Lover, You Should’ve Come Over
On Inspiraling, an exhibition on living together, a girls’ school, the waning of winter, friendship, and a love quietly beginning to unfold.
“Summer Solstice swung around and women from all over arrived. We sang and ate and smoked and danced; we walked in the woods, we looked at the stars and hugged each other.”
(Women’s Carpentry Book: Building Your Home From the Ground Up, NY: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1980.)
At CRAC Alsace, Inspiraling ran until 1 March. The exhibition brought together works by Katja Mater, Clare Noonan, Jessica Gysel, Marnie Slater, Robin Brettar and Matilda Çobanli, alongside contributions by MYCKET, Ot Lemmens, Sophy Naess, Judith Geerts, Nienke Fransen, Christine de Pizan, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Anne Reijniers & Eline De Clercq. The exhibition was conceived by Sarah Menu, Elsa Vettier, Richard Neyroud, Sandrine Desmoulin and Maria Claudia Gamboa.
Looking out the door, I see the rain
Rain, grey — it is three in the afternoon on 4 February. A fine drizzle; it will be dark soon. Two women are waiting for me at the station in Altkirch. Both are curators at CRAC Alsace. When I told Maria on the phone that she would recognise me by my red coat, she replied that she would be wearing black. “Like everyone,” she added. I rarely wear black myself; the colour does not suit my temperament. That week, moreover, I wanted to radiate the warm glow of red.
On the train I had been thinking a great deal about how to go on living in my large house, now that everyone had moved out — the children, and also the man with whom I had lived for fifteen years. It had been a somewhat lonely winter. Not only the house, but our large garden too falls silent in winter. When the trees stand bare, the orchard no longer forms a whole. The sheep, whose meandering between the trees usually binds everything together, are now kept in the barn. During the long winter months, it is each to her own.
How different our garden feels the rest of the year: blossoms and lush greenery, wildflowers, cherries, and tables laden with delicacies, around which friends talk and laugh. Fruit of every kind — apples above all — later, in autumn, when life in our house is at its busiest. Then there is music, and harvesting, and singing. As if in a pastoral novel.
Being alone in a house is pleasant, as long as you still have the feeling that you are missed — somewhere, by someone. But that week, on that train journey, I was not being missed. Miss you, Miss you, Miss you. Man Ray wrote it on a note to Lee Miller while he was staying in Paris and involved with the American photographer. It must have been around 1933. On that fourth of February in Altkirch, I was not in a relationship. Not anymore.
On the train, I kept thinking about the man I had met a few months earlier, with whom I had shared long, intimate conversations. I missed him — and more than that, I wanted him here. I imagined walking beside him from the station to the girls’ school, feeling the quiet charge of his presence, and looking ahead to the room in the old director’s house where, in my mind, we would stay together. The former girls’ school sits just below the church. From the kitchen window of the director’s house, the church emerges into view, half-hidden behind an overgrown garden, heavy with ivy and, in this season, marked above all by bare, desolate trees.
As Maria showed me my room, explaining that the heating in the bathroom was not working and pointing out that I would be the only one staying that night in a house concealing at least three large bedrooms behind as many closed doors, I began to imagine what life here might once have been like. Had a female director ever lived here with her companion? Or perhaps a conventional family, the father serving as head of the girls’ school? Were there children in the house? Did the family walk together to church on Sundays, to the one at the top of the hill? Did things quietly unravel within those walls? Or was there room to experiment with other ways of living together? I forgot to ask Maria. She left me alone in the room, and I opened the window, which offered a magnificent view over the valley. It was still drizzling, and the light had almost entirely faded.
The next morning I was up early. I was deeply curious to discover Inspiraling. I hoped to find answers in the ways the members of the collective reflected on living together. A few months earlier, Marnie Slater had invited me to come and see their exhibition in Altkirch. I had accepted eagerly, because Marnie and her friends were themselves thinking intensely about how to live when you live outside a conventional, normative relationship. In their house in Molenbeek, they have found a generous formula: living with six people under one roof, in a building of their own, a building they have lovingly turned into a nest. Quite literally, with their own hands and their own strength. Building a house demands countless decisions and endless consultation and compromise. How do you do that? And how do you ensure that your house acquires a soul, that it becomes an open house, a place where people can be together and creative, and where each season may look different because those who live there are free, able to express themselves artistically within their own home, together and sometimes alone.
The sun quickly drew me outside. I wanted to discover the place where, the previous afternoon at dusk, I had taken up residence. I was curious about the exhibition, but also about the garden surrounding the director’s house. The evening before, Maria had pointed out that several artworks were installed there as well. Along the walls of the house, I immediately found a kind of guiding thread: a collection of chains strung with an array of keys. All kinds of keys. They referred to the many doors and locks in the house in Molenbeek, necessary during the renovations to secure the building and, at the same time, to share access with as many people as possible. That thread of keys felt welcoming, as if inviting me to discover a secret. For a moment I felt like Mary Lennox, discovering the secret garden on an English estate in the final days of winter. My day had begun well.
The garden path led me to a cast-iron gate to which colourful metal garlands were attached in bright, sunlit shades: pink, orange, blue and yellow. The garlands introduce chaos and imagination against the severe dark-green pillars of the gate. Festive, joyful, and slightly defiant. Through that gate I left the garden surrounding the house and made my way toward the girls’ school. Cheerful flags flutter above the entrance gate, bearing enlarged miniatures from the fifteenth-century manuscript La Cité des Dames by Christine de Pizan. Christine de Pizan’s feminist text celebrates the many virtues of women. It is an allegorical work in which the author constructs an imaginary city for women. With the help of Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice, she builds a “city” in which she gathers examples of strong, wise and virtuous women from history and mythology. The book defends women against misogynistic ideas and demonstrates that they are as capable and morally valuable as men. Christine de Pizan herself ensured that the manuscripts were richly illuminated by Parisian artists. I find myself wondering whether those illuminators were women.
The exhibition makers chose to reproduce a striking fragment of those miniatures on the flags: two women, dressed in long blue and red robes with stately headdresses, helping one another build a wall. I think of the six women who built the house in Molenbeek, how they tore down walls, plastered and painted, and in the evenings sank exhausted into the sofa, longing for the day they could finally move into their new home. Inside the girls’ school, the sun now pours generously through the large windows. The corridors have stone floors, and the former classrooms, now exhibition spaces, are laid with dignified parquet that creaks beneath your feet. In my mind I hear the sound of girls’ shoes, first ringing on the stone, then more muted on the wood. “Le passé est toujours présent / The past is always present,” I read on a work by Katja Mater in the corridor. I imagine giggling girls’ voices, a gentle conspiratorial murmur. So many artists are suddenly present here: the collective’s many artistic friends, their names neatly listed, whispering their ideas into one another’s ears. In each former classroom, they find their place. I pause before a documentary film about the garden of Eline De Clercq and Anne Reijniers, Gesamthof / Lesbian Garden (2022), and I am reminded of my visit to that garden in Antwerp, and of the passionate way in which Eline once explained to me the necessity of such a place, a garden where people can feel sheltered and safe. Simply, as if it were self-evident. I remember the respect she showed for every small shoot that emerged from the soil, how she nurtured it and allowed it to bloom. Much of that same respect returns here in the care devoted to the placement of each artwork in every room. So many voices, beautifully polyphonic.
The Position of Spoons
The house of the Brussels-based collective is on Heyvaertstraat in Molenbeek. The artist René Heyvaert had the habit of sending his friends a spoon, with a kind word or short message attached to the handle. Because friendship is so central to their practice, the collective invited friends to contribute a spoon to the exhibition. That polyphony too, that gathering of small spoons, is carefully arranged in one of the rooms.
When, a few months earlier, they invited me to contribute a spoon to the exhibition, I immediately thought of a short text Deborah Levy once wrote, The Position of Spoons, and decided to contribute my own copy of Levy’s essay collection bearing the same title. The Position of Spoons tells of a housemate of the writer who harbours a secret love for a friend who visits her at regular intervals. The housemate steals a postcard from their shared letterbox, a card addressed to Levy, and secretly keeps it in his own room. On the card are only the words: Miss you, Miss you, Miss you. A secret love. When I handed my copy of The Position of Spoons to Jessica Gysel, I had no idea that this feeling of absence would soon take hold of me so intensely.
As I leave Inspiraling, I feel carried along in a spiral of inspiration, but also of absence and desire. In this exhibition I felt at home; I experienced all the possibilities and the potential of a life with others that felt stimulating rather than confining. It promised to be a beautiful day, and the memory of my own somewhat empty house, where I had lived almost alone throughout the winter months, gave way to something else. What that was, I could not quite say but for sure what I had learned from this exhibition was the value of friendship, togetherness and respect as a basis for creativity, freedom and the conviction to think autonoumsly and inclusively. The exhibition for me read as a promise and I decided there and then to at least try not ever to fall in the trap of patriarchy again.
At the entrance of the girls’ school, a taxi driver is waiting for me. He will take me to another exhibition in Switzerland, just across the border, at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, just outside the city of Basel. On the way to the village, I encounter all manner of monstrously masked figures, dressed in eerie and grotesque garments made of animal hides. The taxi driver explains that it is a tradition in this part of Switzerland, in early February, to frighten people in order to chase away the evil spirits of winter. I nod in agreement. It was precisely what I had experienced that morning at the exhibition in Altkirch. I had not needed any monsters for that.
The apple-shop
At the Fondation Beyeler, an exhibition of Paul Cézanne is on view. You can barely move for the crowds; people stand transfixed before paintings from his final and most innovative period. I linger over the landscapes: the deep greens, sunlight filtering through the trees, a path. There are tables too, bearing a jug and apples. The memory of the apple shed at home flashes through my mind, and with it the way Maggie O’Farrell lets a crucial scene in her novel Hamnet unfold in “the apple-shop.” There, in that kind of small outbuilding, the apples are laid out carefully in autumn after the harvest, placed side by side with their stems pointing downward. The apples must not touch one another; otherwise they rot and will not survive the winter. Just a little longer. Keep your distance. Do not touch.
The shed at home is cold now, but in a few months, it will once again be filled with light and life. Cézanne evokes a happiness one can experience when a path, trees and sunlight, and a table with apples, are enough — when there is no need to search for meaning because simply experiencing this beauty is sufficient. Or is it?
Miss you, Miss you, Miss you. On the train back home, I allow myself to send a message. We text back and forth, both of us cryptic enough; after all, we must not touch, not even in words. I share a few photographs of the exhibition, of the girls’ school and the director’s house. In every language I remain silent about the way my imagination ran away with me during my stay in Altkirch. Just before I fall asleep, one last message arrives: a song to drift off to — Lover, You Should Have Come Over by Jeff Buckley.