten years, it looks like I turned a tourist attraction into an intimate spot, as if I needed to make it mine, in order to start feeling at home.
In front of me being obsessed with circling, this massive circling construction suddenly closes the circle, both in time and space. These coincidences excite me. I decide to revisit it.
----
(Wednesday, 22nd of May)
It is too windy today. Usually it is fun and pleasant. It is like a dream, a flying dream, or closest I could get to real flying. What makes it real is the air, the feeling of air in the throat, the exact line through which it vibrates, the embodiment of the respiratory system, the unity of the atmosphere and lungs - makes it real.
When its windy and when it rains, it is terribly scary. The chains that hold the seat, and oneself seated, move in unpredictable directions so the meditative speed of 60km/h gets a portion of stressful pace - the full rotation of the main ride is interrupted by semi rotation of the seats that are at the same time randomly swinging, left and right and right and left, nervously, all of this, at 117m height.
This is a memory.
Recalling it makes me scared.
Nevertheless, I go there.
To see what happens.
I go there to see what happens. That is what I do. I - go - there - to see - what happens. Simple present tense. It happens. Something happens. And I go there, not only to see it but to watch it happen.
As soon as I pronounce that, I get into a state of being on a mission. Or preparing for a mission. I am alerted. Whatever happens is something that happens and therefore worth my attention.
In this sense, the happening is not as spectacular as one would assume.
It is spectacular in a new subtle way, where any little occurrence becomes a sensation.
The dog is barking, this little alien is barking at me.
I always thought this particular sort of dogs come from another planet to spy on us humans.
This dog is barking at me, and I have troubles not to take it personally.
Its pouring rain. As long as my feet are dry I do not care.
I grew up in Antwerp, familiar scenery, green and grey.
Malo se umusavila bara, ova što je pre par dana izgledala kao ogledalo.
How do you say bara in English.
A chuckhole full of water after rain,
that appeared as a mirror some days ago
is blurry today.
This dead-end of thinking in a foreign language,
this road between image and text –
It is where I live and work.
Apparently there is a micro state in this park, a fact that makes me think of my boyfriend. I don't know where to search for it and I do not know where to find it. I see a man sitting on a bench in the children's playground, reading a book. For a second I think he is alone but just before I made my judgment over his weirdness, I see a child playing next to him. I find his blue jacket and the posture photogenic enough to film the scene, and while filming I realize that this person is in fact a woman and probably the mother of this kid.
I watch people being hesitant about the ride.
It is funny how many things depend on the sun.
On rainy days the ride takes place only when rain stops.
Even the writing of this text, as well as its reading
are conditioned by the weather.
I am searching for dense crowns to protect me against rain
so that my already blurry images do not get even blurrier.
I clean the raindrops from the lens with the cloth of my t-shirt, hidden underneath of many layers of garments, my fingers are wet and cold.
It is late May and too late for this kind of wind.
The winter will catch autumn from the wrong side.
I try to find a frame in which the tower is framed by the leaves and green as if that would emphasize the power of nature over industry. Even this thought alone is tacky, so I give up.
The tower itself is a clock. It is so high that it is hardly visible. It shows the exact time, but I wonder to whom.
I watch a man walking.
Local people walk differently.
Locals walk differently.
Locals - I try to avoid this word.
is it - People who live here?
People from here - or,
People - when they are at home -
People when they are at home -
walk differently.
Nothing of this that I wrote in Venice some weeks ago, when watching a man walking does not really apply to this man that I am watching walking in Vienna, now.
I am too local for this activity.
I walk differently.
I leave Prater, restless.
(Friday 24th of May)
It is sunny, but I am slow.
I am anxious, postponing the walk.
Egzotika is in our neighbourhood, I claimed so easily.
Why was it so obvious from Benidorm, Blackpool and Venice, and why is it so difficult to prove it from here?
I am trying to find a street that feels the least familiar, to enter the park from there.
I want to approach the ride from an unknown angle, to see it with fresh eyes.
It is a troublesome mimicry – I know, opposite from my usual transformation.
I try to remember, what I already know
while searching for the extraordinary, only surprises count...
I am finally seated in the swinging chair of my favourite ride in Prater. They wont let me take my camera up. It is too dangerous, they say.
I leave, mad like a little kid, almost crying.
(Saturday, 25th of May)
The day after, I go again.
This time, I manage to smuggle the camera.
I am only excited about capturing specific views,
those that stand for switched perspectives.
The ride itself is not exciting at all.
I feel as if I haven't taken it.
I was not there.
I was here.
Before I leave the park I discover another carrousel.
Tagada is an amusement ride where riders sit in a round bowl with no seat belts or restraints. There are bars behind the riders which they hold on to. The ride starts to spin, the music starts playing and pneumatic arms bounce the riders up and down. The Tagada is operated by a human operator who will synchronize the bounces with the music beat.
I spend almost an hour watching a girl taking this ride over and over again.
This repetition itself is hypnotizing but what makes her action impressive is the choreography that she performs so skillfully, being in great sync with centripetal force.
This mastered dance reveals her, this ride belongs to her, she is from here.
I am relieved to discover a local that is more local than me.
And I turn her, carefully, into attraction, so that she turns me back into a tourist.
---
These paths between familiar and unfamiliar, home and no home, moving and feeling settled are the ones I never left behind. The resistance as well as the urge to adapt, to fit, to belong, I study, through watching, participating in and narrating about my experience of travel.
Now I can say:
This is a travel story of non-traveling me,
this is me being home, trying to experience the flashes of the appearance as something that usually happens only when I am on the way.