On magic and mountains

So much for blogging about my art school experience – I had to quit after a measly three months. My asthma made it impossible to continue and in January 2010 I had to throw in the towel.

I have been able to keep up my weekly home cinema experience Kunst!Film! and I kept adding pics to my Flickr sets ‘On My Wall’ and ‘Waiting For’, but that’s about it for most of the year. In september I went back to Artless, for a short, but vibrant course by teacher Dieuwke Spaans. Together we collected ideas to act as a starting point. She helped me re-discover what I had known all along: that I love land art: stuff done to change space, to change or intensify the experience of the landscape, make one look at the landscape differently, surprisingly, magically. In land art I recognize my own love for landscape and nature, which I explored extensively from a scientific point of view as a geographer and struggled to help preserve as a civil servant. Art and science both look at the landscape differently, but to me they are equally able to enchant it.

So… what now? In December 2010 I left the Netherlands for a three month stay in  Davos, Switzerland, at the Netherlands Asthma Center. Once my overexcited airways start calming down from all the torture they suffered over the years in the Low Countries by means of air pollution and moisture, I might just start to feel better and build up some much needed energy. Not just for sustenance, but for creativity, for expressing myself in different ways. I want to surprise myself – and perhaps others. My main focus in Davos will of course be to restore my health, but being surrounded by majestic mountains and masses of snow is certainly an inspiration I hope to tap into.

Davos is famous for Thomas Mann’s book The Magic Mountain (1924), in which a young German gets to spend seven years in a Davos sanatorium to treat his tuberculosis. I remember reading this book (half of it actually, twice), and feeling the magic of the mountain myself. No way I could resist re-reading the book, so I took it from the hospital library. I hope the mountain will do its magic for me.

Note: because my posts will no longer mainly be aimed at my fellow Dogtime students (rather an international bunch), but also at current and future asthma patients in Davos, I choose to continue writing in Dutch from now.