Belongings

We were watching this movie with Julia the other day, Sling Blade it was called, and had a good imdb rating. After 20 minutes or so I was sick of it. Like literally sick.  It may even have triggered the migraine of the last 2 days.

Before turning the movie off, I realised what was it. The whole atmosphere, the cars, the food, the fat people, the houses. America in the 90s. America makes me feel sick.

And then I remembered, " The things you own end up owning you." Or put another way, what you don't own gives you freedom.

So I wanted to record here how we live, since I know it's far from being a typical house. I skipped the toilet and the bedroom (which is anyway empty besides the bed and a clothes rack) for the sake of privacy, but here it is. This is my home.

First and foremost, the workbench:

Then to the right, the kitchen/office where the teapots and the laptop live. We like coffee also.

From the other side looks like this.

Except for the kettle,  washing machine, tea pots and few other kitchen items, everything is second hand. The table is made of a piece of plywood that the guy who sold me the work bench gave us. It works just fine.

After my workspace, you find the living room, which is shared by Julia's workshop and the cavies, not shown. We only have music on the kitchen so she's using headphones. Good so she didn't hear I was taking a picture.

 That's the bike I need to sell, a puppet a friend of Julia lent her, a picture of Opa's workshop and some Julia's drawings of Grazian doors.

 Behind that door is the bedroom. It's quite cold there so we just go there for sleeping.

That's it. No TV, no couch, no car keys. We've been here a year and 2 months already, but it looks empty and I like it. It's not that we cannot afford more. It's that we decided to live with less.

I guess we are used to it by now. Julia used to live in squats while studying until they changed the law in Holland and make them illegal. I've been living like a nomad since I moved to Europe. Mostly in shared houses with friends. Artists friends, so poor friends. But we always had food and we always had fun. And that's pretty much life for me.

The best part of the flat for the end. We live in front the Jesus hertz kirche, or something like that. When I was a teenager in Chile I always dreamt of having a flat on Paris where you could see through a small window some nice church. I didn't really like to live in Paris in a chambre de bonne. I also dreamt of japanese stuff. Before I was born, my father was in Japan for an scholarship while my mother was visiting Europe for her first and only time. My whole childhood was filled with those images and dreams, of a different world, a beautiful world. With the stories of my mother's divided Germany, and my dad's quiet Japan. Etwas anderes. Etwas ganz anderes. Certain possibilities of existence that we as a continent didn't have the chance of live yet, and that somehow I ended up looking for.

Nowadays, I have a name for that: handmade. That's what's common to the Japan of my father and the Europe of my mother. Paris' streets, handmade. Japanese gardens, handmade. The doors from Graz, handmade. Well, is either that or the flirting with fascism.  And that's why the means of production as a concept keep on coming back to my head. When you work with your hands you have a society that believes in something, that's capable of creating something beautiful. You have a world, and not only because you are not undermining the biological support of it, but because you experience the creative power of your life. El poeta es un pequeño dios, said Huidobro. The same goes for hand workers.

And that's why the movie was so sickening for me. Seems like the background was only apt for murders, which was indeed how the movie ended.

Anyway, here's the kitchen window.

Which reminds me of a Freud's quote: "Happiness is the deferred fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money is not an infantile wish."