Daniela Nicolaescu's debut collection is a stirring ethereal whirlwind that remains rooted in the earth, corporeal. It is divided into parts, Earth, Water, Air, Fire; and the fast-paced movement continues through raw earthly experience, watery furlings, twisting back and forth, airy imagining, fiery feeling.
It assembles poems over a decade of writing, from 2012 to 2023, across Romania, Italy, England and France. It is a bilingual edition, in English and French, but as a "free translation" (as the author terms it), almost entirely translated by Nicolaescu, it does not read as a parallel translation; instead the translations vary throughout, in what is kept and what is left aside in either language. Some keep the essence or atmosphere of the poem but leave wide gaps between the direct meanings of the words themselves. In this way the poems live in harmony, co-exist in the collection, but are also very much independent of each other.
I read this as a subtle commentary on translation too: the translator's difficult debates with themselves and others before having to make the final decision of how they read the piece in one language, and what they will offer from it into the other. Down to word-level, sentence, atmosphere as a whole; which word is kept for the translation if a double meaning doesn't work; or histories contained in a word, cultural or literary reference, unique to the one language. Ultimately translation is of course a reading by the translator, while keeping horizons as open as possible during the process to embrace other possible readings, and attempt to put something of that palimpsest into the final translation from which the process behind has vanished, other than explanatory notes. But there are no explanatory notes in Nicolaescu's collection, other than the introductory note, crediting the two poems translated by Radu Bata, and calling the rest translations freely adapted from personal interpretation. Inevitably, as the writer of the poems, and the translator, proximity to the text could not be closer.
Collected across many years, and across diverse locations, the poems reflect on versions of the self across time, and the person that moves forward, containing or dismissing the voices, memories, experiences of before. It considers the natural change and continuity happening to the individual on a universal basis. The poems are also very much contemporary, reflecting and speaking of our age. In 'Therapeutic exercise', there is a paralleling of the mind to a computer; a memory that can be removed like deleting a typo: "Your body is a memory, / from which I will discreetly fade away / as if removing a typo" (101).
This also contemplates the body becoming memory, and the memory as being something written. Several of Nicolaescu's poems pay explicit attention to the nature of the written word, as well as the relationship between the body and language. In 'Ungraspable':
Years ago, I stared at blank walls
until I could listen to
the sound of my mind
projected onto them.
Silent walls like pages
that could not have been turned —
playgrounds for ideas
to jingle and merge.
I wanted to be real
in the eyes of my shadows,
staring at me from the distance, but nothing fits in the body
— smell, flesh, or voice —
ghostly mind haunting the walls,
the pages of an elusive existence.
(97)
There is a paralleling of "walls" and "pages", which reminds me, although in a very different tone, of Apollinaire's 'A La Santé' (1913) written while he was imprisoned, noting his naked vulnerability ("I’m bored between these completely naked walls / Painted in pale colours / A fly with little steps roams upon the paper / Through my uneven lines"); as well as Henry Howard Earl of Surrey in England in the sixteenth century in 'So cruel prison how could betide' (1557), where the walls enclosing the poet remind him of previous encounters in this space, and reflect his memories back and him ("The void walls eke that harbored us each night, / Wherewith, alas, revive within my breast [...] The secret thoughts imparted with such trust, / The wanton talk, the divers change of play"). Here Nicolaescu appears to follow in this poetic tradition, where room and mind are paralleled, and walls with pages; it contemplates how the thought becomes a word, written onto the page. The line breaks show a sensitivity to the visual appearance of the poem as it corresponds to its meaning: "walls" and "pages" placed at the end of the line, faces the 'silent' and 'blank' white space of the page. Does this imprison the thought, or free the word? It plays between the silence of the mind and the sound of the spoken, between the shadows of thought and the flesh of the word, the movement of page in motion as it is being read, and its stillness, like a wall, before it is turned, or before the book is opened.
There is a very physical grappling with language that is reflected in harsh bodily metaphors. In 'To inhabit a language", for example, the poet writes:
To inhabit a language
is to perform an operation
in the night, without an anaesthetic,
wearing gloves like a surgeon
(171)
The image is visceral, painful, and asks how one really holds a language; how it may be entered as a space, or held as a material, or broken apart and examined.
Then the spaces between, the divisions and contradictions between languages, between selves across different languages and locations, come to a fore in 'The Distance to Cross':
Solitude inserts itself into the space
between
your dry clothes and your wet body
between
two foreign words
that can't speak through gestures.
Between you and the other,
two tectonic plates collide.
(201)
It delicately locates solitude between opposites "dry" and "wet", but between entities that also appear connected or attached, as clothes resting on the body, especially a wet body, would give the impression of something clinging. The "foreign words" are treated like 'bodies' too, treated as bodies that have the potential of voice, but cannot gesture, cannot communicate between then; and so, however close they are placed, the space between them is vast. The poem looks at distance between bodies, perhaps always foreign, even our body to ourself, different across different times, different across different countries, different across different languages. How do you word your body, see yourself within or outside a language, native or foreign?
Nicolaescu's collection Hyperboréen took me on a captivating disquiet journey through the visceral and dreamy, and an introspective look into identity through language, contemplating the location of the self between foreign worlds.
The book launch for Hyperboréen will be held at Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds on 7th September 2024.
Roy Claire Potter is an artist and writer with a diverse body of work accumulated over the last fifteen or so years across the fields of performance, writing, audio, drawing, sculpture, and installation; often collaborating with musicians and sound artists in radio broadcast and live music events. They are also involved in artist-mentoring and higher education. George Storm Fletcher is a young performance artist working with text, printmaking, photography and video, whilst also continuing their postgraduate education. Both are artists who bring their own queer identities and perspectives to bear through their work in unique, thoughtful, and revealing ways, to reflect on, illuminate, and confront their (and our) experience of contemporary culture and everyday life.
I saw a screening of Fletcher’s new video work, Heaven, just days after finishing reading Potter’s newly published novel, The Wastes. The proximity of those impactful experiences of each of these two very different works cast, for me, a new light on the other; hence this reflection on the parallels and contrasts between them.
Book cover of The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter and Film still from Heaven by George Storm Fletcher
The grit referred to in my title is, in part, a figure of speech, as in ‘true grit’, signifying strength of character, courage, and tenacity. It is also, literally, the millstone grit that characterises both the Pennine landscapes central to Potter’s novel and the building material of Kirkstall Abbey and many of the walls and older buildings around Leeds that are the essential backdrop to the narrative of Fletcher’s film. In that sense at least, ‘grit’ is common to them both. Charm, however, is an adjective that might be more readily applied to Heaven and its predominant tone than to The Wastes. The text work that accompanies Heaven reads, MY LUCK WAS ABOUT TO CHANGE, celebrating the moment when a long and gruelling walk is ended by the welcome offer of a ride in a florist’s van. When luck changes for the protagonist of The Wastes, it is more often for the worst. The significance of a photograph of Vanessa Redgrave, a still from the film Wetherby that also graces the novel’s cover, eventually becomes apparent as the story unfolds. There is, the author describes, “a chaotic crisscross of misfortune” behind Redgrave’s eyes. Much of the actual and metaphorical journey of the novel might be described in the same way, but the story is recounted without self-pity, and this restraint magnifies the book’s impact.
Heaven engages playfully with the road movie genre, documenting a conversation-filled journey shared by the artist and their mother, Amanda, along Kirkstall Road from the centre of Leeds to the outlying village of Burley-in-Wharfedale. Through their dialogue, prompted by Amanda’s recollection of making the same journey as a teenager after a night out on which she missed the last bus home, mostly walking, hitchhiking unsuccessfully, until she was eventually picked up by the driver of the aforementioned florist’s van, filled with the heavenly scent of flowers. In its easy-going, conversational (and often very funny) way, the film reflects on memory and its frequent flaws, social and cultural histories, psychogeography, sexuality, ageing, and intimacy. This narrative, set in a particular moment of historical time, reminds us that the past often seems relatively stable compared with our ever-changing present. This is reflected in the dialogue (for example in fragmentary references to past pop music, or drinking culture, or fashion) but most importantly visually, in the presence of the streetscape and landscape that we see flashing past in an equally fragmented way through the windows of the van. Heaven illustrates well the way we seldom remember things in their entirety but in vivid flashes. The film compresses many such diverse flashes, many funny, others poignant, combining them in a way that creates a coherent narrative. The fact that these memories are recounted through the intimate conversation of an obviously loving familial relationship, on which we are generously allowed to eavesdrop, is what lends the film so much of its charm and sense of joy.
Film still from Heaven by George Storm Fletcher
Travel, sometimes walking, briefly on a bus, but mostly a journey on a miserable and unreliable commuter train across the Pennines from Liverpool to Hull, is also central to the narrative of The Wastes. The journeyings it recounts are both purposeful and aimless. It is a powerful novel of introspection and observation, revealing much about the underbelly of the landscapes and towns of northern England. It concerns survival, economically, culturally, and psychologically. From the multiple perspectives of class, financial hardship, gender identity, sexuality, embodiment, and mental health, and in the various contexts of strained family and other personal relationships, and the capitalist alienation of underpaid and stressful work, The Wastes is ultimately concerned with the self: shaping or defining it; losing and regaining a sense of it; locating it in relation to the selfhood of others. “Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt”, wrote the Roman poet Horace two millennia ago – “they change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”, reminding us that wherever we go, we remain, in our embodied selves, where we are. Each in their own way, Potter and Fletcher use travel in their narratives to reflect on how we shape and understand our ‘selves’.
Roy Claire Potter. Photo © Ilaria Falli.
The philosopher and poet John Koethe wrote in his 1993 essay, Poetry and the Poetry of Experience, that, “what seems most characteristic of subjectivity isn’t the content of any particular state of awareness, but, rather, the transition from instant to instant between perspectives, from an awareness of the objects of thought to an awareness of thought itself, in an unbounded sequence of reflexive movements.” In the proliferating links and layers of a life story, recalled through an account of a single day’s journey, Potter creates a novel that embodies the complexity of subjective experience in a world that is recalcitrant to it, constructing connections in a way that conveys what Koethe calls “the experience of experience”. Fletcher’s real time film journey recounting the layers of memory and history associated with the earlier journey that it recalls does something similar.
Film stills from Heaven by George Storm Fletcher
Heaven recreates, as faithfully as it can, the sensations of and emotional responses to an actual event (or, more accurately, two events: the mother’s journey thirty years ago, and the shared journey made recently to recall it). Its method is a spontaneous conversation that, whilst entirely focused on specific recollections of the original event, reveals much more about a familial relationship and the intimacies of communication across generations. In contrast, The Wastes is a work of fiction, written over an extended period, and related solely from the perspective of its author. Its central event is a single train journey, but it encompasses a life story. Fiction and autobiography should not be confused, but most fiction draws at least indirectly on the lived experience of its author. Such experience, condensed, reprocessed, and seen anew through the lens of storytelling, often lends greater significance to everyday reality, imbuing emotional responses and momentary reactions to mundane experience with long-lasting relevance. Through the narrative language of a skilled writer (and Roy Claire Potter certainly is one) an empathy is enabled in readers that allows them to identify the experiences of fictional others with their own.
Film still of Vanessa Redgrave in 'Wetherby', dir. David Hare, 1985
In their focus on a single journey to tell a much bigger story of lives lived, both Potter’s The Wastes and Fletcher’s Heaven are related – not least in their capacity to make us think about the concept of ‘revision’. Their revision is not simply retrospective, narrating the past as if in a straight line; rather they both, in their different ways, repurpose their respective narratives to simultaneously look backward (re–vision) and forward (revising something toward new ends).
The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter is published as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer. ISBN: 978 1 912570 20 1
Heaven, made by George Storm Fletcher in collaboration with the filmmaker Ronnie Danaher, is included in their solo exhibition of the same name at Hyde Park Art Club, Leeds. ( 29 May 2024 - 28 August 2024)
Infinita infanzia at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, Italy
23rd March 2024 - 9th June 2024
Curated by Saverio Verini
Infinita infanzia is a group exhibition which immerses visitors through the voices, spaces and connotations of childhood. It creates a stimulating journey through the rooms of the museum that is caught and held in tension between the dark and the idyllic. A group show of twenty three artists (mostly Italian living artists), crossing generations and mediums, the exhibition considers childhood in its universality and as a multifarious concept where no two experiences are the same.
Installation view of Infinita Infanzia at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Centre: Cesare Pietroiusti, “Pinocchio” nuovo con gomma, Trieste Zona A, 1954, 25 Lire, rosa carminio sovrastampato I-II-III-IV-V-VI, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Apart, Rome. Right: Andrea Salvino. Pinocchio, 2021. Collection Flaminia Cerasi. Photo: Giuliano Vaccai.
To respond to an exhibition grappling with the idea of childhood, I find it difficult not to impose or project my own experiences of childhood. Travelling through the show, I felt a sense of heightened emotions which varied distinctly from room to room and work to work, with some provoking memories and sensations that I could perhaps relate to and others that I felt pushed against my experiences. In this way, the exhibition contains a natural intimacy and introspection that is at the same time framed in the shared experience of the exhibition space. It evokes a kind of exposure of this process of introspection, of looking inside and presenting it outside.
The age range, years, of this stage of life is not specified in the exhibition. Left ambiguous, this emphasises the exhibition's exploration of the imagined concept of childhood rather than a concrete biological or psychological period. There is no singular or definitive childhood; it is a subjective experience that appears to subsequently get assessed and framed by the society the adult grows into. This ambiguity over when and where childhood might be located, encourages the question as to whether this period of life is fixed or ever-changing. How does an adult look back at childhood? What place does childhood have in the making of art? Where does the child reside in the art world?
Vedovamazzei, Early Works (Raffaello all’età di 7 anni), 2021, Stick oil pastels and acrylic on canvas, 290 x 335 cm, 2021. Courtesy Vedovamazzei and Magazzino, Rome. Photo: Giuliano Vaccai.
Luca Bertolo, Il fiore di Anna #2, 2019, Oil and crayon on canvas, 200 x 250 cm. Courtesy the artist and SpazioA, Pistoia. Photo: Giuliano Vaccai.
It takes the visitor on a journey paralleled to a story. The first room, titled 'Prologue', usually used for the introductory part of a book, gives the impression that the visitor is entering a tale. I recall Disney films, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Cinderella (1950), that begin with a book being opened, the 'once upon a time', leading the viewer into the pages of the book which become the immersed world of the film. This first room proposes a consideration of perspective: with a large work, the viewer is made to feel small. It is a work by the artists' collective Vedovamazzei of a child's drawing Early Works (Raffaello all'età di 7 anni) (2021) copying Raphael's Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn (c.1505-06), introducing an exchange between the worlds and perspectives of child and adult. The last room of the exhibition, continuing with the sense of a book, is titled 'Epilogue' and includes the imitation of a child's drawing by an adult by Luca Bertolo Il fiore di Anna #2 (2019). In this way, the artwork appears a point of intersection in the exchange between child and adult interpretations of art, creativity and each other. This story through the journey of the group exhibition is inevitably not a story of a singular voice, but is made up of a tapestry of voices; it is a polyphonic narrative.
Installation view of Infinita Infanzia at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Front: Alexander Calder, Standing Mobile, 1974. Collection Galleria d’Arte Moderna “G. Carandente”. Back left to right: Adelaide Cioni, Bozzetto per il mare, 2019 and Cerchi gialli, 2021; Posizioni di volo, 202. Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna. Photos: Giuliano Vaccai.
The journey through the ground floor spaces of the Palazzo Collicola takes the visitor on a circular walk from room to room, each exploring a separate element which intersects with the adjoining rooms. The works are displayed with sensitivity to the place and architecture of the Palazzo Collicola, and its unique textures, bringing out affinities of the works with each other and with the space. The third room 'Elementary Complexity' considers the possibility of basic forms to evoke complexity. Here there a sense of stillness awaiting movement in the works by Alexander Calder and Adelaide Cioni, which also share an affinity of colours. Calder's mobile moves subtly in the flow of air, so that it might never be seen from the same angle twice. Cioni's stitched fabric Posizioni di volo (2021) appears to frame a bird in flight, the stitches almost invisible such that the bird feels tied by an illusion. In the following room, titled 'The Attendance Register', exploring school, rules and rebellion, the work of Maurizio Cattelan Punizioni (1991) is placed centrally between two windows, below the palimpsestic wall with traces of lines and patterns from an earlier period. The lines of the paper, and their varying shades of yellow complement this space. There is also a subtle reference to Spoleto in Tomaso Binga's work Alfabeto Pop / Chiesa (1977), a drawing of the cathedral covered by letters reminiscent of a text for learning how to spell, rooting it to the location.
Slideshow (1-5): (1) Installation view of Infinita Infanzia at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Left to right: Riccardo Baruzzi, Abaco, 2018. Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna; Filippo Berta, Happens Everyday, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Prometeo gallery Ida Pisani; Tomaso Binga, Alfabeto Pop series, 1977, Courtesy the artist and Erica Ravenna Gallery; Maurizio Cattelan, Punizioni, 1991. Private collection, Florence. Courtesy Tornabuoni Arte. (2) Maurizio Cattelan, Punizioni, 1991. Mixed media on 30 sheets of paper, 204 x 204 x 6 cm. (3) Installation view left to right: Filippo Berta, Happens Everyday, 2012; (visible through door: Namsal Siedlecki and Myriam Laplante, see below); Binga. (4) Binga. Alfabeto Pop / Casa and Alfabeto Pop / Chiesa, 1977, Collage on pre-printed cardboard, 39 x 26 cm. Courtesy the artist and Erica Ravenna Gallery. (5) Simona Weller, Senza Titolo, Mixed media on canvas, 15 x 30 cm, 1973-4. Courtesy the artist and Erica Ravenna Gallery. Photos: Giuliano Vaccai.
The idea of storytelling and the place of the story within this journey of the exhibition begins to appear in a room dedicated to Pinocchio. This features an captivating story on film by Cesare Pietroiusti, of a stamp and making a work from this stamp and story, interweaving its monetary and artistic value, and tying the process of making to the process of storytelling. In the room's contemplation of Pinocchio, the space raises the power of the imagination to create and give life, to animate toys and objects and put them in motion. The idea of the game and of play, is significant throughout the exhibition, offering the possibility of game as a form of universal language. Further on, in a completely darkened room, a film by Diego Marcon, Ludwig (2018), with haunting music that plays on repeat, prompting a sense of vertigo and disorientation, I felt a toying between dark humour and tragedy that children's animated films can contain and might only be fully recognised in adulthood. In another room, Linda Fregni Nagler's haunting series of photographs Hidden Mother (2013) reminds the visitor of the exhibition as an intersection in the exchange between adult and child worlds, as they depict children being held or propped by the hands of faceless adults that attempt to remain hidden and erase their presence and make the child the central subject.
During the exhibition's duration, there was a performance by one of the artists, Myriam Laplante, which animated the work is a disturbing mode of play. It evokes, with humour, the scariness of fairy tales, which perhaps try to warn children how to behave. Laplante's piece Lupas in Fabula (2005-24) consists of wild-looking bears on the floor with swollen stomachs, and in her performance, Laplante transformed these animals, through an intensive metamorphosis, into items of domestic furniture. This room also contains work by Mattia Pajè, including Un giorno tutto questo sarà tuo (2019) showing a sleeping baby, juxtaposed by large black circles, perhaps evoking a vulnerability of childhood, and mystery about it.
In the polyphony of voices, crossing between the conscious and subconscious, darkness and delight, the exhibition creates a narrative through the complex concept of childhood; at the same time, it weaves the spaces of the museum in with these works, which push and pull each other in a play of tensions and affinities.
Slideshow (6-14): (6) Installation view of Infinita Infanzia at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Foreground: Myriam Laplante Lupus in Fabula, 2005-2024. Courtesy the artist; background: Mattia Pajè, Un giorno tutto questo sarà tuo, 2019. Courtesy the artist. (7) Installation view, left to right: Luigi Ontani, Pinocchio, 1972. Private collection. Courtesy L’Attico and Fabio Sargentini; Marta Roberti, Autoritratto come Pinocchio, 2024. Courtesy the artist and z2o Sara Zanin. (8) Diego Marcon, Ludwig, 2018, Video, CGI animation, color, sound, loop. Courtesy: the artist and Sadie Cole HQ, London. (9, 10) Linda Fregni Nagler, The Hidden Mother, 2013, 5 platinum palladium print on cotton paper, each 51 x 39 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan. (11) Installation view, foreground: Namsal Siedlecki, Group Show, 2014-2024. Courtesy the artist and Magazzino, Rome; background: Carol Rama, Dorina, 1946. Private collection, Turin. (12) Francesca Grilli, Sparks, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Naples. (13) Calixto Ramírez, Tana libera tutti!, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Alessandra Bonomo. (14) Installation view, foreground: Elena Bellantoni, CeMento, 2019. Courtesy the artist; background: Thomas Braida, Sculturine, 2014 - 2024 and Tassidermia in festa, 2011. Courtesy the artist and and Monitor, Rome, Lisbon, Pereto. Photos: Giuliano Vaccai.