The Place Exchange

The Place Exchange

Contents Instructions for Day 1 of the Exchange Instructions for Day 2 of the Exchange Cleveland, and surrounds

2 4 6

Sarabeth Domal

The Barren Moorlands That Look Untouched

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Georgina Watson

Untitled

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Sonya Battla

My-tì-schì

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Maya Guileva

Dacha Sergei Zinchuk

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This publication primarily documents an exchange of places we miss and would like to visit again once the restrictions allow us to. However, the full extent of this collaboration goes beyond purely an exploration of place, through writing about and sharing a place we each miss, we also shared our loss, grief, hope and care for each other. The project also formed an experiment of a de-hierarchised and decentralised network, designed to explore a different way of connecting and sharing with each other during these times when many of us were working from home and enduring extensive video calls in order to continue our studies. The Place Exchange came out of, was bound by and made use of the lockdown restrictions in the UK in February 2021. Over a year into the Corona Virus pandemic, the project enabled us to look back on the past year while also projecting forwards to our ideal futures.

Georgina Watson, March 2021

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Instructions for Day 1 of the Exchange

Hello, First of all, thank you for taking part in The Place Exchange!

As the name suggests this project is an exchange of place, primarily between yourself and two others but also a wider group as each person you exchange writing with will also be exchanging separately with someone else. This creates a wider circle, a chain that should not be broken. You will form the common link between the two people you exchange with as they will not speak to each other directly until we meet as a whole group tomorrow.

Before we exchange places, I’d like you to write about one place you miss visiting and would like to visit again as soon as restrictions allow for you to do so. I’d like for you to describe your chosen place in a way that evokes this place for you, perhaps you might choose to recall a particular memory of being there, describe how you feel when you are in that place or you might choose to write a list of words you associate with being there. However you choose to write about it, that is up to you but please finish the piece of writing with a note of what you would like to do in this place once you can visit it again.

This writing is how we will exchange places, I would like you to send this piece of writing to the two email addresses I sent to you with these instructions, these are the two other people you will be exchanging with. Please send your writing to them in separate emails by 5pm GMT today or if you think you might need a couple hours more please get in touch with them to let them know. Once you have done this please patiently await the arrival of their writing to you.

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This evening I will also send the instructions for the main part of the exchange that we’ll be doing either this evening or tomorrow morning.

If you have any questions or would like to speak about the project or your writing in more detail with me, please just send me an email, I’m available all day and will happily any answer questions via email or set up a zoom meeting too.

But until then please enjoy the writing process and enjoy sharing places.

With thanks and care, Georgina

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Instructions for Day 2 of the Exchange

Hello again, I hope that by now you should have sent your writing to have received writing from the two people you are exchanging places with as part of this project. This evening or tomorrow morning is the time for the main part of the exchange.

Upon having exchanged writing with at least one person in the group, you can start organising this part of the exchange. When you have both sent and received your writing please schedule a phone call. You will need to arrange a single and separate phone call with each of the people you exchanged writing with.

During these phone calls, I’d like you to read each other’s writing back to each other. Taking time to read their words with consideration for the place and their connection to it, imagining the place for yourself and trying to place yourself within the description too. Though, most importantly, please make sure to read it word for word, even if they have used pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘my’.

Once you have each read the writing please check in with each other, for some this could be quite an emotional experience, what you have shared might be quite intimate or you might like to hear about the place they wrote about or to simply discuss the experience of writing about a place and hearing those words being spoken by another. How you choose to do this section of the call is up to you both, just please be gracious and open in this moment of care.

As I said before, you will do this twice, once with each member of the group you are exchanging places with. By the end of the second call, you 4

will have heard the place you miss described in your own words twice but each time in a different voice neither of which is your own. You will have also read aloud a description of two places which you might not have ever visited using another’s words but your own voice. I hope you will have enjoyed this exchange and the gift you have been able to give to the two people you connected with. I also hope you might feel a little closer to the place you miss despite the distance or find strength in the common feelings you find.

Thank you again for taking part.

With care, Georgina

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Cleveland, and surrounds Sarabeth Domal 1. on the balls of your feet as to not creak the floorboards. your keys from the table, cradle them in your hand as to not echo, the cold.

Slam and I do mean slam the screen door, fracture the plastic, retribute, wake up Detroit Shoreway. to Huntington Beach then. Eyes straight ahead, in through your nose, out through your mouth, glacier air reaching the pinnacle of my lungs, northern wind from your approach and dissolve seeing to the outermost layer of my visage, threatening to leave a thing behind.

I don’t like to talk while running.

2.

Anna almost misses the right turn into the parking lot through no fault of her own, I should have been navigating but I was thinking about how this road would lead me directly to Hilliard. I read about Hilliard recently, in a book about the American opioid crisis. There was an anecdote about a young mother who overdosed in the parking lot of a supermarket next to the chicken shop we used to eat at, as a treat.

It was alarming, but also a friendly reminder that my residence was a dream state, boots never on the ground. He texted me last year to say that he bought his mom a gun for protection, she’s a math teacher, I guess I really don’t know what it’s like in Central Ohio anymore.

3.

I also don’t know if I fell in love with you when I first saw the way 6

that peacoat collar framed your neck while we pretended to know something about hygge, or if it was the way you grabbed me by my ribcage months later: when I tried to curl into a ball and sink into loss but I do know that your hands were a few thousand volts straight to my eyes which is not usually where I register that kind of temperature-related shock but all the more I couldn’t help but think how to know bliss is to sob into your chest hair and then fall asleep, never wake up, but the skylight was perceptive. but it wasn’t just your face it was that it was unblemished and I wasn’t the least bit irritated by your beard or silence, only your genuine interest, flight or fight a rogue wind, face it (no), or bow to it and zip up your shoes but (wait) why are you so comforting to look at and why does doing so make the base of my stomach feel like it’s surrendering to nothing and everything in perpetuity: 4.

I’m not thinking about any of this when I’m slowly lifted up and pulled down by the freezing waves. All I can see is black black black get me out of this water.

I swim to the rocks, concentrating on moving my arms like I’m paddling a surfboard, trying to channel the repetition of the sea and counteract the unpredictable movement of this lake. Is this a lake? I clamber up the cliff, trying to look spry and not terrified. I think back to the first time I saw it, from the inside of a car. I often feel I can look at the Atlantic and immediately grasp the vast depth and the churning on the false horizon. I was raised to fear it, to read it, to know it as a 7

backyard, to swim cautiously and parallel to the shore.

5.

Steady now. A surfacing then, near Bay Village. Ahead to the lake, thinking of Sugimoto, absorbing the squeal of ice sheets thinning as the sun fills the reach, wanting to understand orogeny, but A flick of your eyes so as to avert the specific rush of contrition you thought you layered with heaviness so as to conceal for the remainder of the anthropocene at the very least, a personal moraine.

But it is warming at an unprecedented rate, they screamed, and what you considered to be secure several miles beneath is now subcutaneous and malignant. Just a flick To undo, to abrade.

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The Barren Moorlands That Look Untouched Georgina Watson The barren moorland that look untouched Yet has been touched many times and for many years Now steeped with history Political and also personal It’s on top of the Kinder Scout Plateau where I learned to navigate through moorland Following trodden paths through the heather Then following a single line drawn on the map The wind against my face My boots sinking into the peat after a misplaced step The heather jewels the landscape among the rough grasses and soft peat It is something I can look at for days I can get lost in it I have to be careful But still I go back Never alone It draws me back Each time Deeper and deeper Further into the moorland and away from the trodden path When I visit again I’ll sit there with my sister Watching the heather and grasses move with the wind They take the battering a lot better than me

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While I sit there still Trying to protect my warmth They move with the wind Allowing it to take its form Within them Perhaps when I go again I’ll let the wind take its form within me too

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Untitled Sonya Battla The lockdown happened suddenly and unceremoniously. I could not have prepared for what ensued even if I had known this was to happen. I was listening in to the Wuhan reports on BBC wondering why someone would eat a bat in the first place. But Wuhan was a long way. I had not anticipated Covid crossing my path so soon.

In March people coming back from a holy trip to Iran brought it back with them. The first cases of the dreaded virus were here.

Nearly all 70 members travelling on that bus from Iran to Pakistan perished.

As there were no precaution in place there was a fear of an invisible creature and that fear resulted in an immediate lock down across my province. Leaving us all immobilized for the next four weeks. I had travel plans to spend my birthday back in London towards the end of March. But they never materialized.

Initial thoughts were that I’ll delay the trip by a few weeks. That I will not be able to make it at all was not an option I could then conceive.

As time went on my thoughts turned to my apartment in London. I usually leave my plants with the care-taker of the building so they would be fine. But my winter jackets were hanging, as I was there in February 2020 and was planning to come back in a month’s time. I had not packed them in the cupboard. The winter boots were still on the entrance shoe stand.

The building gate opens onto the road and crossing the double road gets you into Holland Park. Memory slipped past the gate onto the wooden bench I would usually sit on and check my shoe 11

laces. Then I would start my ten minute jog into the beautiful park. Winding off the beaten track into the woodland and making my way into the Kyoto Garden from the small side entrance. This garden has a carp pond, which is bigger than the carp pond in my house and looks like a natural pond. Near this pond is Japanese maple tree. The leaves turn bright red before they fall off in autumn. In spring the most delicate leaf buds start forming, and I wait for them as they compete to blossom into fine tendrils before the leaves actually open, the squirrels wait for me as they see me enter. Getting bolder by the day coming closer to grab the nuts I throw towards them, checking my pockets for any hidden nuts.

Squirrels are very smart. There are peacocks too. They seem a bit grumpy I suspect early morning it is still too cold for them to feel fully awake. I was pleasantly surprised to see green parrots on the perch above on a high elm. Green parrots are from Asiatic climes not usual to see them in parks in London but it seems the Park authority has rehabilitated them.

I sit on the bench that has a small gold plaque. Engraved are the words ‘Sheldon .Forever in his favourite spot. Marge. 1939-1997’ I wonder if someone will put up a bench for me. Sheldon’s favourite spot is after all my favourite spot too.

I would jog back after a ten minute break with the ‘friends’ in the park. Fulfilled with a familiar love of an unspoken bond between this secret world and its non-human characters. Usually I would stop at the bench on the way back too, sometimes it would get taken by then. A dog walker comes at that time. I like to wait for him. He walks two Kings Charles Cavaliers and an American Cocker Spaniel. The Cocker Spaniel looks like a twin of my Kaju, my buff cocker spaniel. This thought of Kaju makes me turn 12

around and glance at Kaju, hes resting on his sofa spot without a care in the world. Im told he gets anxious when I travel to London.

But that will not happen for a little while longer. This thought brings me back to the present. To my room. Im still here.

When I do get to London, I will get my plants back. Buy nuts and go to the park and then into the Kyoto garden where the squirrels await my return. Return to enrich myself in a make-belief woods, where I am alone and all the animals speak to me, where the early morning jogger in red shorts always smiles while crossing me and his Schnauzer comes towards me but at the last minute loses courage to stop and jump on me and circles past. Will go and sit on Sheldon’s bench for a little bit longer to make up for the missed year. I miss my world.

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My-tì-schì Maya Guileva Gò-rod nash My-tì-schì, Rò-di-nòi zo-vè-tsià.

Our town My-tì-schì, That which we call our mòther-lànd.

Whilst nobody, including me, remembers a single, other line from this malignant song, its motif still mockingly follows me to all family gatherings like a particularly bad, incurable case of an aural disease.

In my own, over-inflected six-year-old voice, this line comes ringing, verging on internal tremor, dragging with it a hazy memory of a Russian sub-urban town from which I had spawned, or simply — of home.

Whenever I recall it, Mytischi is always overcast, its streets of concrete apartment blocks stamped with an austere, shadowless light. It’s one of many towns that has not yet woken up in a haste to remove the statue of Lenin from its main square, so the git just stands there dumbly, hand still raised to the sky, lonely and poor, stripped of the republic, of honours and of followers. Behind him stands a battered Theatre “Fest”, a hub of battered stage productions and worn out troops, hanging by a loose, boozy thread, whose only salvation from total zapoi is the call-back for the annual New Years rush, which they accept submissively, understaffed and underpaid, rotating a malted beard, a vulgar pair of blue velvet mittens, one shabby sceptre and a pawned smile between redemptive acts as the granddaddy figure of Ded Moroz and his manic granddaughter Snegurochka.

On no particular winter, I remember being inside its derelict walls, 14

when the state budget stretched to hiding its ruin behind a sickening volume of tinsel. Bow on crown and bonbonierka in hand, I gazed at the four-storey, over-decorated pine, catching light beautifully in its cavernous halls. Accompanying me was my very own version of Ded Moroz, or simply, deda, still blushing from the cold, whose face, by contrast, was free from the sinister, thick layer of make-up. Whenever my greedy, childish eyes unstuck from the Sengurochka’s shimmering kokoshnik of fake jewels, and dashed to look for and find deda’s, he would scowl his dentures encouragingly, as if to say, go on, say hello, she won’t bite.

Deda has always been a man of routine. Every day, at eight o’clock in the morning, deda would leave the house with a little plastic bag in his pocket, returning strictly half an hour later, bringing two identical loafs of bread of a standardised shade of beige. After taking off his cap, hanging his sheepskin coat, unlacing and neatly tucking away his boots, sliding into a pair of heal-less slippers, he would shuffle first to the bathroom to thoroughly wash his hands with a soap bar, pat them three times on a hand towel, then shuffle to the kitchen table, already laid with a butter box, a teapot hiding a silver strainer with loose, overbrewed Assam, and a cling-filmed dish of cow cheese, and, untucking the chair, he would take his seat. He would cut one loaf, setting aside the crusted ends which he loathed, and, in no hurry, he would systematically plaster two outstanding slices with butter, smoothing the surface to perfection. Like Houdini with a butterknife, deda would hypnotise me with his methodic spreading motion, then relocate my attention to spooning heaps of white, sandy sugar into his tea, now swirling inside to the melodic scraping of metal against the teacup, before breaking the trance with a clang and a slurp, setting my ordinary day into motion.

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Our town My-tì-schì,/That which we call our mòther-lànd. This hometown from memory, covered in Soviet plaque, that which the rapid crusade of capitalism hasn’t yet mopped off the face of the Earth, is the place I’d like to re-visit. I’d walk past the sordid “Fest”, past the git with his hand still raised, past the bakery where deda routinely bought bread— past Mytischi’s distinctively indistinct streetscapes soaking in dull light, those which are so prone to forgetting.

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Dacha Sergei Zinchuk My nephew is interested in improving our dacha . It is strange to encounter someone’s claim on the place, I realise with surprise, a sudden invasion, like a sharply pulled dust sheet.

Swarming, scattling, blindly blinking memories rise, masking a faint sense of new male’s teritorial challenge, a primal threat and validated legacy at once.

There isn’t an adequate English translation. Second home sounds too grand, allotment inferior. Even in my native’s mind the idea is not straightforward: there’s the dacha of movies and novels, a symbol of political status or cultural success, a distorted pretence at a landed gentry’s bygone lifestyle, as imagined and sanctioned by the ostensibly proletariat’s state.

But there’s an even farther ripple of the idea - the dacha of the 80s, an allotment in gridded patches of flat landscape outside cities: woodlands cleared, marches drained, exhausted sandy soil divided into uniform rectangles. Here, the highly educated, professional workers would affect recreation, while growing their own food to survive in a failed economic project. *** Perhaps the ultimate creation is one conjured out of nothing. It is a forced - or inspired 17

refusal to accept a given system: that which is classified as nothing becomes a stash of building blocks. But in this rebellion - a subjugation too: the newly produced something still mimics the existing order. Unless of course, a new mythology is forged in that process, and with it a new world - real, magical, fertile - if you can see it.

Everyone around was suddenly a pioneer, breaking up virgin lands and erecting dwellings a curious fight of ability, ambition, sleepy imagination and fading inherited knowledge. The resulting fairground of individualism was both striking and underwhelming. A cacophony of pseudo styles and adapted materials, not yet softened by the newly planted fruit trees, it jarred and agitated. Group consciousness, deprived of homogenised resource or continuous tradition, leaked, fragmented and broke into multitude of nostalgic microcosms, rendering the whole settlement a strange graveyard of pre-collective memory.

A particular brand of organised clutter ruled inside. Old furniture, outdated equipment, obsolescent books and records where arranged to resemble a functional home, like a poorly conceived stage set. Devoid of all those subtle but unmistakable traces of habitual life, this lowly grumbling inorganic world of disparate memories and clashing stories was waiting for a generation by which it could be seen, imagined, born.

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*** I was not aware of my own myth-making at the time. There was no one to tell my stories to.

Their possible significance and budding symbology was all but lost by our return to the city apartment, erased by the last minute fruit picking, finding things, arguing, packing the car, the journey back. They weren’t even stories yet, just little scarrings of sensed experiences, primal, free of language, vaguely outlined by absorbed societal judgements and indirect cultural narratives.

Can words be found now and in what language, who could they be addressed to, told by.

Can all those fraying patches of selfhood - bored, erotic, naive, obsessive, frightened, learning - transcend their redundant context, become useful beyond the looming nostalgia.

A new myth is due, I am now certain, the next act of creation in the void of grief, a cautious take on bygone masculinity perhaps, a lyrical trace of paternal presence and its belatedly realised sublime humanity - all so suddenly evident in the hushed peculiarity of our dacha .

And so I want to go back before it loses what only I can decode, a meaning I can try to pass on, but not fully. It is a fragile refraction of unsung history, a hopeful 19

apparition on overlooked land, a hologram of identity that only I can see.

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With thanks to the AcrossRCA team for allowing me to realise this project from the 22nd to 26th February 2021.

With special thanks to Sarabeth Domal, Sonya Battla, Maya Guileva and Sergei Zinchuk for kindly sharing their writing beyond those they connected with during the project and further thanks to all of the people involved, in total fourteen of us shared our writing and the places we miss. What we did together and what you all contributed is truly special. I hope our paths will cross again in the future.

Project coordinated and led by Georgina Watson