Exit Strategies

There’s a book I bought 15 years ago that one day I will make up my mind and spend the time to read (as I perceive this action as fulfilling a useless longstanding desire and therefore a luxury, up now I never allowed myself to). This book is The Soundscape, by Raymond Schafer. I’m not only dislocated in a new visual reality here, but also in a new audio reality. When we are not professionals of the sound we rarely notice it, as the power of the visual is much stronger. And there’s quite a huge number of sounds we are exposed to, in urban areas, that are pretty common in most of the towns where we live. Noises produced by cars and motorbikes, the ones of the planes flying over our heads and landing in the local airports, and – further less enjoyable – the cracking-nerves noise of the garbage bins empitied in the dust-cart. But sometimes, something unexpected can brake the common mixture of noise/silence we are used to, and reveal us the place we are in is not a familiar one.

There’s a kindergarden right in from of my room. I can’t see anything as the flat is on the ground floor and there’s a wall surrounding the building that covers the view, but still you can get the sounds of the neighbourhood. And the sound, today, comes from the kindergarden where – among the crying of the kids and the rolling of bikes, balls and anything they play with, someone is giving a workshop in xylophone, and the music is amplified by loudspeakers. I say “someone is giving a workshop” as you can distinguish specific audio sequences played once, and then repeated by less experienced people. So I presume it’s something like that. The result is quite enjoiable, but unusual to my ears. A different soundscape.
I got the same impression a few days ago, whilst – getting out of my place on a Sunday morning – I was exposed to the music and choirs coming from the nearby Baptist church. The voices coming from inside were mainly feminin. I’m not specifically moved by this genre of songs, nor by this audio experience itself, but behind the sound there are people, and I felt somehow less lonely and more protected although the human presence could only been assumed, but not seen. So I stopped for a while and enjoyed, as churches always give me the same effect of isolated places – far from everyday life – where one can experience a feeling of a strong energy given by the gathering of different people who have a common faith in something (the same description can be applied to different gatherings of people – it’s what Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow experience“). I was perceiving from outside the result of the flow experience others were living.

Then, suddenly, my attention turned to be grasped by the visual – that recalled its power on me. Right on my left – in front of the church – a phone box was covered by an unusual advertisement. A white circle on a black background included the words “A ring of salt will protect you”. I looked at the phone box, then looked back at the church on the other side of the street, then again concentrated on the phone box to eventually realise, at the end, that is was (probably – but who knows?) only by a coincidence that the two opposite communications were sharing the same crossroads.

Besides the hearing, another sense competes to grasp a person’s attention whilst travelling: the sense of smell. Any place has a different smell, and – like in another book (Picturing Culture, by James Clifford & George Marcus) was noticed – ethnographic diaries are full of references to smells that are never present in the final monography we write about the situation we studied/researched about.
The sense of smell is the most powerful provoker, in me, of frequent time warps – as it leads my mind to memories, sometimes far in years in the past, I completely forgot, and make the visual images associated to those time distant situation flowing in front of my open eyes and superimposing on the real ones I’m seeing in a specific moment. That’s probably the reason why I look for these sensations – that can be negative or positive (it’s up to the way to judge a scent) – and enjoy so much those places where smells/scents/perfumes are strong and can lead my imagination to other similar situations experiences in the past. And – let me behave as an anthropologist for a minute – the judgement of a scent as nice/bad is again culture-based (the same could be said about the appreciation of something you hear or taste). I was quite surprised so, when I was living in Germany, to buy a handcream that was exactly the same I was used to use in Italy, and once opening it realising it had a very different scent. The ingredients were the same, only the chemical composition of the perfume was different – to localize the product among the place it was sold. But I was quiet young, I couldn’t realise someone else was already aware of the phenomenon ans was also able to build a marketing strategy on it.

Yesterday I went to a building that is going to be demolished soon, but before this happens it is hosting the Market Estate Project – an art experience and a series of events with about 75 artists – that will end the 6th of March.  The project is connected to the idea of helping the local people – formerly living in the social houses that are going to be destroyed, as crumbling and impossibile to refurbish anymore, who had relocated nearby – to emotionally overcome, by the support of arts and artists, the loss of a place were they led their lives up that moment. A collective “rite of passage”.
I had a tour in and around the building, actually in unaccettable conditions. The water was dripping at every floor from cracks in the ceiling and gathering in little pools on the corridors, the electric cables were hanging from walls cracks – giving me an uncomfortable, precarious sensation. But then, I had a wonderful time warp.

Humidity + chill + concrete. Humidity and chill is a smell I know since the first (squatted) social centre I joined in my late adolescence, places where I grew up and where I still go to meet most of my friends – for concerts, dinners, talks. Humidity and chill recall as well the memory of the flats my friends, coming from villages in the region, rented during their university years, and where it was quite common to have lunch and pretend to study together. The smell of concrete comes from the experience of different houses’ restorations I had been exposed in my life, both in case of family’s flats and because of my father’s work – for which he was always in company of bricklayers whose clothes were impregnated of powder. Where I feel that smell, I feel “home”. And then, I first perceived these three scents together many years ago, one day I got out of the overground train connecting the airport to the city centre in Hong Kong. Humidity was 95% and a few people were involved in the restauration of the building. I couldn’t breath properly as the powder and the humidity were so concentrated – so this might be the reason why I remember it so neat.
The scent I breathed yesterday was right the same one. I climbed the stairs in this empty building, listening to the water dripping and the pieces of concrete craking under my shoes. The shadows of two chinese guys carrying a beam overcame me smiling. I smiled them back, although there was nobody around.

“Don’t try, do!”. This sentence resounds in my ears as a mantra since when I’m here. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much up now, but I’m slowly beginning. A guy physically stopped me one evening on my way home, whilst I was still in a temporary flat I rent for one week in Shoreditch. “Come inside and visit my exhibition!” – he said, and I did. It was the opening, with lots of people crowded in the small space of a former shop, now used as an art gallery. His exhibition was actually one single huge work on canvas that covered the four walls of the shop, painted and written with some hints he gave (colours, “symbols”, sentences) and for the rest by those passing by in the street the days before, and curiously asking what was going on, as well as by the ones joining the opening itself.

I read a few words and realised I was interested, but felt like I wanted to visit it another time, without so many people around. “I come back tomorrow”; “I’ll wait for you”. The day after we both kept our word and I came back, to realise that Piero (Arico’ is the surname) is an Italian artist and a lovely guy – generous, passionate and full of fascinating contradictions. A deep rich soul I immediately clicked with and – enjoying his and his mates’ company (he was supported in this work by the crew of ArtFeelers) – joined the following days for a couple of films in the evening and a lovely shared dinner with some more people. So, one evening I felt sad and tired because of the tough flat-hunting turned out to be one of the most intense and enriching event I could live. I wrote on the canvas – and this became part of his work – “From now -> on you belong to my extended family”, and this sentence joined the many contributions other people gave – in the direction of a sort of collective meditation about society, relationships and communication in contemporary world Piero suggested and that is his aim (“but we can only suggest a direction, and then who knows what people will develop from a hint?”).

Anyway, I met a few new ‘brothers’ and ’sisters’ by meeting him – and it’s a crew I quite enjoy. Relaxed, deeply in contemporary arts and in sharing food and talks. In spite of those who say London is the capital of loneliness!
Still, somehow, I have to say this is true. It’s quite easy to relate each other quickly, but the flow of the people who come and go is astonishing. As soon as you tie up with someone, you risk that this person goes away (usually abroad – ’somewhere else’) to follow his/her attitudes, dreams, life. Some people are never fed up by the town, whilst some others ‘bite it and rush away’. London is immense and with many ‘centres’ that still – luckily for me and by my point of view – are build up from former villages and/or act as real neighbourhood. My friends (who are not going far at the moment, or at least have short trips “in the continent”) are all around here. I’m in a multicultural cool place far from the touristic area, with no mess around and a walking distance by the former ‘village’ of Stoke Newington. I only miss the sea, but can reach the Thames – and imagine the river docks as scratches of an imaginary sea – in half an hour by bus. And whilst talking with new people I meet, I define myself in terms of East Ender, living in Clapton (Hackney), and realise – by this same way I talk about me, as “new Londoner” – the way some pieces of my identity are to a certain extent “shifting”- carrying me at least to a new (temporary) definition of myself. It’s a curious process – and something anthropologists love to live on their own skin and self-reflect about!

Do not trust maps, in London, they don’t tell the truth: what you think is nearby on the map, will always be elsewhere in the reality. Walking is something I do really enjoy. Covering neverending distances is something I enjoy less, but still is a wonderful way to get to know a place. When I don’t walk, I observe this town from above: from the upper floor of the buses, from the windows ot the overground train crossing the houses at their somthing like second floor of the houses. And I grasp instants of people lives: a white man gardening the backyard of his place, a woman caring at her kids inside a sad grey block, a couple of gothics walking to reach Camden Lock. I take the chance of any interview and any step I do in my job search (yes, now I’m searching for a job – it seems there’s always something to search for here in London, doesn’t it?) to discover new areas of the town, but at the moment I mostly had the chance to explore – if you look at a standard map of London and use the Thames to split the north and the south of the town, and the City as ‘hardcore’ of all the issue – some east, some north-east, some north-centre and some south-east of the Thames.

I had to meet Chris, a few days ago, at the 56a Infoshop Social Centre. You can reach that place taking a couple of buses from Clapton Pond (where I live) to Walworth and, as I never give up any chance to play, I did it also this time. This means that, without any ‘academic’ intention about questioning issues such as place, standard maps, distances and cultural assumptions about the boroughs I was going through, I jumped on a bus, reached the upper floor and began shooting pics as a common tourist. I wasn’t really interested in anything in particular. I just took a pic any time I had a question or some stupid reflections were coming up to my mind.

Clapton Pond seems like a fairytale, notwithstanding its poverty. A fountain, a small wood bridge, a few trees, and probably ducks (not in this season). In front of it, waiting for the bus, you are offered the sight of some anonymous shops and a phone box sunk in the cement of the pavement (it’s a pretty traumatic experience calling from there, as the pavement itself is partially lift so that you are forced to assume a diagonal position with your body as well, and hope not to fall out of your centre of gravity).
From the bus I take a few pics, perfectly knowing the areas of the town I’m in – and being able to figure them both in my mental map of London and in the memory I have of the standard map of it, but still… where are the borders among the different boroughs? And how comes that sometimes boroughs are not written in some maps, but smaller areas within them are? Which is the reason why a map includes the name of a smaller area and skips out the one of a bigger borough?

The freedom of enjoying this small trip gives me the chance to notice and joke about the places, so that I feel moved as I see a huge building in cement, glass and steel with two high wings… and something that seems just fallen down between them. I can imagine it desperately crying to the people walking quickly in the streets nearby, and I can hear its voice and story: “Hey, you, can you help? I’m a piece of the roof, I fell between the two wings of this building and it’s so narrowed that I can’t stand up anymore so to climb it and get back to my place… CAN SOMEONE HEEELP?!?!?!?!”.

Chris (Captain Mapp) draws maps, and makes people do the same. Then he collects the works produced and organises exhibitions of them. I ask him what’s next, when he leads a workshop or a walk with people, and they produce their maps of a place, or tell him their stories/memories about a neighbourhood in the past. “What’s next? Nothing!” – he replies. All is spent in the dimension of the actualising, in a full situationist style.

I got to know him whilst searching online for maps and mapping in London, and I met the project “THE MAP ROOM (is open…)” – that exists also in reality as “suitcase” archives of maps, projects, festivals he produced (or led the production of)… The maps we are talking about are not the usual ones, with standard points of reference anybody could use to orientate in the space: they are subjective, emotional, symbolic, and mostly depict their author, his/her memories, points of view and desires. They reflect the sense of a place by those who live it, and for this reason both a (psycogeographer) artist and an anthropologist can be interested in them.  I’m starting wondering how an ethnographic project I have in my mind about the issue of “personal and collective identity” could match with his work and be developed by our different, but closed, gazes. One  of these days, I will find out the time to write a draft about it, and ask Chris to give me his feedbacks and work on it himself too.
But now it’s time to get back to my (desperate) job-hunting, and leave the dreams about my projects, games, and happiness besides – for a little while.

The first time I came to UK I was thirteen years old, and one of the things I still remember was the surprise I had by discovering you could get an ice-cream or a soft drink in a shop that sold newspapers as well. Another surprise was to see cigarettes sold in supermarkets, right nearby the cash desk. Comparing habits between different countries (and/or cultures) has become something I don’t even realise I continuously do now, but at those times it was for me a real shock. Commercial licences in Italy are now a little less severe then before, but still cigarettes can’t be sold in supermarkets (you find them only at the tabacconist, who can’t sell food in the same shop), and you can find soft drinks whilst buying the newspaper only if you are in some fancy small shops selling anything in touristic areas.

Not much has changed here – by this point of view. Shops keep on selling different goods and giving different services at the same time in the same room. So you can get your mobile phone unlocked whilst waiting for your coat to be dry cleaned, or you can get a haircut whilst buying bags.
Whilst walking in Mare Street, I notice a huge amount of mobile phones hanging on the right side of the entrance of a butchery. “Can I take a pic of the shop for my blog?” – I ask. The guy stares at me, and replies “Ask the boss, over there”. I enter this sort of grocery store, meet this man, likely from Middle East, and ask him the same question, explaining I will write an article about this issue as it’s something unusual for us. “Really?”, and then he turns and calls another guy, an even younger shop assistant. “Is it true that in Italy you need licences to open shops and sell goods?”. This last guy looks at me and then at him and replies “Yes”. And then asks me: “Sei italiana? Anche nel mio paese devi avere le licenze. Qui è davvero strano anche per me!” (“Are you Italian? In my country we need licences as well. Here is definitely weird for me too!”), and smiles. He is from Romania, but learnt a perfect Italian by watching Tv shows and cartoons whilst he was a kid – quite a common habit for Rumanians that became an unwilling learning strategy and then a useful competence when they turned adults. “I let you take a pic if you give me the article!” – shouts the owner from the back.  “Fine! You will see it on internet!” – I shout him back.

Another pleasant surprise about London is the existence of so many open air markets selling any kind of merchandise. Markets are wonderful places to grasp the mood of a place. You can experience different way of greeting and talking together between the people, you can understand much about the common food eaten in a place, the gender relationships issues, the city councils strategies to improve an area, the values and attitudes of those working or living nearby and so on. I had the chance to visit a few markets up now – quite different as goods sold. I already told about Broadway Market (where all the young creatives and artists of London Fields meet to buy expensive organic or imported food), and as well I did about Camden and its (fake) punk reminder. Let’s switch to two new discoveries: Ridley Road and Brick Lane markets.

Ridley Road one (in the area of Dalston) is what is more closed to my personal experience of Italian open air markets: housewives meeting and comparing prices, people wandering about without a specific need, dealers shouting the freshness of the seafood they sell. Little differences are what I got used to notice: whilst in Italy you would have a stall assistant collecting for you the food on the quantity you require (kilos, hundreds grams) from a tidy pile of a specific vegetable or fruit, here you have the same product already split in different baskets, each of them going under a specific price (1 pound, 50 pence etc.). And, of course, the variety of imported goods is quite undelievable too, and reminds you constantly the colonial past of this land (not to mention the people themselves): I keep on wondering about the use of huge cactus limbs perfectly aligned nearby other fruit, and still old african men comfortably dressed in tunics and gym shoes – arguing about the quality of a yellow/golden/green coat coming from Ghana – attract my surprised gaze.

Brick Lane is a flea market that take place on Sundays in Shoreditch. You can find quite a few used stuff there, ideally gatherable under the notions of ‘posh snobbish vintage’ on one side, and ‘desperately sadly miserable’ on the other. Nothing in between – apart from (stolen) bikes. But, as it always happens in these kind of makets, people can express their creativity in drawing the attention of potential custumers with odding strategies, such as  placing a perfectly functioning and switched on television right on the pavement nearby a rubbish tin.

But the best DIY attitude is testified by an online resource for professional beggars: the Hackney freecycle. Freecycle is online community of ‘givers’ and ‘takers’ under the notion that what is the garbage of a person can be a treasure for someone else. Membership is free, and everything posted must be free as well. Anything can be given, taken and recycled in different ways, using all your creativity to fullfill your needs. Brigida got four folding chairs that match perfectly the eco-style of her flat. I got an ink-jet printer Epson Stylus probably sold around 2001 that matches perfectly my old laptop bought in 2002, so that none of the two feels old-fashioned. And one day I will be able to find a black toner so not to have to use the blue left one in the space of the black – as I’m doing now. Or I will find a way to refill the toner myself, by buying some fresh black ink and probably wasting the half of it in my hands… Awww, whatever!

Searching for a flat in London is an experience I don’t wish upon my worst enemy. It exposes you to the weirdest humanity you can imagine meeting. It seems that all the borderlines of the world have gathered here with all their financial resources, and bought flats to rent out in an act of affirmation of their identity. Renting a flat or letting a flat is a matter of status, in fact. And newbies on both sides know and accept this. All except the last, who could care less about this rubbish: me.
I’m not a Muslim woman willing to sharing a flat while waiting for the right one to whom to devote myself. I’m not the lesbian frightened by men to the point of not allowing – just in case – even my father to come, visit and sleep near me. Not to mention all the 20-something idiot girls I met who told me: “Sorry, but you seem to be too old to get on well with us” (in this last case I’m only upset I will not see you in the next 15 years, darling, when your life will be fucked up by an inconsiderate man and a couple of useless kids and you will wonder why you were so stupid to party every night instead of studying and building your means of survival).

But most of all I’m not the eco-vegan-animalist willing to recycle every tiny little thing I use to show how much I care about this planet: nice one, but on the contrary I think the best demonstration of my care for it would be to spread (and join) the proposal for a mass suicide of mankind as the friendliest act to let the earth regenerate by itself, and – hopefully – in less than one hundred years to forget the existence of human beings on its surface. But eco-vegan-animalists would never care enough for the cause to be the first ones to do it (at this point, dear reader, I want to enlighten you to the fact that – in case you are of such bad faith as to accuse me of instigation to suicide – I am not supporting this perspective in any way: mine is only a reasonable observation).
So I’m looking for a simple, clean, unpretentious place. Given all this background, my search is quite hard.

I keep on looking on the internet at Gossip, a lovely café in Broadway Market. Yes, it’s fancy and elitist – in this renewed area which ten years ago was considered such a slum that people willing to open a business couldn’t get bank loans, and those working in the area had to come by taxi because they were afraid to use public buses. But now it’s a “stylish” area, where young people come on Saturday mornings to buy expensive organic food in the market and wander around all day showing themselves off. All dressed in the same, classical English style: tweeds, tartans, lots of wool pullovers, jackets, coats and scarves. All pale, with sad, depressed eyes giving the impression they are always about to faint. And all with the same haircut, the one that made me hate the Beatles from the very first moment I saw them.

The Gossip has wi-fi, a great selections of teas and two young people as staff who are supportive and let me stay there the whole day to search in exchange for the few teas I drink while almost “squatting” a table and a chair. I will never be able to thank the people here enough for their kindness and hospitality (in spite of the desperate room search).

Today I found another place whose destiny is to become “my place”: the British Library. A huge, modern building and a paradise for book lovers. Here, you don’t even understand how they check you, but they do, deeply. You can plug in your laptop anywhere and leave it (apparently) unguarded. You have a free wi-fi connection (but no chance to do any political activity through it) and gluten-free chocolate cakes (the only way I can survive, as all the other food costs too much for someone with celiac disease).

I took off my shoes, since my left foot hurt, and realised after a while that I was walking around the library barefoot. “Whatever”. I sat on the floor and checked my email. My status on Facebook today says: “Cristina is still homeless but searching for a room at the free wi-fi hotspot in the British Library”. My punk attitude always comes out, aligned to my new conception of myself as somehow a snobbish newbie Londoner.
And, as I’m a part of it, my dear new co-citizens, can’t you let me sleep inside here for free? I feel safe here, among lively books you consider unanimated. “Adopt a book” – an advertisement inside says. Yeah, I’d rather pay for a book than for a room at this point. Would any of the books among the social sciences sector adopt me as well? I would feel “home” surrounded by them – and sleep quite cool and safe on the floor, imagining all the wonderful, surprising, unique and adventurous lives and stories they contain, and which my life will not be long enough to read.

I had a wonderful dinner last Thursday with a few (girl)friends – where I learnt to complain in the English way. “Complaining the English way” means that instead of mumbling and telling yourself you will never go again in a place you disliked for something due to the service or the food, you make it notice to the manager of the place, who will do its best to compensate you for what went wrong – with a dessert, or in any other fancy way. Cool, isn’t it? I like it – my critic attitude is definitely fulfilled by it.
Anyway, we had a lovely evening any anthropologists would dream about: talking with some other intellectuals, not from your field, about what we notice as similarities and differences between cultures – and Brigida and I are deeply embedded in this educational attitude and in broadering our knowledge about human cultures beyond academic community. So we spent some of our time teaching about hygienic norms and conceptions among gypsies, Italians and British people. When you take the shower in the morning, for example, we first use the bidet, and then take the shower: yes, we wash ourselves twice. And no, the bidet is not “that piece of forniture that fill the space between the WC and the sink”. Just as we would never use the small towel – the one we use to dry our privates – to dry our hands and face as well, for which we use the bigger towel. Of course, we had finished our dinner before talking about these issues – it wouldn’t be nice to talk about intimate washing whilst eating…

The day after I had what I consider the best interview I ever had for a job with whom could be considered at a first sight as a ‘weird’ professor – as I couldn’t even understand, before meeting, is she was a ’she’ or a ‘he’. Her name is in fact Sue, but she uses as well the name Johnny to refer herself. On the net I saw some of her articles signed either with the masculine or the feminine name – so I couldn’t really understand. But at a certain point I didn’t worry about it anymore. “Whatever!” – I told myself, a comment really nice I learnt here, that means something like: “Whatever it is, it’s not an issue of mine, and/or it doesn’t make any difference” – it’s all London, baby!
Anyway, the inverview didn’t give me (at least not immediately) a job, but opened up some opportunities. What’s more important is that it has been the best inverview I had in my life: two hours spent 1) with a passionate person willing to learn about my researches, attitudes, aims, 2) listening with a sincere interest and care to me, 3) telling me a true and objective analysis of what I’ve done up now (so congratulating me for the good things as well as criticising for the wrong ones), 4) suggesting me the further steps to achieve my goals (and not forcing me to necessary do this in her department), and showing to be a people person with a deep and warm kindness to support me – like she could see my past in my eyes. Unbelievable! Something special I wish all the ones I love to live by/with someone else such as a potential mentor/tutor. So I’m keeping on thinking/wondering/reflecting about this still now. I’m getting every day more confused, but still in a serene way. Thinking about next steps. What I want to do. Where I want to live the next few months. What am I actually looking for in general…