Last few weeks of preparations
It has been a very busy time for me lately, with preparations for the trip but also with other things besides. This busyness has prevented me from writing much about these things here, and so I will first have to do some explaining.
I was invited recently by occasional DAI guest tutor and organiser Alite Thijsen to participate in an exhibition in March in “het Glazen Huis” in the Amstelpark. It’s a gallery space located in a glass box in the middle of the park, and the theme of the show was to be the park itself.
To this end I have been busy working on some new works which I would like to show. The first is a video shot hand-held while walking through the park, accompanied by a forest soundscape: the idea is that you don’t notice immediately that the two do not belong together.
Secondly, I am making a series of small models of the various structures in the park, which will be presented in one or more “kijkdozen” – something like the shoebox constructions which children make with a wee hole in the end to see inside.
We, myself and the other participants, had made a collective funding application to the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, an organisation which sponsors artistic projects in the city. This involved each artist submitting a written proposal, as well as an application form, which was filled in by Alite and Anna. The last stage of the process was attendance at a meeting at the offices of the Fonds, certainly a scary experience for me at least.
When we had spent a half hour or so explaining ourselves, the pair interviewing us thanked us and said that we would hear their decision the following day and… we got it! Yes, that’s right, real money. I must also say that as far as I am concerned, it means a lot more than just the cash: it is about getting a certain sort of recognition that what you are doing is up to scratch, that someone in a position of power thinks it’s worth supporting. I am much more sensitive than I should be to the approval or disapproval of others, and this sort of thing helps my self-confidence a lot. Of course, there are four other artists involved, so well done to them too. Others worked much harder than I did.
Back to the big journey, and some complications. We have finally got round to dealing with visas for Russia and Kazakhstan, a process which is none too simple. It is only possible to get a one-month visa for both countries. This should not be a problem for Russia because we are crossing a relatively short section of the country, but we had hoped to spend three months crossing Kazakhstan. I’ve managed to make contact with a tour operator in the country itself who should be able to send us an official “invitation” so as to be able to obtain a three-month business visa, but of course this will cost money and seems a bit dodgy to me. I mean, we are not going to look very businesslike on our bikes. But there seems no other option, so we’ll have to give it a go.
One very annoying thing about the Russian visa is that, since I live here but have a British passport, I needed to get a “uittreksel” from the municipality to confirm that I live here. Normally this would mean a quick trip down the road, but myself and Astrid have just changed our addresses so that we officially live in her sister’s house. This is because we will obviously have no address in Amsterdam while we are away, and many beaurocratic things become very difficult in the Netherlands if you do not live somewhere.
The problem with this is that to get the uittreksel, I needed to go to the offices of the municipality where we now “live”. This meant a four-hour return journey this morning for an A4 sheet of paper, which incidentally also cost almost €10. Just the sort of waste of time and money I could do without right now.
