Und führe uns in der Versuchung: Vom Umgang mit den eigenen Abgründen (German Edition)

She had hoped for a beau with a reasonable beauing arm. This marking has disappeared from modern editions. Unfortunately it is not impossible that Wolf should have momentarily forgotten the Italian context of the words in order to echo the prejudices of his idol Wagner, and also those of many other Viennese of the period, in imagining this violinist, small and hunched of stature, as a racial stereotype. On the other hand Wolf must have known that Paul Heyse was Jewish, and his admiration for the poet and co-begetter of the Italienisches Liederbuch, as well as other Jewish colleagues, was boundless and well attested.

Pour la mauvaise musique, il ne faut attendre de Wolf que des critiques et un regard condescendant. Wir haben es hier nicht genau mit dem Musiker zu tun, den sie sich vorgestellt hatte. Das Nachspiel, in dem es um komische Koordinierung geht, ist eine von Wolfs schwierigsten Herausforderungen.

Once again it is the woman who puts the man in his place, but in this case with great good humour. It is a real moto perpetuo where the tempo only lets up at those moments when the music turns the corner into a new section or key. The pervasive dotted rhythm perhaps a deliberate follow-on from the postlude of the previous Lied and the jaunty syncopations off the beat in the first three bars of the introduction, cast the music in the style of a skipping song, the type of ditty made to accompany physical movement.

The vocal moves dive in and out of the complexities of the accompaniment with the skill of someone too deft to get her feet caught in the rope. The song after all is about independence and a refusal to be tied down, although subtleties in the music, fleet on the ear but manifold, imply that this complaint of being taken for granted is addressed to a young man who may, or may not, be guilty as charged. The introduction starts on the dominant seventh of the home key and in four bars the music rises by chromatic stages to the very moment when the girl gives voice to her qualms in G major.

The effect of this is of someone blurting out something which has been on her mind for some time; pricked by some last straw, her feelings come bubbling to the surface. Unlike some of the other female characters in the set she is not in a towering rage, but dotted rhythms in the piano part flounce and pout in a pique which has an element of pose. As in a number of the other songs, delicate little rallentandos seem to accentuate certain words and ideas, the better to lead the young man by the nose as he hears sentence being passed on his behaviour.

This section is in F sharp major, which is as far away as it is possible to be from the home key of G — a type of Sunday-best tonality to be brought out on high days and holidays. This emphasises the charge: The final two bars, a miniature gesture in which the young lady turns on her heels in a flurry of skirts, set the seal on the proceedings.

The late Walter Legge likened the rush of these final nine notes to that of a smooth-furred cat streaking under the hand. Unlike other songs in the set, though, there is very little real cattiness here; this little minx may have set up the whole of this complaint as a type of game to elicit the fervent denials of her wretched and devoted cavaliere servente. Es betont die Anklage: For the first time in the set we hear an outburst of anger from the tenor. It is hard not to imagine that the composer saw this as a male counterpart of XII written on the same day. The young man has had enough of this teasing and taunting and the introduction is similar to the opening of the previous song in that the expression of anger seems generated at first in the piano and catches fire in the voice.

If we have doubted that the girl was truly angry in XII, there is certainly no dissembling here, and yet, as in many of the great Wolf songs of wrath, the emotions have more than one dimension. If love is a game for the young lady, it is a thing of pain for the man, and we hear him being pulled two ways at once. This section is marked as slower than the rest, allowing the sneer of sarcasm to yield to audibly hurt feelings by the end of the phrase.

This is a technique which Wolf has already used in Wer rief dich denn VI ; in both songs it is as if the errant beloved is being given a chance to interrupt with suitably soothing and contrite words. In the absence of these the tirade resumes with the sarcastic references to birth, class and position which occur frequently in these poems. If this is so, he has presumably been refused for his lack of youth and beauty. This is an indication of how dangerous it is to imagine this book of songs as a dialogue between the same two lovers throughout the set, although Wolf himself could not resist building certain links and cross-references between adjacent songs.

Is it only coincidence that both XII and XIII share the same metronome pulse of and that, as already noted, the introductions share certain characteristics? Wolf dropped a much longer original postlude to this song in favour of this short, sharp shock. One of the things that gives such a restless atmosphere to this miniature is that although the song is written in F sharp minor, the very last chord is the first time we hear a tonic chord in this key This accentuates the impression that everything about this relationship has been leading to this conclusion.

Up to this point we have heard only settings of rispetti, short and elegant. He had composed it a few days before XIII, but it is possibly significant that he decided to place it in the published sequence directly after that song of unfulfilment and rejection. It is possible that Wolf knew it.

He was certainly not above quoting the music of rival composers but usually in mocking parody. It is also possible that both Wolf and Strauss, who derived their language of motifs from the same Wagnerian sources, should have happened on a similar musical analogue for high-jinks and roguery. The church in medieval times had the power of the social services today. The singer and his mate proposing this scenario remain firmly seated in the local hostelry and are probably too drunk to go anywhere. This was a subject on which Franz Schubert also felt strongly.

It was in Vienna, after all, where sexual hypocrisy and double standards were a source of pain and difficulty for Wolf as they had been for Schubert. Everything about this music is fat and greasy, pomposo and bogus. The motif we have heard in the beginning slips and slithers in the left hand. Her tremulous piety is cruelly exaggerated in the telling as she cringes before the would-be priest.

The bowing and scraping and embarrassment that the bread is not yet baked are all supported by an accompaniment of pious quavers; mention of her sick daughter turns these mezzo staccato as if one has to tread on vocal tiptoe so as not to disturb the patient. His priestly function continues to be represented by the placid quavers of the right hand, but other functions leap to the fore with the left; as the rogue senses he is getting near to his prey he can scarcely control an outbreak of the excited semiquavering of lust.

As with most fantasies there is no follow-through. Et comme la plupart du temps dans les fantasmes, il n'y pas de suite. Im Mittelalter hatte die Kirche die Rolle der heutigen staatlichen Sozialleistungen. Denn in Wien war es, wo sexuelle Heuchelei und doppelte Moral vielen Leuten Kummer und Schwierigkeiten bereiteten, unter anderem auch unserem Komponisten.

Seine priesterliche Rolle wird weiterhin durch die friedlichen Achtel in der rechten Hand dargestellt, andere Aufgaben tun sich jedoch in der linken Hand hervor. Wie bei den meisten Phantasiegebilden wird die Sache nicht weiter verfolgt. The male singer has had a substantial song, so Wolf now gives a more extended piece to the soprano in his carefully considered sequence. It is no less of an outrageous fantasy in its own way with a story-line of almost surreal imaginings. They have a good laugh at masculine expense, and, if men only knew, it was ever thus.

The use of hyperbole suggests that they egg each other on in exaggerating the deficiencies of the men they know; and yet because, after all, these men are their lovers, the tone is not vitriolic but affectionate. The governing motif of the song is the figure of a quaver phrased away, in finicking manner, to a semiquaver generally either directly above or below it.

As Eric Sams has pointed out, there is also a sense of restraint in this song, as if there is an order and dignity in being as small as this. The vocal line, hushed and careful not to jump or move too suddenly to alarm the tiny specimen, is delicate and careful in the manner of a research scientist examining an exquisite find under the microscope.

And then the fun begins with a catalogue of all the dangers to be endured by the Lilliputian. Wolf has tremendous fun in giving the accompanist whirring semiquavers for the fly and nose-dive runs for the bluebottle. It is all perfectly imagined in the manner of a Disney cartoon half a century before its time. The final page is a coda with no less than six tempo markings hastening the music on and pulling it back as the girl veers between two moods: Despite the fact that he is scarcely built to come up to her expectations she has to bend to kiss him she loves him nevertheless.

The postlude resumes the music of smallness and self-containment and, as so often in this set, the final chords set the seal on the mood. Here two F major chords, one long and the other short, are married by the pedal in a manner ineffably tender. Wolfs Metronomangabe scheint genau richtig. Sie ist so zart und vorsichtig wie ein Forscher, der einen seltenen Fund unter dem Mikroskop betrachtet.

In der Art eines Disney-Cartoons ist alles genau geplant — seiner Zeit jedoch ein halbes Jahrhundert voraus. After the song of the miniature lover from Maremma, the set continues with the soprano once again a spokesman for a small lover not able to fend for himself. Like XV, it seems that the song is a joke whereby the girl imagines a little scene with soldiers and, to the amusement of her peers, acts out a scenario of ridiculous special pleading.

The only real danger here is for the pianist for whom the quickly repeated notes represent a tricky, finger-tangling challenge. These young Italians march to the beat of the same drummer. Wolf had already tackled this theme with perfect sincerity in Sie blasen zum Abmarsch from the Spanish Songbook after all, and the songs share the use of a fanfare motif in double thirds which denote companionable activity, the fingers walking in parallel rank.

The vocal line runs alongside the accompaniment as if trying to keep up with it as the singer attempts to stop the soldiers to speak to them in mid-march. There are a number of fleetly felicitous touches. Und die Lieder haben ein Fanfarenmotiv in doppelten Terzen gemeinsam, das auf leutselige Betriebsamkeit verweist, da die Finger in parallelen Linien marschieren.

Nevertheless, there are a good many Italian blondes, and this rhapsodic outpouring of fervent melody is one of the most Italianate of the set in its tone and mood, if not its harmonic vocabulary. Spread chords here denote the act of combing hair — the five fingers separating the luxurious strands like a five-tooth comb. Wolf had already composed a song which mentioned the combing of hair — In dem Schatten meiner Locken from the Spanisches Liederbuch, but that had been written from the point of view of the coquettish owner of those tresses. In a Wolf song this seems to add to the Italian flavour of the music.

The use of the mediant C major, unconstrained by sharps and flats, emphasizes the untrammelled nature of this release from inhibition. A girl such as this would probably only undo her tresses in front of a man as a prelude to love; he knows this and can only dream. The girl, like her tresses, is as good and pure as gold, and throughout this song we hear both admiration for, and frustration with, her Madonna-like status. The stirrings of longing in the loins are prefigured by the rustlings of nature, depicted by a ground swell of harp-like arpeggios drifting up the bass stave.

Here similarly insinuating left-hand arpeggios are introduced at the magical moment when a static landscape is brought alive by the movement of breezes after a rapt opening section. In Ganymed we sense the god at work animating the whole picture, but here it is the human goddess at her toilette. The piano finishes off in two bars of short phrases, with a rising figure repeated in sighs without resolution — the masochistically sweet contemplation of unattainable beauty.

Dieses Lied wurde jedoch aus dem Blickwinkel der koketten Besitzerin dieser Locken geschrieben.

Zu Beginn scheint die Gesangslinie hier fast gesprochen zu werden, sechs Achtel lang bleibt sie auf derselben Note stehen, und dies ist ein Merkmal der ersten Seite des Lieds. Both are for tenor and both are intimate love lyrics. It is connections such as these which make one believe that Wolf planned his order for this set with much intention and care. This should give pause to modern performers who have a go at shuffling the pack in the belief that the composer has dealt them an unsatisfactory hand.

This song must rank as one of the greatest in the book. Just as the lover measures out each word as a precious pearl of sincerity and truth in order to be perfectly understood, the composer ensures that there is neither a note too many, nor too few. A perfect balance is struck between expressive intent and musical means: The rhythm of the accompaniment is unvarying — a gentle barcarolle propelled along by the ardour of a lover, but also held back by the gentle care not to shock or alarm. Yes, because there is something prayer-like about this love-song in the form of a litany; the supplications and articles are paragraphed as if in a petition to the Virgin.

This is, however, no game, for love such as this is to be taken in deadly earnest. He announces in advance how long his petition is and we hear him point to his heart the better to get across his message that it is breaking. One of the touching features of the accompaniment is how for each line of poetry the piano has three quavers of commentary after the vocal line has finished. With the art that conceals art a song of tremendous complexity sounds simplicity itself.

Just when we think that the last miniature modulation has gone as deep as possible into the emotions of singer and composer, another harmonic shift opens up new vistas of vulnerability and tender concern. This song is about love in the deepest sense; not only does it show a man attracted to a woman to the point of worship, but it also captures his open-heartedness and willingness to take risks in declaring his love. This enables us to imagine for a moment that most private and closely guarded state of affairs — the composer himself in love.

Le rythme de l'accompagnement ne varie pas: Wolf schafft ein perfektes Gleichgewicht zwischen ausdrucksvoller Absicht und musikalischen Mitteln: Dieses Lied handelt von tiefster Liebe. This song is in two sections, contrasted to show the difference between silence and speech, discord and harmony, barren strife and fruitful concord. At the beginning the music is tight-lipped and inhibited, the piano in sombre octaves which are ungenerous in their lack of harmony and which sulk within the compass of a tritone.

The voice stays on an F which in this very slow tempo illustrates both the length of time during which the lovers have not been speaking, as well as the lack of music i. The toneless grumblings of the first two bars are here replaced by a scale — in the minor key, but a scale nevertheless.

As speech returns to the pair, chords fill out and blossom into harmony. This one word contains all the agony and regret of the strife, an encapsulation of the happiness shared in the past and temporarily forgotten. It is also set off the beat which powerfully suggests a tentative stumbling towards a solution involving apologetic smiles through tears. It is only the greatest song composers who have the power to say so much in music for a single word. It is as if the angels are all playing viols in heavenly consort. This return to harmony sets the seal on the whole song.

Wolf asks the singer to encompass a huge range from low B flat to F an octave and a half higher within the space of a bar. What is corny in description and would have been mawkish in other hands, is sublime with Wolf. This softening of tonal stance seems to say that peace is about yielding, compromising, giving in. All is back to normal. On a l'impression d'entendre des anges qui joueraient dans un consort de violes celeste. Es scheint, als spielten die Engel alle Violen in himmlischer Gemeinschaft.

Gott ist im Himmel, und alles ist wieder beim alten. Most songs in the Lieder repertory have accompaniments which reflect the viewpoint of the singer, which is to say that singer and pianist are one person. It is no surprise that an aspiring and frustrated opera composer should be impressed with the notion of an off-stage orchestra; Wolf seizes the opportunity to place a serenade outside the main texture of the song i. The piano part is like a Chopin mazurka with its elegant emphasis in the left hand on the second beat.

The young man outside weaves and sways, struts and woos, implores and occasionally demands to no avail. In the absence of his girlfriend it is fitting that it is quite possible to play this music without a singer, for it actually makes musical sense in its own right. The vocal line, more mournful and intense, with banks of quavers counterpointing the pianist's flitting semiquavers, straddles this mazurka faute de mieux and has an independent life of its own, joining and leaving the main current of the piano part at will.

It is a mistake, however, for performers to ignore the fact that the young man outside is ardent and impatient, and that the composer accordingly gives the song rather a fast metronome mark. A faster tempo also makes her seem angrier and more frustrated as if she longs to break out of her purdah and elope. Of course the whole point of employing the operatic ensemble technique of obligato whereby only we, the listeners, can hear the whole, is that voice and piano should be cunningly interwoven and that this vicarious musical love-making between the protagonists should produce planned clashes of great sensuality.

This postlude is made up of the four bars which have opened the piece followed by four rather disconsolate ones as if the paramour has decided to pack up his lute for the night and be on his way. He has received no response to his serenade and signs off with four rather dejected strummed chords.

This is a song which admirably mirrors the emotional complexity of its singer. She does not know whether she is coming or going so, predictably, she is unable to decide whether her boyfriend should come or go either. The music gives the impression of getting nowhere — it turns around on itself, retracing its steps, reworking old ground as it paces and doubles back on its tracks.

The song begins angrily; certainly the dotted notes followed by triplets which form the tightly wound mainspring of the accompaniment suggest obsession and pouting disappointment. The fifth bar of the song contains an amazingly quick change of mind, but such is the unsettled nature of the opening that such quixotic mood-swings are scarcely a surprise. Here is someone who does not quite know which card to play in order to keep her lover. She has tried proud independence on for size, but quickly finds he would be all too apt to follow her opening directions to stay away.

This woman is not to be trifled with. On balance I would advise the young man to stay at home with mother. It seems to me that this type of mirror-image programme-planning was typical of the subtle links Wolf built into his set, rather than the far more obvious story line built around a game of quasi-operatic consequences. Like many of the songs in this set, one has the impression that the scene is rehearsed in front of a mirror; it is always pleasant to give voice to what we would have liked to say, rather than what we actually dared to say at the time.

The idea of going out to serenade someone is like duelling — not as attractive as it seems to be in the story books, and probably not worth all the trouble. It is this that makes these little Italians endearing in their provincial timidity. Not for them the assurance and experience of a Byron, much less a Don Juan; they are simply everyday people like us, and we are reminded that throughout his career Wolf was interested in truth and reality as a bench-mark for his operatic plans.

As the projected serenade progresses, the song gets faster and the lover ever more bold. Once he has shot his bolt in an impressive climax the scenario evaporates at the end as if it has never taken place. This is probably because it never has. This is the Wolf of the Serenade for string quartet, which is also in 38 and also swaggers with music that suggests student jollity. That delightful work, later orchestrated as the Italienische Serenade, is related to the cheery Eichendorff songs of travel and adventure in the Italian sunshine.

Although the Eichendorff Lieder are different in scale from the miniatures of the Italienisches Liederbuch, they share an uncomplicated bravura and zest for life with certain songs such as this. There are many piquant touches here: Here the percussive nature of the piano comes into its own; it is difficult to imagine strings attaining this type of splashy exuberance. The young man has caused general uproar among his scandalized listeners and he seems to be hugging himself in congratulation at his very cleverness and boldness.

Just at the end his bubble is pricked. He remembers that he is yet to set out on this serenade and that the whole thing is very much easier said than done. Comme le fantasme se poursuit, le tempo du lied devient de plus en plus rapide, et l'amant de plus en plus audacieux. Obwohl die Eichendorfflieder eine andere Tonleiter haben als die Miniaturen des Italienischen Liederbuchs , teilen sie sich unkomplizierte Bravour und Freude am Leben mit Liedern wie diesem. Wolf told his friend Edwin Mayser that the second part of the Italienisches Liederbuch, composed five years after the first, contained more absolute music than the earlier set, and that many things could be equally well played by a string quartet.

It is true that the music looks different on the printed page — more uniform perhaps. In the first book the character of the poem dictated the texture and character of the accompaniments. In contrast the piano writing of the second book, with some notable exceptions, seems to be less interested in detailed and mischievous textually-inspired comment and more concerned to provide a flawless underlay for some of the greatest word-setting imaginable.

One should also not forget that between the two books of Italian songs stands the opera Der Corregidor with its complex strands of orchestral polyphony. The piano writing of the first set is airier, full of space and light; in the second volume it is generally darker and thicker. This is not to say that the pianist is not called upon to use all his skills; on the contrary, the challenges are manifold. If in the second book there is less mercurial and witty comment from the piano, there are many more passages which rely on seamless legato playing and sheer beauty of tone.

The first song in the set Wolf actually composed it last to set the seal on the achievement of the entire songbook is a case in point. It is every bit as much of a motto song as Auch kleine Dinge. No composer had more right to highlight the painstaking process of creation in this regard than Wolf as he completed his last great songbook. Auch kleine Dinge is one of them, and this, its counterpart, is the other. This music for the raising of the curtain , as it were, is set in the middle of the keyboard and perfectly laid out in four parts.

It looks nothing much on the printed page but its beauty is incontestable. It contains the seed of the big tune which will sing its way through the main body of the song, but because that tune is not yet fully formed the whole process of longing to create, of striving to find the mot juste, is implied in this introduction. This is music before the lifting of the veil: The mood here is seraphic and calm; huge claims are made for the importance of the music, but all as if the composer is astonished by his own gift and struck by the visitation of the Muse.

And then the singer stops in his tracks in order to listen to the music in the piano that he has just created, and which has been at the heart of this song throughout. Such a tune has been sleeping within him from the beginning and it is love which has at long last liberated melody from the sterility of illness. Es ist genauso ein Mottolied wie Auch kleine Dinge. In der ganzen Sammlung gibt es nur zwei Lieder, in denen Wolf dem Pianisten etwas wie eine viertaktige Einleitung zugesteht: Wir haben es hier mit Musik vor dem Aufgehen des Vorhangs zu tun.

Die Stimmung ist engelhaft und ruhig. Eric Sams rightly calls this a pantomime song. The tears which purportedly moisten the otherwise dry bread are definitely of the crocodile variety. It should be said here, however, that as in all his ironic songs it is the music which makes the jokes rather than the singer. If ever there was serious comic music this is it. These songs do not lend themselves to ham performances; it is enough that the vocal line moves in wailing semitones and that the accompaniment is made up of phrases falling away like wilting little sobs.

The over-the-top musical manners of an earlier age are employed to distance the singer from real tears. Throughout all this Wolf seems fascinated by his part-writing; in the accompaniment he gives the tenor voice the top of the bass clef a linear life of its own.

Sometimes the pianist feels as if he is playing Bach. As soon as the tempo picks up in jaunty quavers the sudden reality and earthiness of the mood in contrast to what has gone before is a miracle; we can almost hear sunlight flood the picture. But lofty suffering is replaced by exaggerations of another kind.

We have a little march of the grotesques, for this is suddenly the Italy of Fellini rather than Heyse — a pantomime indeed. We have a parade of every little gnarled old man in Italy marching past rather creakily with enormous good humour and in hope of selection. The vocal line is teasingly feminine, the piano music cheeky and slightly gruff with bristly staccato semiquavers taking over from the smooth ones in the vocal line; one is reminded of Snow White and the seven dwarfs.

The audience cannot see how young the girl is until she gleefully blurts out that she is fourteen. The joke is on them as well as the singer who might well be three times the age. Et c'est vraiment une pantomime. Tout cela nous rappelle Blanche-Neige et les sept nains. In der Tat eine Pantomime. This is among the best known songs of the Italienisches Liederbuch and it is also one of the least intricate. One has the feeling that stylistically Wolf falls between two stools, for he reverts here to the type of setting in which he excelled in By the style has changed, however, and the composer is no longer writing songs which are pictorial in the way they once were.

That said, the song is tremendous fun and a good display piece for the soprano. Opinion is divided as to whether she is angry or amused. There is an element of cruelty and indiscretion in the telling who said that only men boast about their conquests? This male excursion into traditional female territory Italian men have nothing to do with la cucina was bound to be a failure in any case. If the song is an allegory for love-making on the other hand, the grievance may well be more genuine. The opening two bars of the introduction consist of a repeated figure quickly moving from piano to forte, and which seems to burst into laughter as it reaches its apogee.

Both hands are in the treble clef and this feminine tessitura suggests a bustling gathering of skirts. Throughout the song the motif of staccato quavers in chords punctuates the proceedings like chortles of appreciative laughter. Each new point is greeted by this tittering which ceases in time to allow the narrator to continue her indictment. As the story progresses she seems to become enraged at the very cheek of it — how dare he? At the end voice and accompaniment, which have hitherto echoed each other, are in unison as if the girl has the whole female community behind her in outrage.

The stone-hard bread brings forth chords in the piano to break your teeth on and the blunt knife perhaps an allegory for another weapon inexpertly wielded prompts four sawing quavers, each with an accent. Walter Legge used to encourage the pianist to use two fingers on each note here in order to make a suitably ugly and abrasive sound. Wolfs Tempo ist hier — wo er die Pausen zwischen den Gedichtzeilen verringert, um eine gereizte Stimmung besser zu beschreiben — meisterhaft. Once again mention must be made of the ordering of the songbook.

No XXV is all about a dinner albeit an abortive one ; it ends with a loaf of bread too hard to eat, and a knife too blunt to cut it. This is juxtaposed I believe deliberately with Ich liess mir sagen, a song which continues the theme of food and in which loaves of bread also play a somewhat inelegant role. This is one of two or three songs in the set which are truly droll. This may not be exactly what makes us laugh, but the story of the self-dramatizing lovelorn glutton certainly had that effect on him.

We can imagine Wolf playing and singing this music to his friends; these must have been performances which were funnier because more daring than any since. He laughs at such pretence, and not at all genially. A few poems in this songbook give him the opportunity to indulge this propensity for sarcasm at the expense of those whose emotions are not genuine.

Here the man who claims to be wasting away for love is revealed as a greedy hypocrite. A less attractive side of the composer was his impatience with ugliness and those less favoured. Wolf was trim himself, as lean as his forest namesake and sometimes almost as savage , and there is no reason to suppose that overweight people were not also the butts of his wit. The streets of nineteenth-century Vienna must have given him ample scope for his scorn.

Everything about this music is podgy and lugubrious. The trills in the piano part are of course stomach rumbles, but this music wobbles everywhere like loose flesh. There is also just the right mood of lachrymose self-pity ruthlessly parodied. The pain which follows is nothing to do with love, rather is it a massive case of indigestion with strangely hammered semiquavers and trills; the guardians of Lieder proprieties might throw up their hands but it would not surprise me if these violent ascending scales were meant to depict the throwing-up of food.

In any case the most Tonina could do under the circumstances is go around the corner for a bottle of Fernet Branca. The final chord, suddenly brutal and loud, seems to be a dismissive kick from the composer as if, once he has laughed his fill, he is ultimately disgusted by the whole picture. Il se moque de ces faux semblants sans la moindre indulgence.

En tout cas il n'y a pas grand chose d'autre que Tonina puisse faire, hormis aller au coin de la rue acheter une bouteille de Fernet Branca. An dieser Musik ist alles dicklich und kummervoll. Es folgt eine kurze explosive Figur aus vier Vierundsechzigsteln. Das Nachspiel baut auf den Klavierphrasen des Anfangs auf. Wolf has lavished much care and love on this masterpiece.

For example, it is one of only three songs in the set where he has taken the trouble to find a new metronome mark for a second section. It has all the strong points of the later style and all the mercurial vividness of the earlier songs. In actual fact the contradiction of tired limbs and a heart racing with the joy of love is what the song is all about, and the heart wins of course. We can hear the physical fatigue in the drooping chords of the very opening bar, and the vocal line at the beginning is too weary to move more than a step at a time.

He is interested more in her reality than dreaming about her, however, and we are back in A flat after a few seconds. The pianist feels something familiar in these oscillating thirds under the hand in the key of A flat, with a tricky ornament decorating the notion of a lute gently plucked. An earlier instrument comes to mind, and with it the pleasure which accompanies the recognition of an old love in a new guise: This sudden flattened seventh vividly suggests close listening, as if people in the streets had stopped in their tracks and inclined their ears in the direction of the music.

We were right about the preening though: Wolf allows us to experience their emotion at hearing his music: Like an older man remembering his past adventures, the postlude muses affectionately on the melodies of youth. Wir hatten jedoch mit dem Herausputzen Recht: The look of the music on the page is dense with notes. There is nowhere anything longer than a semiquaver rest to punctuate and ventilate the accompaniment which is in fact a self-contained piano piece, or more exactly a perfect little string quartet movement in piano short score.

Typical of the late Wolf style, the piece is woven with a feel for the intricacies of counterpoint and the independence of the four parts. Once the voice is added descant-like to the picture, however, the complexity of the whole becomes clear: For a moment we are sorry for the girl who seems to have been genuinely hurt. The final taunt goes back to the question of wheels. This has already occasioned trills and pomp with the earlier mention of the state carriage.

These noble trills of fantasy turn the corner and change into staccato semiquavers which scuttle up the stave like puny legs running behind the nineteenth-century equivalent of an Alfa Romeo. Although we suspect that this girl has given the man her heart, and that she still loves him, the final pianistic flourish at the end suggests that, for the moment at least, she has given him the finger. This is one of the songs which was a jewel in the Schwarzkopf repertoire towards the end of her career.

In theatre and film, and no less the concert hall, many a fan finds it a thrilling prospect to see their favourite grande dame giving a dressing-down to some unfortunate even if invisible underling. The ultra-sophistication of this music was ideally suited to the incongruity of the diva playing the village maid. Et par une raillerie finale, elle remet sur le tapis cette question des moyens de transport. Diese edlen Fantasietriller biegen um die Ecke und verwandeln sich in Stakkatosechzehntel, die das System wie mit kleinen Beinen hinaufhasten.

Such is the tone of submission and self-abasement of these words, and because almost nowhere else in this cycle do the women strike this note of humility, there is a temptation to think that the text is meant to be spoken by a man. A reading of the original Italian, however, makes clear that it is the woman who speaks. This weights the balance of true lyricism in the cycle in favour of the man, and this song, coming two-thirds the way through the set, goes some way to help redress that balance.

The song scores points and wins hearts not because of any clever word-setting or even word-related psychological insight, but because of the sheer beauty of the music which could convey tenderness and infinite longing even if it were wordless. As in the manner of many of the songs from the second set, the accompaniment is written in string quartet fashion: The very willingness of the singer to yield her autonomy and become part of the ensemble reinforces the notion of someone who stands in the background until needed.

There is no doubt that Wolf had old-fashioned notions of the German woman in the home rendered more poignant for him by the fact that almost all his own relationships were conducted in secret for various reasons, and that he never knew the daily sharing of an acknowledged companion. These words may imply the sort of masochism to anger feminists, but the music transcends them, and even contradicts them in a way rare in Wolf.

The fact that the love is unconditional gives a wonderful grave dignity to the singer rather than diminishing her. In any case, despite what the words say, no-one capable of voicing love with this depth could possibly be in the thrall of handsomeness alone — this devotion has been inspired by something much more than a self-regarding Italian good-looker. The postlude, full-toned and eloquent, is amongst the most beautiful in the set; it is more a rapturous hymn of thanksgiving than the plaint of the downtrodden.

The composer was in fact himself the recipient of a devotion similar to that given to the lucky Italian recipient of this song. And the devotion was reciprocated: Wie bei vielen Liedern im zweiten Teil ist die Begleitung auch hier in der Art eines Streichquartetts geschrieben. Melanies hoffnungslose, aber beharrliche Besuche in der Heilanstalt an Wolfs Lebensende bezeugen dies. Und die Verehrung wurde erwidert: The piece opens with an imperious upward scale G major, but starting on a D which depicts anger as well as introducing watery images of torrents and stream which lie at the heart of the text.

At the top of this opening scale the right hand lands on, and holds, a minim D: Is he spurning her, or has his whole song come about because she has refused him? In any case he is fuming, but his anger takes the form of a sort of exaggerated politeness, full of wry lip-curling and sarcastic little bows.

Surging scales in the left hand sound explosively angry, but they are there to establish an idea which will soon come into its own. A footnote to the song gives us a geography lesson: The spurned lover bitterly believes that, in like manner, the woman will find herself without any lovers in lean times, despite the huge number she has now. He builds up the tension in a masterly fashion with a succession of sequences which rise through a number of keys like a build-up of rivers flooding the Arno with increasing volumes of water; it is this passage which apparently cost him some little time in the organizing.

Note that the demisemiquaver runs which signify the rush of the tributary streams are at this point flowing in an upward direction. This stormy bluster with upward surge answered by downward gush continues for the next two lines as if the singer helped by the pianist of course is himself diverting the course of these smaller rivers with his bare hands. This postlude is grandiose as if he is mighty in his wrath — this is music for a Titan.

In true Wolfian fashion, however, there is a greater depth to this commentary: En tous les cas il est furieux. Le postlude est grandiose, comme pour manifester l'ampleur de ce courroux — il s'agit d'une musique digne d'un Titan. Eine Anmerkung zu dem Lied erteilt uns eine Geographielektion: And then we are plunged into one of those outbursts, the spontaneous combustion of the emotions, which make Wolf's Italian songs such vivid and believable evocations of everyday life. She turns on him and tells him exactly why she has been down in the mouth, singing with that mixture of anger and hurt pride with which the listener is now familiar.

Grief over my absence had caused this transformation … she is beside herself and I fear the worst. The opening words are set to a tune which is sung in the first bar and then moves into the accompaniment where it is deployed in various transformations and disguises. The opening rhetorical question is delivered almost operatically by a neglected woman of some grandeur. After these four bars the tempo changes and the singer is less successful in controlling her emotions; dignity slips somewhat as the tempo quickens and she is now simply a young girl who gives her lover a piece of her mind.

The various stops and starts in the vocal line are an astonishingly accurate evocation of a tirade interrupted only by tiny pauses for thought and emphasis, and in order to swallow tears. Of course this offends her dignity, but at least it enables her to blame someone other than the boy himself for the rarity of his visits.

As the song progresses we can hear the singer struggling to regain her composure. She realizes that she cannot win him back by accusations, but rather by an act of heroic, even religious, renunciation. Her sudden appeal to the powers of heaven moves the song into another dimension. It is as if she has taken the veil before our eyes, but surely only as a means to salvage her own dignity in a way to make him possibly relent and love her the more. The postlude is a grandiose, orchestrally inspired tutti.

The song ends in the dominant: Sans toi, je ne le serai jamais. Le lied se termine sur la dominante: Ohne dich kann ich es nie sein. Das Lied endet auf der Dominante: From time to time Wolf allows himself to choose poetry for setting which has re-awakened in him a youthful passion for Wagnerian cataclysm. At the end of XXXI there was the first of the tremolandi found in some of the postludes of the later Italian songs — a tell-tale sign that the composer has operatic dimensions in his mind.

Wolf knew large chunks of the Wagner operas by heart, and these passionate rumblings became part of his song-writing vocabulary. This is an effect that can seem slightly comical as it breaks through the boundaries of what is effective in pianistic terms. Wolf has tremendous fun here in writing music of a bigger scale, but in doing so he loses the focus on reality found elsewhere: The tone of self-righteousness could be seen as someone who protests her innocence rather too much, however.

Such a devious viewpoint is certainly not beyond our composer. In this respect Wolf has placed his hallmark on a song which nevertheless seems untypical of the set. L'inclusion dans le recueil d'un tel lied Verschling' der Abgrund , le no. Un raisonnement aussi tortueux n'est certainement pas impossible de la part de Wolf. Solch ein verschlagener Standpunkt ist unserem Komponisten sicherlich zuzutrauen.

This song is built entirely on an A flat pedal. This tonal anchor denotes both constancy and obsession. The gentle tolling of syncopated octave A flats in the left hand, no less than 84 of them, accounts for a sense of suspended animation — of belonging to another world, half-way between life and a romantic vision of what death might be. The difference, however, between the dying girl of the Brahms song and the lovesick swain of the Wolf is that the Italian lover is expiring of nothing more sinister than love, and that the elaborate conceit of the poem is, like so many others in the work, a means of paying his girl the most elegant of compliments.

It is easy for the performer to be wooed into this sort of self-indulgence. Over the repeated A flats in the bass, a succession of soft chords in the right hand droop and sigh, intertwining with the vocal line which within a relatively small compass suggests someone thunderstruck and almost incapacitated by a blinding vision of love.

Or perhaps a direct experience of it. Both songs, although from utterly different cultures, seem suffused with the dying golden light of an enchanted afternoon of love. But there is nothing smugly satisfied about this music; this has been the kind of love-making that magnifies longing rather than assuages it; she has entered his bloodstream and there is a need for deeper and deeper communion. The occasional addition of accidentals outside the key of A flat provides magical harmonic touches. The postlude murmurs echoes of continuing devotion.

This brings to a close a masterpiece which brings tears to the eyes by its simplicity and its mood of vulnerability and solitude. This song seems to say that however hard we try we can never ever get close enough to the objects of our adoration; having known the most profound love, we are destined to die alone. Mais il n'y a aucune auto-satifaction dans cette musique: An dieser Musik ist jedoch nichts blasiert selbstzufrieden. Auch wenn wir tiefste Liebe kannten, so sind wir doch dazu bestimmt, allein zu sterben. If a film director were to choose one song from the Italienisches Liederbuch to convert into cinema, he would surely select this.

After panning over the countryside and a radiant dawn there are wonderful opportunities for shots of beautiful Italian interiors — a bedroom and a church — and the heroine at prayer. And there is the voice of the narrator telling us what is happening, but — like every good guide — not getting in the way of the cameras. Unlike others in the set, this song progresses, on the set, from one place to the next. We are taken, frame by frame, on a conducted tour. In this sense Wolf has fashioned a song unique in the collection.

The composer has selected the key of E major not found elsewhere in these songs and has produced a monothematic miracle where almost all of the music of a four-page work is based on the opening bars. The household begins to go about its business and the voice perceptibly brightens with this upward shift of tessitura. So far in a mere thirteen bars we have heard and almost seen an Italian household coming to life on a beautiful summer morning. The upward shift of gears from one key to another suggests that the singer has become caught up in his own spiralling hyperbole.

After all, is it really angels who bring the girl her clothes and shoes, or are these merely cherubic young servants? Suddenly the mood changes and we cut in cinematic terms to the interior of the church. The quavers in the accompaniment now swing back and forth like pendulous censers as the piano writing formerly in a modest three parts is filled out with extra notes in the right hand, which bring a perfumed effulgence to the music.

Wolf now displays a marvellous sense of theatre at the very heart of the song. As the beloved stops to cross herself with holy water, the music stops with her. Quite exceptional, however, is the tone of almost anguished rapture with which the narrator comments on all this, as if he is observing these devotions from behind a pillar. There is in the music a sense of stretching out in vain, like someone who would give anything to touch the object of his veneration but dares not do so.

The last page of the song is given over to a hymn of praise. The voice is now placed bright and high in its compass and pours out its admiration with religious words allied to the erotic yearning implicit in the chromatic harmony — a mix of sacred and profane which has in fact provided the frisson throughout the work.

Der Haushalt wird betriebsam und die Stimme deutlich heller mit dem Lagenwechsel nach oben. Die letzte Liedseite gibt sich einer Lobeshymne hin. Es folgt eine ruhige Meditation, die, wie immer in dem Meisterwerk, auf dem Motiv beruht, mit dem das Lied begann. When I yearn from afar and contemplate your beauty, how I tremble and groan past concealing!

In my heart I feel rebellious flames that destroy my peace. Ah, madness seizes me! After a song unique in the songbook, another one-off, more popular with performers certainly, but arguably less perfect. It is hard to resist the tune, of course, and why should one want to? It is not hard to believe that it is the same character who sings both of these songs; in each the beloved is a jewel of great price, and elevated in the eyes of the lover to a status of madonna-like perfection.

This impression is fortified by a religious flavour to the work: So besotted is this young man that he is even willing to bless a prospective mother-in-law, although the reference to the Mother as being the fons et origo of all this heavenly beauty is simply a variation on the age-old Marian theme. The song stands out from its neighbours above all for formal reasons. It is an ABA structure where the recapitulation is a repeat, note for note, of the first section. This procedure is common enough with other song composers but occurs very rarely with Wolf, and only this once in the Italian songs.

At 53 bars it is the longest song of the entire set and perhaps for that reason it seems to be at odds with its fellows. These reservations apart, there is much in the song which merits its high reputation among singers.

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The word-setting is, as always, magical. Identity is derived from a process that cannot and should not be steered, at least not with conventional methods. Significant for the Osthang project, again, was the discrepancy between the enormous effort and work involved in constructing this temporary settlement and the unclear impact all this effort would have on the long-term development of the prestigious and valuable area. It is a fact that, even though there are more and. How to achieve a major shift? This publication presents only a few of the projects that employ artistic urbanism strategies in different ways.

In addition, the www. But is collecting of these examples enough? This may sound impossible and yet simple at the same time. To understand the significance and relevance of certain projects, it is helpful to look at where the financing comes from, since expectations and opportunities are often in alignment with their funding resource.

This meant that for the client the number of people attending events counted more than the content of the projects—not to mention that they did not commit to commissioning a long-term urban art strategy for this largest new urban development in Vienna for the next 20 years. But what if the marketing budget had been transferred to a long-term urban art strategy invested in exploring relevant urban issues? I dare say things would look different now. The long-term involvement of artistic planning strategies requires innovative financial models. The construction of real estate should generate enough profit to finance the collaborative projects of the quarter.

The Montag Foundation Urban Spaces provides a basic annual budget of EUR 60,, for the first 3—5 years of accompanying and moderating community work. This budget should be generated from renting the velvet weaving business and is intended to finance one person for coordination, small community activities, and project communication and public relations. This question is a fundamental aspect of the discussion on the societal relevance of art.

Of course this touches upon some basic. Must art be legitimized by participating in the art market? Or are the art practices of artists who do not engage in the art market system, even refusing it outright, not equally relevant? Meanwhile, numerous artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Christoph Schlingensief have raised controversy on societal issues, showing that it is indeed possible to be critically engaged and highly successful in the international art market at the same time.

These examples, and others, show that the public and the art system must finally consider the now wide range of art practices involved in and addressing urban and societal issues and that we need to reverse the critique. Why has the art market still not realized that it will remain far behind the recent developments of a major section of art production if it does not recognize these works and projects as being at least as important as the art being handled and traded in galleries now? Artists, curators, collectors, etc. I claim that art does have a function, that artists may engage in societal and urban issues, but for the further discussion of the possible function of art, transparadiso and our practice of direct urbanism emphasize the need to differentiate between art and artistic strategies.

However, art and artistic strategies can create a very different angle for looking at things. As mentioned above, we transparadiso differentiate between art and artistic strategies. The significance and importance of artistic strategies invested in changing conditions is obviously not restricted to urban issues, as they can be applied to various societal contexts, especially when current acclaimed methods like coaching, survival games, etc.

I was recently approached by a university film and media department wanting to expand the angle of their film education program from being orientated solely towards the film industry to including critical engagement by employing artistic research methods and performative elements. During the conversation, I realized that the problem was not how to develop a new program, but how to convince colleagues that this was needed and that supporting an innovative new program will garner international attention.

This situation can serve as a good example of employing artistic strategies beyond the urban context, and of how the method of shifting or reframing the context can work. Let us now return to the urban context—which is the foremost terrain of. Paradise Enterprise was not going to directly inspire new companies to settle in Judenburg, provide new jobs, create new revenue, or attract more people to move to Judenburg. However, it would be able to create settings for local people to take matters into their own hands, to become active again, and to emphasize the necessity of engaging in social values.

In Judenburg, for us this meant involving as many different parts of society as possible and interconnecting them. Significant amounts of time were needed to research how to address certain people and their interests—time that is usually not provided, yet requires a true interest in individuals and their situations. This one element—time—is one of the most volatile elements in our current Western society. The diverse perception of time exemplifies the ambiguity of a linear input—output relationship, which often counteracts expectations based on measurable results.

At conferences, the most important times are the breaks, where people chat and hang out informally. One could even see the talks and discussions as merely providing a framework for the informal situation of the breaks. So, again, when considering conditions for direct urbanism, the mostly unnoticed time that is required to establish communication with various and diverse groups of people and agents is a completely underrecognized prerequisite and, due to the indistinctness of its investment, often underpaid or even not paid at all.

Certain rhythms and loops of involvement need to be carefully designed in order to understand when interruptions or halts are needed in a process—and how art is linked to artistic strategies and at which point one or the other are more conducive. After outlining an overall plan for the long-term development of the area as contributing to the development of the whole town , we invited art projects with which we wanted to work once the wishes of local residents and youths were clearly expressed.

During the project, the artists lived next door, in the notorious Paradise Street social housing complex, and were thus inside the community. Occasionally, the artists would invite the young people to join them for barbecues on the site. But they always sat down and enjoyed our strange company.

Paradise Street will grow. The plan we are developing for the area includes new housing intended to create a social mix and expand the urban public space of the paradise garden into a new urban area connecting—socially as well as geographically—the historic city center to the steel company and working class neighborhood on the other side of the Mur River.

Thus the neglected area of the former paradise garden will become a new urban center for Judenburg, enhancing the existing quality of the beautiful, dense, and wild landscape along the Mur. In the first part of this text, I outlined situations in which new approaches towards urban and regional planning are needed. I stated how it is essential to investigate the context and parameters for involving direct urbanism methods, and that conditions are not comparable on a 1: How can artists and artistic strategies be positioned and recognized as active contributors to cultural policies and urban development?

The following list far from complete is a summary of what I already discussed before, derived from the transparadiso experience. Any semblance to a manifesto is not unintentional. Areas of expertise must be differentiated in order to create a basis for being clear about who should be involved at which point of the process, for what reason, and in which way. According to the specific societal, cultural, geographical and political context, it should be investigated whether new structures for establishing the concerns of new urban practitioners need to be created independently, or if they should be part of the framework of existing structures, and which cultural producers should be involved in decisionmaking on what level.

These movements fight for a perspective of change, which encourages the potential for change in the realm of urban planning and urban issues—where the redistribution of wealth and of resources can first be seen. Public art funds, e. It is important to note that artists must not be expected to adapt their projects to prescribed tasks and envisioned outcomes.

If art and artistic strategies are involved in urban issues, they need to be integrated in a long-term perspective of urban development that introduces new societal values and involves broader aspects of society. As I already stated, art has an additional function that goes beyond feeding the art market. At the same time, I want to make a plea for critical art to be collected even better, if out of personal interest and conviction rather than just for raising the credibility of a company. Critical artists claim that art has the function of not functioning within the parameters currently governing our neoliberally dominated society.

Art must maintain its independence in order to function as a non-commercial surplus in society—a surplus free from judgement by economic criteria and outcomes. Otherwise, art loses the unique and critical role it plays in society. If art were to subordinate its role to only functioning for the purposes of the governing interests, it would not be art anymore. This may be considered a utopian perspective, since art, of course, is also part of the system. And we know how fast art can be appropriated by marketing campaigns. Therefore, the question is: How can art assume a strong function in urban and societal development without being appropriated for the purposes of creating capital for the people and companies already in positions of power?

This means that a differentiation is made between the internal value of an art project for participants, attendants, and authors and value that can be marketed on a political level. The internal value is very difficult to measure. This seems to result in even more emphasis being put on art and artistic practices raising the market value of a certain property.

The expectation of definable results in the U. New buzzwords like creative placemaking and urban resilience are continually thrown around, joined by hollowed-out terms such as sustainability. But what is best practice, and what are the conditions for it? Is it really so easy and does it even make sense to single out one project that stands for many others? How can we withstand simple categorization? Can we find ways to describe the parameters of the context in new narratives, narratives that could expand visions rather than limit them? Planning authorities and city governments need to accept the fact that the engagement addressed in this publication, one in which manifold projects have a voice, is based on the unique dedication of the people involved.

Best practice precludes the abyss of generalization, of creating a model intended to serve for others. On the contrary, each situation requires an in-depth analysis of possibly hidden existing potential. This potential can be used to form a concept that employs new methods and strategies, some of which I will present below. The quest for best practice also infers a clear definition of success and failure.

Under which circumstances can failure become a productive force? The degrowth concept and debate is an important source of empowerment for artists and urban practitioners, and vice versa. Failure in terms of economic growth could thus become a productive force for new values and the ways that they are discussed by degrowth movements. In her Manifesto of Possibilities , Sophie Hope states: Whereas the UK is more similar to the U. However, I think that this refusal to reduce art and artistic practices in order to analyze their function for a certain purpose contributes to maintaining the potentially independent role of art.

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This is why it is important to consider that the range of projects presented in this publication must not be considered as examples of best practice. Instead, they aim to trigger associations with delving into current urban issues and the diverse ways artists and urban practitioners respond to, or challenge, the specific context. Public Art Lower Austria has maintained its crucial agenda to confront small towns in the region of Lower Austria with contemporary art of the highest level www. Public Art Styria has developed a profile with a special emphasis on involving art addressing community development and regional concerns www.

The Festival of Regions in Upper Austria is a biennial regional festival dedicated to developing art and art projects in close collaboration with the population www. In addition to the existing public art programs in cities and regions, a new regional festival was founded in , the Styrian regionale, which ended in The study Kunst macht Stadt!? However, this study—and all other studies—must be critically examined in terms of whom it is meant to serve.

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In the context of Vienna, this does not necessarily mean gentrification at least not on the same scale that other cities have experienced it , since the structures are too complex. If evaluation were to be used to legitimize investments in art, the artistic concerns and quality of taking a stand—against dominant interests or otherwise—would be endangered. Since we are so used to adhering to the fulfillment of the quest to judge by quantity of visitors rather than discussing the quality of the experiences of individuals—something that cannot be measured by mainstreamed questionnaires—we need to shift the criteria of evaluation.

How could one measure the value of a peaceful and inspiring community living together? Can these qualities be reduced to a figure? Or is it not rather the multitude of individuals who contribute to a vital and diverse community, with their often unwanted various social or cultural backgrounds? Study for the City of Vienna, The name was criticized from the very beginning for being a direct reference to the gentrification process in Soho, New York. Many artists, sociologists, activists, theorists, urban researchers, and people from other fields have been operating in transdisciplinary roles in manifold collaborations pursuing similar goals.

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In spite of the significance, their tools and strategies have not yet been analyzed in depth or extracted as methodologies. This is one of the reasons why we have compiled the urban-matters. The goal of the urban practitioner is to create a situation that enables local residents, politicians, and decision-makers to continue with a process once started, providing assistance only when needed.

Through its fluidity, this role can assume a position suited to a specific moment in time and to the needs of the people involved. It is important to note that the critical voice of the urban practitioner never waives, always defending the independence of artistic strategies and of art that questions societal conditions. Paul Rajakovics writes about how we can also make use of other terms, tactics, and strategies introduced by de Certeau, explaining how we can adapt and employ them for current urban issues.

This is in the sense of using the underrecognized position of being on the fringes of society to ask crucial questions concerning society—and to believe in their potential to actually have an effect. Could artistic strategies of this kind become a different kind of activism? In this way, unlearning is also closely related to the production of desires. Through this, we freed not only ourselves from presumptions, but also freed everyone involved.

The expertise was attributed equally to all the participants involved—no matter what background, an aspect we consider intrinsic to unlearning. Shifting roles is closely connected to unlearning. It is a strategy that can be used in two types of situations: Anticipatory fiction takes the envisioned final outcome of a process and assumes it has already become reality.

It works by developing narratives that transgress the seemingly doable, involving poetic moments as well as introducing new values other than that of the prevalent neoliberal governance. Plan B was a project anticipating dependence on Russian energy supplies, the incalculable costs for consumers that go with this, and the growing problematic of Central Europeans especially retired people not being able to afford heating anymore.

Our critical anticipated fiction had thus been overruled by mere entertainment at a different venue. At the same time the strawberry fields are a signifier of manual labor being regarded as an unaffordable good due to high labor costs in central Europe and therefore outsourced to big strawberry plantations such as those in Spain, which are harvested by immigrant or migrant workers.

We can learn from these contexts and look at the means, methods, and tools they produced, to expand our vision and produce ideas beyond what our imagination usually perceives as doable a limitation that often can lead to self-censorship. It is crucial to not assume that all solutions are at hand, but instead to refer to other situations with similar problems and challenges to find modes of coping that may seem impossible to apply to a different situation.

Shifting the context allows the commissioning party to draw their own conclusions rather than pretending to have a solution at hand. The method of shifting the context from a shrinking city to a growing city obviously meant that conditions could not be compared. The chosen setting, artistic means, and procedures employed in Vienna were completely different, yet the two congresses had in common that they generated unexpected, yet specific, future perspectives. These new situations and encounters on an eye-to-eye level can facilitate the leaving behind of familiar territories.

It still needs to be carefully investigated in which situations activist strategies are more powerful for change—or when it is conducive to provide situations for engaging people in a communication process on an equal level. Too often, the greatest obstacles to change are language and social barriers between the various backgrounds, fields, and experiences. Artistic procedures can offer a language and setting to communicate across diverse interests, and thus overcome confrontational oppositons and presumptions of non-understanding. Oftentimes the problem stated by the commissioning party needs to be reconsidered from a broader perspective in order to arrive at the core of the problem.

The challenge is that there is no predefined ground or outcome. The direct experience and the parallel analysis reflect back on developing the next steps for the concrete situation while continuing to develop and shape the dialog between theory and research.

This ping-pong process requires openness from all people involved, including the divesting of conventional concepts of what research is. Research through practice can be considered a method of artistic research. This artistic method like the others mentioned above instead opens up space for unexpected knowledge through direct experience. This applies especially to our Central European culture, where openly addressing conflicts is something that is avoided. Conflicts are pushed to the outer edges and made invisible so as to not obstruct the comforting feeling of well-being, which politicians, in particular, try to convey.

Opposing interests need to be publicly discussed rather than arranged behind closed doors. Artistic practices can create settings and narratives for playing out moments of conflict and even compelling them by using the art project as a rehearsal area for conflicts to be acted out. The concept of the Empty Field Consortium was derived from the fact that the Aspern Lake City has not achieved its goals of attracting institutions such as the Vienna University of Technology or the Vienna University of Economics to Aspern, institutions which would have been major carriers of identity and stimulated a mixed use.

Urban reserves supply the potential to adjust to processes and unforeseen changing parameters. This research gave the expertise back to the local people—as in the next steps—and established the basis not just for developing the overall project but also for establishing communication on an equal level. The soft fact of revealed hidden potential thus also resulted in the soft skill of building confidence. Creating situations in which everyday users and residents are encouraged to take action, to take matters into their own hands, counteracts participation being used as a generic and often pseudo-democratic instrument.

In these pseudo-participatory planning processes, representatives of certain groups are singled out and involved in conventional urban planning processes in order to legitimize them. No further research is done on what the. Creating situations for appropriation means leaving the dichotomy of planners and consumers behind to construct settings where a different type of research, like research through practice, is needed. Here, again, artistic strategies can play a fundamental role, e. Situations where unheard voices and unwanted wants can surface should be taken as a basis for further progress.

How can one return the public voice to the people using this rundown area next to the inner city of this shrinking town, which has recently been laden with expectations for raising its property value?

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How to engage these people, who are mainly homeless and drug addicts, and gain their confidence in the meaningfulness of getting involved in an art project? How to explain to city authorities that this, or any art project, cannot and must not resolve the vast social problems stemming from the political and economic system? This is why I decided to use the word congress, referring to the unquestioned credibility of a congress to produce content and build contacts. However, I shifted the congress format away from the typical closed situation, creating an open access conference in urban public space.

One of them said, seemingly touched: The aesthetic of the congress situation not only brought back an appreciation of this underrecognized site and the people living there, but it also created deep— and I almost want to say poetic—moments on a human level. For two days or a total of three weeks together with on-site preparations , the congress successfully interrupted the tragic helplessness and hopelessness.

As one black woman said to a white academic from Baltimore: How can we communicate? They cannot be planned. They cannot be evaluated. Basically, there is nothing wrong with a tool catalog in the sense of learning from experience, as long as the people who want to implement specific elements are aware of the need to adapt the tools and.

It would be a big misunderstanding to see them as recipes. Let us now return to one of the main issues—and maybe the most complex one—where this catalog for the unplanned can be applied: This allowing of contradictions is exactly what artists and urban practitioners can bring about: If art served these interests, artists would not only betray the people involved, but it would be the end of art.

Thoughtful urban practitioners need to be capable of shifting roles, of engaging from different perspectives, and of communicating with everybody involved. They act from behind the scenes as much as they do overtly, escaping expectations and definitions, maintaining a fluid role. Their serious or playful energy can make the impossible happen, even achieving social equality. And if this sounds like a claim, it is intentional—it is a claim that is not modest, on the contrary: This is how art and urban practitioners can create new realities.

How can we bring across that they provide qualities conventional urban planning is unable to achieve? What are these qualities? What is their importance, who is it that attributes it to them, and what are their motives? What is the function of art in this context? These two reference projects were highly innovative on different levels: I will not be able to analyze the contextual or political parameters of these urban developments, nor the applied public art strategies and their impact in this text, but I will look at the program strands and their function in order to explore possibilities for taking the role of art in an urban context one step further: Inspired by the projects mentioned above, we had all reason to hope we could establish artistic processes as an integral part of this Vienna project as well.

I have to state outright that our ambition failed. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in , Vienna has continuously grown after having shrunken from its peak population of 2. Apart from the Belvedere quarter and the Sonnwendviertel with the new main train station, the focus was on the re-development of the former airport and airfield at Aspern, which had been shut down on May 1, Of course, even though the airfield had been abandoned for almost forty years, the area was everything but devoid of identity.

It was used as a car race track and loaded with many different connotations. There was plenty of informal use by strong and very diverse neighbors, from the General Motors plant opened in , providing 2, jobs in the south to single family housing and still existing village structures in the immediate surroundings. And not to forget the significance with which the name Aspern resonates in Austrian history, recalling the famous battle of Aspern , in which Napoleon was beaten for the first time by Austrians! The complex history of the site could have been a significant reference for connecting to an existing identity that was built throughout the centuries.

This did not happen. The University of Technology preferred to stay in its downtown location, and the University of Economics decided to build a new campus in the second district of Vienna next to the Vienna Fair and the Prater amusement area. Unfortunately, Aspern Development AG has not yet committed to shifting perspectives on a larger scale, or to taking the courage to shift their goals and their vast marketing campaign towards other burning topics. And these topics are evident: The unplannable aspect of growth could thus be committed to as a program—as it was already suggested by the cohabitation group que[e]rbau.

As PUBLIK was funded by the marketing department, expectations were clearly to bring in as many people as possible to the site to be developed. The budgets were allocated on a year-to-year basis, so that no longer-term perspective could be conceived. The construction of the Ring street as a representational boulevard replaced the fortification and ditches which had become obsolete; it was officially inaugurated by emperor Franz Joseph in For a detailed chronology and analysis of the development, see, e.

Numerous collaborations with Austrian and international universities added to activating the space temporarily and to communicating the project on an international level. So, while everything seems to be possible in Aspern, an overall art plan has not been developed—let alone one to assign a new role to artistic strategies of urban practitioners.

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No one from the arts context was included. This demanding open blind spot was the starting point for speculating on the Consortium Freies Feld Consortium Free Field. Reversing the notion of a consortium as a merger of business interests, this atypical consortium meant to gather societal interests and social values and to find out how they could be placed in the foreground of current urban agendas beyond neoliberal interests and public—private partnerships.

Messestadt Fair City Munich-Riem is a new urban quarter on the hectars area of the former airport Munich-Riem, which was shut down in Unlike Vienna Aspern Lake City, this new urban development started with a central function, the fairgrounds, which opened in —before the construction of the housing areas started. It was conceived for 16, residents 6, apartments and envisioned the provision of industrial property for 13, jobs—which is a density significantly below that of Aspern Lake City.

The Messestadt was scheduled to be completed in Commissions must therefore take into account both the rapidly changing face of Messestadt Riem now and in the years to come and the varied concerns of those affected. For the artists, this means addressing the specifics of the suburb and engaging in a dialogue with those who commission their work—ultimately, the local residents. In their works, some of which are intended to be realised over a number of years, they focus on certain aspects of life in the new suburb.

In addition, several projects are carried out each year in connection with a particular theme or motto. The Munich suburb Messestadt Riem is such a place. People have already moved into some of the new accommodation, but much is still missing—the centre, for example. The works of art shed new light on existing features or draw attention to various intermediate states in the birth of Messestadt.

The artists have reacted to the transitional stages between unused land, building sites and the creation of a new suburb. They have also provided residents with points of identification in an environment in which the noise of building activity is omnipresent and a planned landscaped park nothing but a far-off vision.

Living is also a theme of contemporary art. Artists create uncommon installation art and design special atmospheres. United by common interests, by gender, religion, origins or age, the members of these widely differing groupings gather in various indoor and outdoor spaces. Together, they constitute society in Messestadt. The process of devising the elements of Beyond began by inviting six specialists to write an essay exploring their visions of the larger social developments concerning the public domain in Leidsche Rijn.

These essays served as a resource for the art program and were made available to the artists. The Beyond scenario contained the following elements: In , the continuation of employing art in the Messestadt was confirmed by the Committee on Culture of the City of Munich. In , the artist informed the public arts committee that he could not resolve technical problems and therefore would not be able to realize the project.

A new invited competition took place, pursuing the same goals as the last one. Vinex focuses on strengthening existing cities and urban areas thus reducing exploitation of the land, traffic and unnecessary mobility. It also aims at reducing the quality difference between the rental sector and the buying sector.

To download the list go to: This was designated in by the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment in order to address the housing shortage. Leidsche Rijn was the largest Vinex site and planned for about 70, inhabitants. The Visual Arts Advisory Board proclaimed the necessity of a special arts plan that should develop along with the construction site. From the beginning, Van Gestel emphasized the interest to identify gaps in the planning process, make them visible through art—but to not resolve problems of the master plan. This is the umbrella name for mobile architecture and experimental forms of light urban development; residential and professional spaces that can be easily moved and require very few facilities.

But parasites can also fulfil all kinds of other functions such as a catering pavilion, a gym, cinema or ice-cream parlour. A platform for that debate is available on this site. In addition, Looping tells visual stories featuring a number of fictional characters. These stories are a means to communicate all aspects of Leidsche Rijn. The subjects dealt with can be related to various public activities. They can be found on the homepage, where you can also view previous episodes.

In the Netherlands, the term Vinex is often associated with large, boring residential areas. We use art to conceive strategies that can be a creative solution to this. This could include projects like building a house or organizing an event. With the White Spots programme we join in that process. These sites can be used for.

Eventually, Beyond will sell these plots and then buildings can still be erected on them. He is director of Gideon Consult, in which capacity he serves as project director or consultant of numerous complex urban regeneration plans. The New Patrons in Germany are: The various strands of Beyond—from creating communication and temporary interventions up to installing large-scale art projects and buildings on site—were critically engaged in the contemporary discourse of art involved in urban issues and reflected the role of artists in an ongoing process.

Beyond continues to address critical aspects in their final publication, which does not shy away from highlighting the discrepancy of art engaging in urban development and the dominant interests of market forces. Only then, participating in these meetings as equal experts with an equal voice in decision-making, artists could question the dominant parameters. They could play out the potential of resistance and being a critical element. Shifting the expertise from commissioners or curators, it is now citizens or associations that are encouraged to take initiative to realize art projects in a collaborative process for their chosen urban or regional context.

Whereas the projects realized by the Nouveau Commenditaires were mostly still large-scale public art projects, the New Patrons in Germany are rather engaged in vital urban issues. They were submitted by the first some forty residents and by some of the 2. Speaking of innovative approaches of art engaging in societal issues, the Artist Placement Group APG is a seminal initiative to place artists within the system in order to enable change.

It was founded by John Latham and Barbara Steveni in The organization actively sought to reposition the role of the artist within a wider social context, including government and commerce, while at the same time playing an important part in the history of conceptual art during the s and s. It was agreed that there was a bilateral interest between artist activity and government activity, which later lead to a number of APG placements. Invited by Joseph Beuys, the APG participated in Documenta 6 Kassel, Germany, , and held a series of podium exchanges with German government officials in Bonn, which led to the first international artist-with-government placement.

The Potential of Missing Things What is missing now? What difference would it have made to shift the marketing budget to art projects engaging in urban issues? Why did Public Art Vienna not take the initiative to develop a concept? They would have had the potential to produce an innovative approach of engaging art in urban issues, based on the projects mentioned above. New cultural initiatives were started in early As already mentioned, many cultural producers, artists and international university programs have engaged in providing new perspectives and meaningful and critical contributions—but what impact did all these endeavors actually have?

Let us now return to the question at the beginning: This decision was based on the conviction that it would gain a larger acceptance by the public. Current burning questions of our society include the unresolved issues of people seeking asylum and the ongoing migration process. How could these issues be located in a new urban development? As mentioned already, one of the cohabitation groups in Aspern Lake City, que[e]rbau, has phrased their intention of providing space for queer asylum seekers in their building—and they even want to expand the initiative to the other housing areas.

Sie kommen abgebremst durch Schaumstoffe und Kartonagen auf den Boden. Ein punktuelles Ereignis kann dauerhafte Auswirkungen erzielen, wie ein dauerhaftes Vorgehen punktuelle. Die wichtigsten voraussagbaren Zeitstrukturen auf der Erde sind der Gezeitenzyklus 12,5 Std. Heinz von Foerster sagt: Derselbe Bewegungsrhythmus, der den Boden verdichtet, dient bei den Lockerungs-. Deshalb nimmt der ideale Plan seine Verwerfung vorweg. Wer seinen Plan verworfen hat, ist mitten in der Planung.

Ein unheimliches, aber oft praktiziertes Projekt. Kunst war in Aspern Seestadt nicht vorgesehen. Was heiSSt unplanning bzw. Aus der heutigen Perspektive erscheint diese Forderung zu bescheiden und zu wenig weitgreifend. Wie wird ein Stadtteil urban? Kunstprojekte Riem, Springer Verlag, , S. Mit Zwischennutzungen Stadt entwickeln, in: Wo ist die Kunst? Thomas Kaestle, Wo ist die Kunst? Zur Geographie von Schnittstellen, Kerber Verlag, ; zitiert nach www.

Die Projekte begannen in der Leere des ehemaligen. Auch die Finanzierung erfolgte nach einem neuen Modell: Wo ist die Kunst heute? Es gab und gibt niemanden, der sie finanzieren will. Sie wird nicht als notwendig erachtet. Der Widerstand, den der Ort selbst seiner Planbar-. Das Programm wird fortgesetzt werden. Siehe auch die aktuelle Debatte um Commons, u. Dies ist der Hintergrund des Freien Feldes. Die sogenannte Zwischennutzung entwickelt mittlerweile ambivalente Tendenzen: Much of the material in this presentation is taken from Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, London: Tauris, , and Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, London: This paper approaches the issue of the unplanned, first by discussing the concept of critical spatial practice and different approaches this might take, and then moving to consider criticism itself as a way of moving between planned and unplanned as a form of critical spatial practice in its own right.

My initial training is in architectural design, and my interest in spatial constructions has influenced the work that I have gone on to do, first as a feminist architectural historian, and more recently as an art critic and architectural writer. My book Art and Architecture: A Place Between from attempts to trace the multiple dynamics of my investigation into public art located at a three-way intersection, between art and architecture, public and private, and theory and practice.

Unlike architecture, art may not be functional in traditional terms, for example giving shelter when it rains or designing a room in which to perform open-heart surgery, but we could say that art is functional in providing certain kinds of tools for self-reflection, critical thinking and social change. When art is located outside the gallery, the parameters that define it are called into question and all sorts of new possibilities are opened up.

Art has to engage with the kinds of restraints and controls to which only design is usually subject. But in other sites and situations art can adopt critical functions and works can be positioned in ways that make it possible to question the terms of engagement of the projects themselves. In a couple of key publications appeared. The Spirit of Art as Activism pointed to the potential of socially engaged public art practice as a tool for political critique, while writer Tom Finkelpearl described. The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Glasgow School of Art, Thames and Hudson, , pp.

Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , p. Perhaps because of this narrowed perception, but also because of the richness of the work produced by the growing number of conceptual artists working outside the gallery and developing modes of institutional critique, across sites, both public and private, terms such as site-specific or contextual art started to be used instead. So I am going to say a few words about what I mean by this term.

Starting with the critical. Critical theory is a phrase that refers to the work of a group of theorists and philosophers called the Frankfurt School operating in the early twentieth century, whose writings are connected by an interest in the ideas of the philosopher G. Hegel, the political economist Karl Marx, and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Critical theory could be characterized as a rethinking or development of Marxist ideas in relation to the shifts in society, culture and economy that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Two figures are key: Lefebvre put forward a trialectical model where space is produced through three interrelated modes: It was the writings of another key spatial thinker, postmodern geographer Edward Soja, that suggested the three part structure of my book. I am now going to draw out some of the key forms of critical spatial practice I explore in the book, focusing on art projects. So in Section 1: In the first, I consider the relationship between site and non-site, see here the work of artist Robert Smithson, who first used the terms site and non-site to describe a work or site located outside the gallery and how it is documented in the gallery or non-site.

I aimed to bring this up to date by examining the curation of shows across large sites which engaged debates across the disciplines of art, design and architecture. For example, In the Midst of Things, where curators Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade invited 27 artists to critique existing social models and offer new propositions at Bourneville, a village and factory complex built in the late-nineteenth century as a paternalist development conceived by an enlightened capitalist, George Cadbury, a chocolate manufacturer who wanted to create a pleasant.

University of California Press, , p. Blackwell, ; and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: This essay was originally published in October 8, Spring See Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade eds. See also Gavin Wade ed. Pluto Press, , pp. This essay was originally published in October 8 Spring See Gerrie van Noord ed.

In Chapter 1 Ruin as Allegory I suggest that projects that focus on aspects of ruin, disintegration and transience not only inspire feelings of melancholic contemplation in the viewer, but also provide experiences where critical transformation can occur through quiet but active thought. Shot at night with a long exposure, the architecture takes on a strange luminescence.

In Chapter 2 Insertion as Montage I examine the principle of montage through contemporary works where new insertions into sites produce juxtapositions which displace dominant meanings and interrupt particular contexts to create visual, audio and tactile environments in which the experience may initially include shock, but over time starts to engage with the more subtle ambiguities usually associated with allegory. And in Chapter 3 The What-has-been and the Now the focus is on history and on the position of the dialectical image as a threshold between past, present and future.

I look at a number of artworks that insert new fragments into existing contexts, but here the act reclaims or unearths certain aspects of history lying buried in the present. This is a work which expresses a key aspect of public art, the need to operate somewhat ambiguously, offering a number of interpretations, which rather than tell us what to think, ask us to question the ways in which we assign value to matter. Finally, in Section 3: Between One and Another, I shift emphasis to the social aspect and examine the spatial construction of subjectivity in feminist and psychoanalytical theory, investigating the relationships people create in the production and occupation of art and architecture.

I focus on three different approach to creative exchange: What I sought to do in Art and Architecture was to consider different approaches to critical spatial practice. My interest was in the relationship between art, architecture and theory, but what I learnt from researching and writing the book was that my position with regard to the work emerged in response to my direct experience of it. Following this, I became more intrigued by the process of criticism itself, as a form of critical spatial practice, a writing practice which remakes works in the form of writing; which can write a site, rather than write about a site; and which can also write the relation between sites.

I am interested in how the interpretative act of art criticism can itself engage with those changing sites and positions we occupy as critics materially, conceptually, emotionally and ideologically. The Ethnographic Turn, London: Black Dog Publishing, , pp. See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Columbia University Press, , and bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: A Critical History, London: Tate Publishing, , p. Interpretation is, we would argue, a kind of performance of the object … Interpretation, like the production of works of art, is a mode of communication.

Meaning is a process of engagement and never dwells in any one place. See also another alternative version: It was through the process of writing Art and Architecture, writing about critical spatial practice, that I came to realize that the changing sites I occupied in relation to art, architecture and theory—physical as well as ideological, private as well as public—did more than inform my critical attitude, but rather produced it.

So in my new book Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism the focus of the in-between shifts from between art and architecture, to the sites between critic and work, essay and reader. Site-Writing explores the position of the critic, not only in relation to art objects, architectural spaces and theoretical ideas, but also to the site of writing itself. I also combine different interpretative and writing modes, for example using the analytic to outline the structure of my response, and memories—sometimes real, sometimes fictional—to create the detail.

In other words, this involves a movement between the planned and unplanned in critical terms. So I am going to end by reading two pieces from my Site-Writing book to explore this dimension between the controlled and the uncontrolled in critical writing and how this tension can be explored using spatial devices. Then, at the suggestion of a friend, Iain Borden, I decided to write about a place in which I had previously lived.

My coinhabitant of that house had been making our living space through an unusual method of DIY, much of which involved the removal, rather than the addition, of building elements, as well as the use of objects for non-designed purposes. This incorporation of the personal into the critical had different kinds of effects depending on the reader. But my retelling of events disturbed two important people in my personal life.

The responses I received made me aware that words do not mean the same thing for writer and reader and this raised many questions about storytelling. While the subject matter and subjective stance of a personal story may upset the objective tone of academic writing, writing for a theoretical context repositions events in ways that may be uncomfortable for those involved in the story. Writing about the DIY practices in a house I once lived in in order to question the authorial position of the architect and the permanence of architecture assumed by the profession involves recounting a story.

Like the fiction writer who uses friends and family as the basis for characters, I use others in my writing, but unlike the fiction writer, who provides a disguise through character, my writing offers nowhere to hide. Adopting a narrative form in which they feature as subjects in order to make a critical point reveals there is more involved than simply telling a good story. So what do these others make of the subjects they become in my writing? As a writer, what ethical responsibility do I have to them? The question of how it is possible to recognize another is a problem at the heart of much feminist writing.

If so, then what other tools do we have at our disposal? My own use of architecture is placed between the authority of the father, the male architect, on the one hand, who sets out the modernist principles of design still largely adhered to by the profession, and the voice of the mother, the female theoretician, on the other, who suggests alternative modes of producing space: The essay has a way with words, a particular patterning of speech, a feminine rhetoric that undoes architecture. This speaking subject speaks in threes. Her speech is tripled. As architects we remain true to this ideal, and ensure that we, and only we, do things our way.

When she submits to such a theory, woman fails to realise that she is renouncing the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary. I was taught that architects do architecture all by themselves. Gill, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, , pp. Architects do architecture with designs on the user—that the user will follow certain intended patterns of consumption.

Consuming—the act of acquiring and incorporating goods— indicates distinct social identities. Desiring creatures transgress; they resist the logic of architecture as the other who completes the self. They undo architecture as architecture undoes them. Writing is working; being worked: A course that multiplies transformations by the thousands. Melnikov had made a mess. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: The Athlone Press, , p.

The houses we buy and the way we choose to live in them allow us to distinguish ourselves from others. Our choices are limited by factors of all kinds, not least our desires. You grant me space, you grant me my space. But in so doing you have always taken me away from my expanding place. What you intend for me is the place which is appropriate for the need you have of me. What you reveal to me is the place where you have positioned me, so that I remain available for your needs. Scattered all over London, all over the world, are other homes, houses where I have once lived. In some still standing, I return and revisit past lives and loves.

Others have been destroyed, physically crushed in military coups, or erased from conscious memory only to be revisited in dreams. In all the places I have lived I recognize lost parts of myself, but this particular house means something very special to me. Through its fragile structure this house physically embraced my need for transience, and perhaps this is what made it feel like home to me.