Hortus Conclusus 't Janboersmeulentien 1
This work was created during the work on the landscape project with social sculpture. Already during the making of its project plan, I encountered a poem by the Spanish author Antonio Machado from the beginning of the twentieth century: "Cantares y Proverbios", in a composition and translation of Tjeerd de Boer and Kathleen Ferrier. From this I took the first two lines:
Traveler,
There is no way
The poem of Machado is about the road we must go as human beings through existence. There are no rules, there are no directions, you have no guarantees and the traces you make fade away as foam on the sea. The poem also has an autobiographical touch, because Machado refers to himself as the poet in exile in a neighboring country. The poem fits so accurately with the project of the historic lane that was taken out of use and became overgrown, that I included it in my project plan.
The lane is literally a road, and at the same time it stands for me and my fellow villagers from my hometown, for much more than just a piece of infrastructure. It's a road intertwined with our youth, our growing up and our lives there. Over that road you walked past the monumental farm, between the pastures through to the nature reserve of the Linde valley. The experience of the landscape; the life you found in the ditchess, the hedgerows and the fields; being 'outside' and coming outside; the village that suddenly rises up, reddish and orange from far behind you, behind the meadows and hedgerows; leaving the village to be on your own; the transition from the architecture of the village, through the cultured grounds to nature. The lane is a tangible track of centuries-old usage and of shared and personal meanings.
The first two lines I mirrored, so that the sentence can be read as a kind of palindrome starting from both sides, with the term 'way' as the spindle. In English this sentence sadly doesn't translate properly: traveler there is no - way - no is there traveler. In Dutch this makes sense. This mirroring fits how the lane can be walked from two sides down. By encountering the words as concepts separately from each other, but in sequence of the line of the path, each word gets an independent focus as a concept. The 'there', and the 'is', and so on. Each word as a concept to see and contemplate autonomously, but nevertheless in that linear sequence, which orders the words into the syntax of the sentence. The 'sense' of every word as a concept and as an 'image', together with the 'sense' of the words ordered as a sentence, which runs up to the middle (giving the lane itself a 'middle', wich thus becomes a Hortus Conclusus in itself) and then reverses to where it started from. The middle is the term 'way', which in Dutch reads as 'away' or 'gone', and thus 'is not', and at the same time it refers to the lane as a way to get somewhere and to the road in a transient sense: a history - the path that a community or someone takes through existence. Because of these last two meanings, I did not omit the concept of "traveler", but consciously included it.
Traveler,
There is no way
The poem of Machado is about the road we must go as human beings through existence. There are no rules, there are no directions, you have no guarantees and the traces you make fade away as foam on the sea. The poem also has an autobiographical touch, because Machado refers to himself as the poet in exile in a neighboring country. The poem fits so accurately with the project of the historic lane that was taken out of use and became overgrown, that I included it in my project plan.
The lane is literally a road, and at the same time it stands for me and my fellow villagers from my hometown, for much more than just a piece of infrastructure. It's a road intertwined with our youth, our growing up and our lives there. Over that road you walked past the monumental farm, between the pastures through to the nature reserve of the Linde valley. The experience of the landscape; the life you found in the ditchess, the hedgerows and the fields; being 'outside' and coming outside; the village that suddenly rises up, reddish and orange from far behind you, behind the meadows and hedgerows; leaving the village to be on your own; the transition from the architecture of the village, through the cultured grounds to nature. The lane is a tangible track of centuries-old usage and of shared and personal meanings.
The first two lines I mirrored, so that the sentence can be read as a kind of palindrome starting from both sides, with the term 'way' as the spindle. In English this sentence sadly doesn't translate properly: traveler there is no - way - no is there traveler. In Dutch this makes sense. This mirroring fits how the lane can be walked from two sides down. By encountering the words as concepts separately from each other, but in sequence of the line of the path, each word gets an independent focus as a concept. The 'there', and the 'is', and so on. Each word as a concept to see and contemplate autonomously, but nevertheless in that linear sequence, which orders the words into the syntax of the sentence. The 'sense' of every word as a concept and as an 'image', together with the 'sense' of the words ordered as a sentence, which runs up to the middle (giving the lane itself a 'middle', wich thus becomes a Hortus Conclusus in itself) and then reverses to where it started from. The middle is the term 'way', which in Dutch reads as 'away' or 'gone', and thus 'is not', and at the same time it refers to the lane as a way to get somewhere and to the road in a transient sense: a history - the path that a community or someone takes through existence. Because of these last two meanings, I did not omit the concept of "traveler", but consciously included it.