WITH/IN STIJN

One on one student Stijn Pommée:

'It's September. 
And I'm on my way to Oosterhouw.  

I lost my public transport card. I enter the bus, I realise it's not in my pocket. I freak out and the bus driver tells me I can only buy a ticket with cash. I look in my pockets —no cash. I never have cash. We wait 45 minutes for the next bus.

'We' is Damian and I. We are going to join SHIFT/with/in Oosterhouw. Christiaan is the curator in an initiative of Lenn Cox and JP Scheen.

In my room at Oosterhouw I put down my shoes against the wall in an orderly way. Which basically means I don't throw them off my feet. I feel like 'putting down my shoes in an orderly way' when I come home, means that everything else will also go orderly from that moment on. 

I look down and see a 5 euro bill in my left shoe.

I wonder if that would have been enough for a ticket from Groningen to Oosterhouw.  I don't really want to know. Or rather, I want the price of the ticket to be exactly five euros.

I suddenly remember putting the 5 euro bill in my shoe but I don't remember exactly why.

In Finland - I left Finland yesterday, I spend my whole August there - there was next to my residency a small sauna with a spare towel. If someone would forget their towel walking to the sauna it would be there, waiting for them. You only realise you miss your towel once you're butt naked.

The idea of a 'spare'— of calculating incidents or mistakes in your organization— I find that very human.

A spare key

A spare room

A spare pencil

I had a spare transport card.

I just forgot to put money on it.

A pocket is perhaps a way of organizing something that you cannot predict yet. A way of organizing incidents. An idea, a phrase— something seen or heard— or a  grasshopper.

Christiaan found a grasshopper today.

In a sense, a pocket is a kind of spare-room!

A friend told me about a tiny bar she used to go to that only had five seats and five glasses. I loved that. 

No spare — live with the mistakes! A group of 6 people will have to fit themselves on 5 chairs. 

What about spare time? I realise I don't often give myself spare time. A specific amount of time in which I have exactly no plan yet. No idea how I will use it. Yet often spare time is already stuffed with things to do. 

Finland felt like a month of spare time.

'A time, free from all distractions, so I could be free to be distracted.'

It's strange to think I left Finland with a bill of 5 euro in my shoe. I took off my shoes at the airport where it went through the security with its 5 euro bill inside, properly documented. And when I needed it, I didn't realise it was there.

Perhaps all I want from a pocket is to find something there that I did not expect— even if I put it there myself. 

___________

The next day at my stay in Oosterhouw.

The truckers nearby played music till late. But when I wake up, I feel fresh. We have breakfast.

JP talks about dreams. In your dreams, whatever happened during the day also gets re-arranged in such a way that something unexpected happens. We wonder what dogs dream about. I don't remember what I dreamt last night.

Dreams are a bit like a messed up newspaper of your day.

The daily newspaper tells the news of yesterday. It makes perfect sense, but I can't wrap my mind around it. 

The news is organized in a strange way. Things that don't seem to matter at all are put next to disasters.  Just as in life. But how else could news be organized? On a spectrum from good to bad? Organized alphabetically? There's an organization based on topics, but apart from that, nothing seems to make sense.

Christiaan takes his cup, fills it with coffee and gives it to me. My cup goes to JP and so the circle goes on. Juggling, but with coffee. 

I've been eating the same breakfast for a while now. Oatmeal, with one banana and a bit of milk. Recently, someone showed me how to make pancakes, with those exact same ingredients. I was amazed! The same breakfast, but in a different form.

We're in the music room. A large piano stands in the middle of the room. Yet the whole room is filled with paintings. Empty paintings, placed next to each other on the wall. There are only two paintings that are not empty. The first one that is noticable— Christiaan as a child. It hangs above the door. And one painting, turned around, at the end of the bed in the corner. The pillows are placed against it. Apparently its a horrendous painting of a man. But no-one needs to know that, especially if you sleep there.

What else can you do with paintings—christiaan says. Besides having them painted, empty or turned around. Burn them?

I realise we're also living these two days in a specific organization. 3 hours of eating and talking. 3 hours of working.

The content of one specific block trickles down into the next one. If we didn't have breakfast, what would I have to write about? I literally need food for thought. We don't talk about things because we have to. They just pop up naturally. But in the writing, I filter out a lot. I could make a pile of rejected news of the last two days. I use a thread to bind me to the writing table.

It feels weird leaving Oosterhouw without finishing this piece of text. I want to write: I put on my shoes to say goodbye. 

How much time do you need to properly digest information? One night sleep? An hour? A minute? 

I guess I'd need a spare day to properly close off the program. And once I'm back home in Amsterdam. I might have found something unexpected in my pockets.

___________

I think about being in Japan, where I attended a tea ceremony. I made the mistake of holding the cup with only one hand. 

'IT'S NOT COFFEE!' The monk shouts. 

I'm completely mortified. I guess holding a cup with two hands — which is already a cup in a way — makes it impossible to do something else at the same time. When drinking the tea, you can't talk either.

I stay one more day. I have breakfast with Christiaan. We do have coffee. I need more than a few cups. And we talk as well.

Christiaan told me that sometimes, especially in group conversations, when there are a lot of loud people and he feels he can't focus, he simply puts his hands under his butt. He listens. 

Yesterday, I walked down the garden before JP and Lenn left. I put my hands in my pockets. I store them there. I can't really do anything else except walk and look. And think, although I try not to. I can't use my hands to put anything in my pockets. They both fill the pockets and make it impossible to put anything there or take out of them.

I hold my own hands while sitting. The fingers of one folded over the other. The whole package resting on my legs. I find it a beautiful way of organizing them.

I help Christiaan arrange tables for an event the next day. 45 entrepreneurs will dine here. We try to squeeze in 10 chairs on a table for 8 and wonder about the possible consequences. Will someone become angry? 

We rearrange the tables. We rearrange the entire house from one function to another. We change a bedroom into a dining room. 

'This is my shift', Christiaan says, 'a house is a performance'. 

STIJN POMMÉE 


*painting by Xinyi Cheng