And sleep...

Once upon a time there were some animals in a barn that were unable to sleep. There was a celebration going on in the village and the wind carried all the music from the violins all the way in the barn. The sheep and pigs were fast asleep nevertheless, but the cow, the cat and the newly brought puppy, were all awake listening to the faint music. The cat said "I cannot sit around here so still any longer, I want to go and see the people playing the violins and dancing. I am going to go to the village. Anyway, I am not able to sleep". The puppy started jumping up and down in excitement, knocking over his plate of food and wooden spoon, "Me too, me too, me too!!!I am coming with you!", he barked squeakily. The cat shook her head slowly, "I cannot take such a responsibility and take you with me, you are still so young. You shall stay here with cow", she said and at once started to leave. They watched her gracefully sliding under the barn gate. She stood in the path and just before she left she waved at them with her head, under the golden moonlight and the faint violin music. The cow sighed and blinked her long black eye lashes. "How I would like to hear and see those violins play and all the villagers dance and sing!", she said. The puppy was crying "Please cow, let us go too! If I get tired you can carry me on your back! If I get hungry we can take with us my plate! Please cow, please!". The cow pushed the gate open and blinked again, her large brown eyes shining in the moonlight. "Let us go up to the little hill puppy and from there we can look down at the village", she said and the puppy came out jumping, holding in his mouth his wooden spoon and his plate. 

The cow walked slowly while the puppy jumped up and down and run ahead of her. The moonlight shone on them and the cow looked up to see. The moon was bright and the stars were shining and the path to the top of the hill was lit. On the top of the hill the music from the violins was very clear and loud and they could see bright lights flickering in the distance. "Lets dance too! Lets dance too cow please!", said the puppy. He started jumping in circles around the cow and cutting funny figures. He then started to sing and pine and he dropped his plate and his wooden spoon. They rolled all the way down towards the village. "You will have nothing more to eat now puppy", said the cow, "I really hope you are not hungry". But the puppy was not much worried and kept on dancing and singing around the cow. The cow did some small jumps, two jumps to the front and one to the back with the rhythm of the violins. After a while the cow said "Time to go now puppy, it is time for us to sleep. The music is dying away, the celebrations are over". They both started walking down the hill, back to the barn. The puppy still running ahead, jumping and singing. The cow caught up some speed from the slope of the hill and broke into a little trot. She saw a muddy puddle full of water and in it the shinning golden moon. She took a big breath and jumped over it. She looked up in the sky and the moon was there as well as in the muddy puddle. When they got back the puppy curled up next to the cow and fell asleep. The cow's large eyelids were now heavy with sleep too. Soon the cat was back and settled on her usual spot. And soon all the animals were asleep.

When I first came across British nursery rhymes in Agatha Christie's books, I found them very strange and a bit eerie. They are very fascinating nevertheless, and I would love to research the roots of some of them. The one that Aretousa likes a lot, Hey diddle diddle, the Cat and the fiddle, the Cow jumped over the moon, the little Dog laughed to see such sport and the Dish run away with the Spoon, I think is based on star formations in the sky. As entertaining and strange as they are, these British nursery rhymes, they never manage to make me sleepy, but make me rather nervous after I've read them. So as well as singing the rhymes to Aretousa, I tend to make up some stories to go with them (more for myself than for her), featuring the same main characters.

For me travelling and changing places was a very exciting time, an opportunity for adventure. But now it is also an opportunity to sleep -although it rarely works out that way. Lets hope it will during this holiday. In the meantime, below are some postscripts on three old posts.

*On Axolotl. If you found the Axolotls as fascinating as I did, please read this great short story named Axolotl, by the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, which came to my attention via a friend after I had already written my post. http://southerncrossreview.org/73/axolotl.html

*On Totem and Taboo. For a little more information on Cycladic Art and a quick view, half way through the video, of how the Cycladic Art figurines and the antiquity sculptures are supposed to have looked like painted, you can watch the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCpPSBnHo6E

*On Roter Mohn. After I had written this post featuring my Grandmother's story with a German young boy, I received an email from the daughter, my cousin, of my Grandmother's only surviving brother. With her permission I copy here a small extract from her email:

"About the song and Aunt Marika. Did you know the story of the German boy? He was the son of a high ranking German officer who was fighting in Russia and since Crete was not in active battle in the manner that Russia was at the time, the German boy's father had a favor arranged to send him to Crete where he would be "safe" and out of the line of fire...and then to die from a balcony fall. The irony of life. And I'm guessing you've been in that house where the balcony was...I don't know if there's a balcony there anymore but George Kourtikakis in the village of Kousse now lives in that house across from his mother's house in that village."

Empty Books

When I was expecting Aretousa, I made for her a book with collage animals in it and the Greek equivalent word printed underneath. (Some examples of this book can be seen in the post Happy New Year). Then I started working on a second one, using the same kind of black, square, spiral bound book, to make a series of images of first words a child usually learns. This time I wanted to handwrite the word in Greek underneath rather than print it. When I was learning to write and read, I remember finding it very hard to read handwritten words; they seemed to me very varied from person to person and not at all similar to the printed ones. I still find it hard to read handwritten words in any language except maybe French, where the calligraphy people learn at school seems to be quite uniform. So I thought if I handwrite very clearly the words underneath the images, it will expose Aretousa to handwriting and help her get accustomed with it easier than I did. I barely had started the second book and Aretousa arrived, so I left it and still have not continued with it. I would like to finish the next five collages in the space of a month, which seems a very doable deadline. I thought maybe I should ask my mother to handwrite the words underneath, as she has an immaculate and almost perfectly even handwriting, but then that kind of defeats the point and will make the whole thing feel a bit alien to me if someone else finishes it. So I will leave the writing bit for the very end and decide what to do then.

Below are the ones I managed to finish: girl, boy, house, boat, ball, doll, teddy bear.

The thing I like the most about making these two books, is that it feels in a way as a very organised and complete thing to do and it makes me very satisfied to know that I stuck with it. I have been unable to ever keep a sketchbook, for example. I seem to draw and write mostly on whatever is around, before I forget my own thoughts; on opened letter envelops, behind or on shopping lists, on bits of paper laying around, in address books, on bills and so on. Whenever I bought different sketchbooks, I might start something very self consciously, but there are never more than a couple of pages used in either one book. Sometimes the drawings feel trapped in the sketchbook to me, and I want to see them next to other things, move them about and the only way to properly do this would be to tear the pages off, which really frustrates me. I am very envious of people who can keep sketchbooks and trace their ideas backwards through them. I am not sure where the root of my own inability lies. I once tried to stick all the bits of drawings in a book in an attempt to create a kind of sketchbook, but it looked very artificial and I was never sure which side to stick down, as most of the times there is something drawn on both sides. The best thing I could do to keep things together, is insert them in clear sleeve books, where you can see either side of the drawings. The problem then is that everything becomes a bit like an archive behind plastic and you are much less likely to work on any of these drawings again.

When I was a kid, we lived in an apartment that belonged to two, very modern at the time, twin blocks of flats, on split levels, that had one of their walls in common. This was apparently, one of the first blocks of flats to be built in the area, by an Italian architect, and because of its location on the mountain and its remarkable view of the whole of Athens, had the very exotic name of Bella Vista (Beautiful View). We were lucky, as the owners lived in Australia and let us rent the apartment there for years and years without ever altering the price. The first floor was raised from the ground with thick rectangular cement columns, so that it created a great play area for the kids in the winter. All around the two blocks of flats lay a huge garden. It took around fifteen minutes to walk all around it. In the summer we stayed and played "downstairs" from the late afternoon till around 10:30 to 11:00 pm. Amongst the residents of the two blocks of flats were altogether more than twenty children living there. There were around ten kids of my age and we had formed a very strong gang. I was slightly older than the rest of the kids and the leader of that gang for about five years, till we left the building.

One of our main missions was to stop a very mean, sad old man from destroying new born kittens in the cruellest of ways possible, that I will not go into here. I am sad to say that this was not uncommon in Greece of that time for stray animals to be disposed of. We managed to save many, but it was very difficult to find the money to bring them all up and without attracting the attention of the neighbours. We also played extensively hide and seek, with another version, solemnly retained for night play, called in Greece, German Hide and Seek. We played this after 9:00 pm. and it was a truly thrilling game. In this version everyone closes their eyes and counts to 100, while only one person hides. I still remember the darkness and the smells multiplying in the dark where you crouched hidden. There was grass, wild laurels, a weeping willow, honeysuckle, rosemary, cypresses and lots of bushes all around the garden. Then everyone spreads out in different directions looking for the one hidden kid. If you found them you had to hide very quietly with them till one poor person was left alone looking in the dark. Very often, we giggled and gave ourselves away and very occasionally the last kid would give up and call out for the rest to reveal themselves.

The reason I remembered all this, is because we also used to play a story telling game. Everyone wrote a paragraph on a piece of paper of a real or an imagined event. If you were not good with words you could only write down one single thing. Then one of us collected the papers and took them home the day before the game. We were given a beautiful leather black book, by the father of one of the boys there, that was from his job, to keep accounts inside. It smelled beautifully of leather and had pink shaded pages with lines and columns. We agreed to write our names, do a drawing of ourselves, the rules and missions of our gang, the money we had and the stories we told from the story telling game. I was responsible for this book and I don't think I ever wrote anything more in it than a title. Instead I wrote everything in bits of paper hoping to copy them properly down at some point. When it was my turn to do the story telling, I collected the bits of paper and made a hole in them and put a string through.  Then I carried it around with me and read them wherever I was. The bunch got bigger and bigger through each week in the summer.

At the very back of the garden, along the end, there were a series of very tall, old elm trees planted. I think there must have been around thirty of them of a silverish shade. When the wind blew from one direction the first tree moved slightly and touched the next one, then the next one moved and touched the following, so that it really looked like they were nudging each other tenderly, warning about the wind. When there was a storm or something like that, they really moved and made a very specific noise of fine wooden fractures and loud whispering. They looked like they got really panicked when there was a storm and worked each other up. Next to one end of that line of elm trees, was a round sand pit of about four meters in diameter. We lay there in the dark, like spokes of a wheel, with our feet in the centre of the circle and our heads outwards. You could see all the stars in the sky and hear the summer noises of people on the balconies and the elm trees always talking. One of my friends managed to somehow make her stories always include aliens. No matter what information everyone had given to her. You were meant to combine all the information and make up a story to tell. I always brought with me the pieces of paper with the string through them, but I could never see anything in the dark, so I made it all up anyway and no one seemed to protest if their bit of the story was not there. When I was leaving they asked for the book, which was still empty, so that we all went through all the stories. I told them some kind of made up thing I cannot remember, about burying it in the sand pit without opening it first. So I think it still lays buried next to the elm trees, without much written in it at all. Just the title and maybe a date.

TV Dozing

In my house, when I was very young, we had a television, which I do not remember. Apparently my grandmother used to leave me in front of it for short periods of time in order to get on with some housework. But as we used to live near the top of a mountain which hosts most aerials feeding Athens with all sorts of TV signals, the channels used to often flick over by themselves. The result of this was that our television often tuned itself spontaneously to a Russian channel. When I started, after a while, jabbering around in what my mother thought was nonsense, they tried to work out what was causing me to speak like that. When my mother was told by a client who heard me in her shop, that I was saying Russian words, she traced it back to the television and freaked out so much that she gave the TV set as a donation to the old people's home of our region. So then from the age of five to the age of fourteen there was no television in our house.

To compensate for that, my mother used to religiously take me out to the cinema once a month and she continued to do so throughout my childhood. It was the most exciting weekend of each month and we made a big deal out of it and dressed nicely. We often went for a sweet beforehand in a patisserie. Amongst the many films I saw at the cinema were some that were appropriate for children and some that were most probably not; but there was no censoring procedure strictly followed at the time in Athens. As a result I saw some films that I should probably have seen much later. Amongst the films I watched as a kid, some I still remember as part of the whole outing and what we did before and after the film, very very clearly. Such films were Fantasia, Stand by me, The Goonies, Cyrano de Bergerac, Heavenly creatures, Fried green tomatoes, A room with a view, The age of innocence, An angel on my table, A fish called Wanda, Beetlejuice, Who framed Roger Rabbit and the list goes on. Every summer the cinemas in Greece used to close and no more new films were shown. Instead the open air cinemas started and they used to play old films. There you could eat an ice cream or a souvlaki (and if you were an adult smoke) while you were watching a film. We saw such films as Rebecca, From here to eternity, North by Northwest, Some like it hot, The great escape, Rebel without a cause, A fistful of dollars, The Ipcress file, The old man and the sea, Death of a salesman and many Greek, Italian and French classic movies. 

When I was age fourteen, we got an old black and white Siemens television set from my father. At that time I had moved from the bedroom I used to sleep with my mother to sleeping in a settee-bed in the living room. I used to read and work for school late into the night and before the television came I used to listen to the radio a lot. But when it arrived everything changed. Late at nights the national Greek channel used to put on old classic movies, mainly French and Italian and I got quite hooked. During the  week there were serials on, like Dynasty and Dallas that my Grandmother and mother watched. My Grandmother was very funny with the television; she treated it a bit like a hazardous machine. Literally. When you switched the TV off it had one of those thick, bowed screens that used to glow into the dark for some time afterwards. So my Grandmother used to cover it with all sorts of things, like crochet table cloths, sheets and blankets. She said that stopped the radioactivity spreading to us and put the TV to sleep. The screen used to still glow in the dark through the holes, colours and designs of the fabrics. 

The first summer with that TV, I got so obsessed with following an old comedy serial, I dream of Jeannie, that I did not want to go on our usual summer holidays and miss any episodes. My mother was so upset with me I think she was very close to donating this TV set as well. There was no discussion about it though, and I had to go. I now more or less know that if I hadn't gone because of that Siemens television set, I would now be a doctor and probably would never have come to the UK at all. When we arrived for the first time, at a tiny island that summer, I was a grumpy, moody kid who was hoping the lady renting us our room would have a television and maybe let me watch my programme. She did have one and I did watch it once or twice, but soon I took to going around the island and painting my usual landscapes and forgot myself. That year I used actual gouache paints, rather than coloured pencils, and spent lots of time walking around the island to find a good spot. One early evening as I was coming back to our room, I crossed paths with another painter who was also holding his finished picture and bag of equipment. He stopped me very eagerly and was speaking in English wanting to see what I had painted. My English was not that good at the time and I spoke with broken grammar and very little words. From that point onwards we went painting together everyday and finished a very nice set of work, although mine was quite childish with very vivid colours. Towards the end I suffered with a horrendous sun stroke and my mother stopped me from painting further that summer. 

He spoke to my mother and I about his studies at a British college in London (he was himself Italian) and how inspirational his stay in the UK had been for him as a young man. For the next four years or so we kept on going back to that island, our friend and his family had built a summer house there in the meantime, so they were always there. We painted a lot every summer and he, very persistently and passionately, discussed with my mother the possibility that I study art. Although I loved painting I had never thought of studying art till that point. I was always somehow meant to become a doctor. I had not questioned it much as I was a good student and quite interested in medicine. My mother was not really taking him seriously, but his determination and my work I think, started to make her entertain such a possibility. 

I still have a very funny relationship with the television. For periods of times I get hooked with it, watching lots of things and other times I forget it's there and will not open it for weeks and weeks on end. Below are some images and a few videos using our current television set. I used some lace curtain sections and brown paper cut outs to put in front of the screen, as my Grandmother used to do. In this case the television is still on, but kind of dozing and you can look at it in a completely different way. 

Alpha the Privative

When I was little, my favourite animal was the horse. I had a very specific idea of what a horse was, even before I ever saw a real one. I thought of a horse as a very elegant animal, graceful and beautiful, while also as an intelligent and strong one. When I visited a stable with riding horses with my father, I was able to go close to horses and feed them carrots and stroke them. The horses at the stable were very friendly and tame and I was over the moon to have seen them close up and even been able to touch them.

I remember that soon after that, towards the end of primary school, we learned in a lesson that horses were originally animals that lived in herds and that they were prey. They were quite nervous and could get scared easily of things like loud noises and sudden movements. I remember feeling a little bit confused about this information and found it hard to imagine my graceful horses being hunted down to be eaten by other animals. I also thought it strange at the time, that such intelligent animals as I thought them to be, horses were actually still governed by their primal herd instincts and could get scared and spooked easily.

In Greek, there are a few words for horse, but the most common one used today is άλογο, "alogo". Apparently this was my first word when I learned to speak, after the usual names for family members. It is also one of the simple words we learn at school beginning with Alpha, the first letter of the alphabet. One of the traits of the letter Alpha as a prefix in Greek, is of being privative. In the beginning of a word it often deprives the word of its meaning, rather as if it stood for without. Some such words also exist in English, so that a-theism means without a God, a-nonymous without a name, a-mnesia, without memory, a-nemia without blood,  a-narchy without a ruler and so on and so on. Of course not all words beginning with an A in Greek are deprived of their meaning; I do remember though thinking at the time, how strange it was that the first letter of the alphabet had such thieving qualities.

In the case of the word horse, "alogo", I was soon to find out that Alpha also played a depriving role. The word derives from a military term referring to army horses. They were called, collectively if I remember correctly, as "alogos", which meant the part of the army without logos; "logos" means word and reason, so I guess it was used to presumably distinguish them from the humans in the army. By that time, I think I felt a bit deflated about horses. My original romantic and childish vision of them was rapidly fading away, robbed by thieving letters and lessons with meticulous zoological information. I did not think of horses again till years later, towards the end of school.

We had gone on a trip with my mother to the very Northern part of Greece where some friends had invited us. I had never been so far up North before and I haven't visited this part of Greece since then either. It is very different from the dry and rocky Southern and Eastern areas I was used to. The North part of Greece is very very green, wet and cold in the winters, resembling a bit Ireland, but far more mountainous. We stayed in a rural village and during one of our excursions to the valleys around the village, we came across a wild herd of horses. They were about a hundred meters away from us. They were grazing, but when they saw us they stopped and stared at us. They were absolutely amazing. I saw them galloping away and I remembered the lesson at my primary school. Seeing them like that made good sense in my head. To completely restore my faith in horses, just a few years before the end of school, we came across them again in Homer's The Iliad. In the whole of the Iliad the horses are given an almost human dimension and often talk with a human voice and can even sense their keepers' upcoming death. I still remember, in a passage just after Patroclus is killed, Achilles' horses mourning for him, bending their long necks and crying human tears for his loss. That made me think again of horses and remember how I had originally imagined them, as a kid.

Today we made the letter Alpha with Aretousa. I drew some horses with a permanent pen on some clear sticky plastic for covering books, because she likes stickers a lot at the moment. We were making a green field for them and when we finished she stuck the horses on top. Here is how it looked.

Exercises with Boxes

I have always had, since I was a teenager, a deep dislike of people getting together and forming groups. This is not a reasonable attitude, but a very personal one, idiosyncratic to myself and by no means is it a judgement on people who have formed distinguished and remarkable groups throughout the disciplines and enhanced their world with their work.

In my secondary school in Athens, during the last three years, (secondary school in Greece consists of three years of Gymnasium and three years of Lyceum), the "cool" kids were the ones who were the strongest, top pupils, while also being trendy and fashionable. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, were the rebellious, "anarchist" students, who did not appear to give a damn about school. If you belonged somewhere in between and you were a medium kind of student who did not really stand out you were OK, as everyone left you alone to eventually form a group with similar students. But if you were a good, conscientious student, like I was, but not trendy or "cool", then you did not fit anywhere and stood out like a sore thumb. The last two years at school were terrible for me. My previously "best" friends had somehow formed a clique and made it very obvious that I was not accepted. The worse thing is that I really never found out what exactly caused this complete change. In several occasions I was treated in a very humiliating and aggressive way in the middle of school. When I tried to mix in with any other group of students I was made to understand that I did not belong there. What really got to me, is that every group was physically taking over certain spaces inside and outside the school, so much so that you could almost make a map of different territories of each group. It was a given that you should not go to the spots the groups normally occupied, even if they were not there at the time. I think there was a period of about six months I did not speak to anyone at school and I often stood at a specific spot in the courtyard looking out towards a small hill. It was a great anticlimax to a very positive experience, more or less, of school till then.

Forming a group is a very natural thing for people to do and it must have been crucial to the survival of prehistoric men. Any kind of group of people getting together voluntarily, for any reason, presumably do so because they have some things in common or because they have a common cause. By definition and unavoidably, a group carries with it the trait of exclusion. No matter how large or small a group is and regardless of its nature or purpose, it will always exclude a certain portion of people. Visually it is similar to a circle, with the people of the group in the centre. That is neither here nor there and many groups do actually aim to make an obvious distinction with the rest of the world or to purposefully oppose other groups or institutions. Many groups do not even acknowledge this exclusion and would advocate their openness to everyone or their intention to reach out to the world from their position in the group. Of course a group, say formed in order to protect the wildlife of a lake somewhere, will make no effort to interest classic movie fans and so will probably never reach them. And that is not so important, as the two subjects are not directly related. But if the same group failed to communicate with the local people living around the lake and with those whose living directly depends on the lake, then that exclusion would be crucial, not only to the future of the group, but also for the potential future of the lake, wildlife and people of the area. What is really ironic is that, from my observations, by forming a group, albeit often with the best intentions, people tend to exclude or oppose the nearest and most relevant subjects. That is particularly and overwhelmingly apparent in politics with tragic consequences. But even more subtly, especially within creative groups, the danger is that the individuals could get so consumed with their ideas and with each other, that everything will start to swirl around in circles within the group, which will either eventually lose momentum and die out or overflow in some dramatic fashion. In many cases the focus of the group collapses inwards, towards the centre of the circle, shrinking it, so that the inclusion of crucial subjects and ideas from outside becomes less and less likely. Occasionally a group will be so influential or so necessary, with often a charismatic leader or a great dynamic of personalities, that its formation feels inevitable and it changes the face of the world, for better or for worse. Being part of such a group must feel like being caught up in a whirlpool and your following it is no longer up for discussion, you are so deeply in it that you just watch yourself as part of history taking place, in amazement.
Remarkable works have been achieved by people forming or belonging to a group, so again I note that this is a very personal view. But as an individual, I am very wary of the difficulties of belonging to a group and of the lurking dangers to oneself and to others, of a moral and of a human nature.

However much I dislike groups for that inevitable exclusion trait they carry, I am doubly intrigued by their spatiality. By that I mean the actual different physical spaces that a group may occupy throughout its existence, and also the "imagined" spaces that spread outwards from the group and from its ideas to the world. This sounds mildly philosophical and abstract, but it is not as bad as my idea about theatre that I wrote for my MA final dissertation. I sometimes do not believe I got away with it, for my whole dissertation was based on a notion I had that there is an actual shape created in theatre between the stage and the audience. At the time I was actually serious about it, but I could not find the words to explain exactly what I meant. Thankfully one of the professors gave me an amazing reading list of books which gave me the vocabulary and foundations to explain my crazy idea. Amongst those books is my favourite non-fiction book and I believe a very important read for anyone, called Thirdspace, Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places, by Edward W. Soja. Others included Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel Foucault's Of Other Spaces, Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space and Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. I suddenly felt less crazy and that non-physical spaces did not only existed in my mind but people had been writing about them for years.

I will not try to go into the idea of a shape being formed in theatre now, but I could give a simplistic visual example of what I mean regarding the spatiality of groups. If a group was to be meeting in a room, for example to discuss and develop their ideas, then we can imagine this room as a closed box. Already for me, what is going on in this room/box and the ways the space is used or not used and what is being brought in and taken out, in regards to objects and ideas, is in itself very interesting. But even more interesting are the ways in which the group will attempt to externalise their ideas and their work outwards. Because if the weakness of a group is its trait of exclusion-the potential failing to identify and consider crucial ideas and people-, its major strength is the unlimited ways it can externalise and project to the world its internal visions. So then the box it is opened, and all the flaps can be unfolded, tucked in, ripped out and given away, expand, change shape, flip over and so on. This is again a simplistic visual metaphor and might sound complicated and abstract, but just think that the space of meeting does not have to be in a room/box to begin with and also throw in some cyber technology and the possibilities become multiplied and even more abstract.

The groups in my secondary school were able to create areas were they met and which no one else could access. Groups of students moved from area to area, marking it, but they remained nevertheless internally static. It does not have to be that way. There is great future for groups, with the acknowledgement of the potential pitfalls and with an unlimited and hugely open way of externalising ideas and visions. So that real and imagined spaces created through ideas, can form a new platform, or better even a new dimension, which will be more inclusive, more accessible and always developing.

Some years ago, driven by boredom and frustration for the lack of a studio, I made for myself some exercises with boxes. For two months I collected all used boxes of any kind and gave myself a few minutes to unfold them, look at their shape and come up with a construction that either gave them a character or a narrative. Below are some examples.

War

Japanese Fisherman

Love Flight

Out of Reach

Dirty Laundry

Mind or Heart

Anchored Pig

 Greek Kiosk

Boxing Match

IKEA still life #2

The second toy related to food that Aretousa enjoys playing with, is a fabric tray with a fabric filleted salmon, two wedges of lemon, a tomato cut in half and two bunches of parsley. The difference with this one in comparison to the first, (the first was the basket of vegetables seen in IKEA still life #1), is that this one contains food from the animal group.

Aretousa has been eating fish from an early age and when we were in Greece she saw both live and dead, cooked fish, but I doubt that she remembers them or that she understood the connection between what she saw and what she ate. My aim for us today was more or less to handle a bit the fish and the rest of the vegetables before we cooked them, so that we form a very basic understanding of what food looks like before we cook it and afterwards and how the same food tastes.

I think that it feels strange to be eating things for so long without knowing what they looked like before you ate them or when they were alive, and how and where they grew (being animals or vegetables). Many of my students had never seen an apple tree, which is common and native in the British Isles, but were consuming lots of apples each week. On the other hand, many people who have not been familiar with some foods all their lives, find it very strange or even repulsive eating them afterwards. Like many people find prawns with their shell and antennae still on a bit creepy. While others, who perhaps played in sea water puddles where shrimp live and tried to catch them, probably would not even think about it. So maybe originally people ate what happened to live and grow where they were and this way they knew exactly what they were eating and were aware of or even had been involved in growing or rearing it. But of course things are much more complicated today and we can get hold of foods from all over the world relatively easily, but with such variety it is very unlikely that we can relate to each food properly and be aware of its journey and its life before it reached us.

It is so funny that every time I cook fish and smell it, I remember a particular fishing trip and think of a large school of small whitebait that we caught when I was young. It was a midnight fishing trip in August on the day of the last full moon of that summer. That used to be around the time that we returned to Athens from our summer holidays. The sea was a "flat pan" with not even the most minuscule wave on it. We hadn't even left the harbour of the island that long when we literally fell upon a large school of small whitebait. They must have thought the moonlight for the sun or for some strange reason they were swimming close to the surface and jumping out in waves, rather like dolphins do. You could hear their bodies touching each other and then entering the surface of the water. They were so many that even by throwing the net on top of them you were sure to catch a huge amount. We only threw the net once because that felt at the time like a privilege to have fallen upon them in that way. We caught many and it felt like we were fishing fallen stars from a golden sea. They were like a silver treasure, like we had caught with our nets an open old treasure chest. They spilled on the kaiki deck from the net and glistened and shined and danced in a dazzling light. It was unforgettable. Then we just anchored there and then and did not fish any more, but jumped in the sea for a midnight swim.

To cook the whitebait best, we rinse and dry it, cover it in flour which has been seasoned with salt and pepper and deep fry it. It is best eaten very fresh and you can eat the whole fish, no need to bone or gut them, they are so small. Once deep fried, we squeeze some lemon juice on top and crunch the whole thing. It is rich in calcium and phosphorus.

Today Aretousa handled the fish and the vegetables and then we rolled out a little water based black printing ink and stamped them in the ink and then onto some thin rice paper. The ink can be safely rinsed out before consumption, but to be sure with the tomato and lemon, I sliced a thin slice of the inked surface off and discarded it.

Long time ago, Japanese fishermen used to document their catch by making a print of each fish for their records. The technique of fish printing in Japan is called  Gyotaku, and now it is recognised as an art form in its own right. You can make such a print by applying ink directly on to the fish or by producing a print indirectly. In that case you would have to apply a wet thin paper onto the fish, dry it out and then proceed to make a rubbing of the surface. Our results are not so sophisticated, but I like that the lemon, tomato and parsley prints look like sea creatures.

After the print had dried and we brought it back in Aretousa persisted in wanting "kokkino" and "kitrino". Which means red and yellow and she means by that paint in general. So below the finished fish still life.