i’m thirty feet above the ground in a treehouse woven between three pine trees. this has been my home since i arrived with kirmo and tim on friday night.
the house is a tangle of ropes, beams and platforms which has evolved around the angles and conjunctions of the branches. it’s roughly pentagonal in plan with a diameter of twelve feet or so. one corner is sheltered by a tarpaulin roof but other than that the structure is open to the elements. the mid-morning sun casts flickering shadows across my keyboard as it filters through the tree canopy. from the front there’s a view over recently-harvested grain fields, forests and smooth grey rock outcrops.
reaching the platform involves a climb of twenty feet up a slender oak before crossing to a pine to ascend a further ten feet. i suffer from a fear of heights so my first few ascents and descents found me clinging in mortal terror to each bough. stepping across from one tree to the other required an act of particular determination. but as i grew familiar with the location of each foothold and how i needed to move to get from one to the next my fear gradually became more manageable.
five years ago tim clubbed together with nine friends to buy sixty-five hectares of land here on the island of livonsaari in finland’s south western archipelago. several of them have built houses, settled here permanently and started families. there’s now a full-time community of 13 adults and 8 children. one of them farms the fields. two of them can build and repair just about anything. at the centre of the community there’s a communal house and a wood-fired sauna. tim started building the tree house in the first year and has added to it each summer. yesterday we carried some windows from an old pig shed and hoisted them up to the platform. two of them are already fitted and as i write tim is hammering a third into place. eventually he plans to enclose the roofed corner so the tree house can be used for brief visits in winter.
on saturday night the community’s wood-fired sauna was lit, a lengthy process undertaken about a dozen times each year. the stove must be lit and kept fed with wood for six hours before it’s ready to use. there’s no chimney so the hot fumes fill the sauna cabin. when the last wood has been consumed vents are opened to let clean air in and the sauna begins. we were amongst twenty-odd people roasting in the sauna, sitting wrapped in towels on the terrace and singing songs around a bonfire. after our first spell in the sauna kirmo, tim and i walked down the track to the shore and threw ourselves into the baltic. the water was surprisingly cold and the bottom was slimy black mud. this was more than compensated for by the electro-illuminescent plankton which sparkled in the water as we swam and left a milky fizz behind us.
it’s three days since i touched running water, saw a mirror or used a mobile phone. i’m mostly wearing mostly the same clothes i arrived in. the night air is chilly so we remain fully dressed in our sleeping bags. our meals have been cooked alternately on a small paraffin stove and a steel brazier burning small branches. an escape of this kind works wonders an soft, urbanised, over-networked creature like myself.
here’s one final album from the venezuela trip. sixteen photographs from an afternoon spent exploring a small bay on the north coast of gran roque. the prevailing swell breaks onto this side of the island. it is more rugged and inhospitable than the south. the bay’s sheltered by two guano-covered islets which create a calmer lagoon good for swimming. successive storms have piled up layers of coral, torn from the sea bed, until there is now a four foot high crescent surrounding the bay.
slideshow and thumbnails below. higher resolution downloads available at flickr.
[ 00:29 tuesday 10 august - haggerston road, london ]
after another batch of scanning here are forty-four pictures from my time on the island of los roques in january, where i found my long-lost friend matias along with his wife carolina and son esteban. uploading the photos brought back a host of memories. it’s one of the most intense and beautiful places i’ve ever been.
herewith fifty photos from gran roque, the largest island in the los roques archipelago. i arrived there with adrien on the morning of new years day when the island was asleep. after the turbulence of caracas the silence was amazing. just the shhh of the low waves on the white sand and the plop of pelicans plunging into the water.
from gran roque i made my way to the tiny island of rasqui to visit matias. coming back from rasqui after a few days gran roque seemed conversely like a metropolis, full of bustle and life.
i’ve uploaded 26 photos from caracas taken on the last day of 2009 and the first day of 2010. as well as being venezuela’s capital city, caracas is also reputed to have the highest homicide rate per capita of any city in the world, predominantly gun related. it’s not a beautiful city. actually it’s about the ugliest city i’ve encountered anywhere in south america. all spanish colonial structures from the seventeenth and eighteenth century have been destroyed. even nineteenth century buildings are rare. most of the architecture is from the sixties and seventies. not much of it is any good.
clicking any of the four photos below will open a slideshow of the whole set. if you’re interested i wrote more about my experiences in caracas here.
on christmas day i went walking with mum and dad in the forest of dean. here’s what i wrote at the time:
this afternoon we went out walking in the forest of dean. everything was crusted in snow. a deep, timeless silence hung amongst the trees disturbed only by the crunch of our feet on the icy ground. the river wye was in full flood, winding around the limestone cliffs of symonds yat and churning tirelessly over the shallows. the sun hung low above the horizon and sent fingers of gold piercing the mist between the boughs. we got lost and ended up walking rather further than we intended. it was breathtakingly beautiful. i took photographs with a sense of wide-eyed wonder.
now, five months later, i’ve uploaded eleven of the photos. you can see them all here.
after returning from venezuela in january i spent a week scanning my slides plus the backlog from november and december. a couple of days after i’d finished i came home one evening, plugged in the 1.2 terrabyte hard drive where my scanned photos were stored, to be prompted “the drive you’ve connected is not readable. would you like to initialise it?”.
eventually i managed to mount the drive and started copying files over. some files had survived intact. however others were corrupted beyond recovery. from the samples i tested it looked like half and half. so i faced the prospect of having to re-scan a thousand slides as punishment for my slack back-up habits.
for the past week i’ve been stuck at home with a nasty chest infection. i haven’t been able to do much but i did take the opportunity to begin the epic job of rescanning. i’ve started with the slides from november, december and january. here’s the first batch, thirty-nine pictures from the krankenhouse squat in crouch end.
krankenhouse was established in a two-storey hospital building from the 1920s which had been squatted for a decade. through november and december i visited quite frequently to see my friend bertrand who was living there whilst working on his fashion design degree. the pictures reflect the fact i was generally there at night, occasionally biking home at dawn.
it was fascinating to build up a picture how the squat functioned, the first time i’ve had this opportunity. krankenhouse was one of the larger squats in london with around twenty-five residents. from the perspective of my thinking about informal decision-making mechanisms it was a community from which i learned a lot.
sadly the writing was on the wall. property developers had acquired the building and gained consent to demolish it and build apartments on the site. its final day was sunday the twenty-first of february. i was there with my camera but those photos are not yet scanned. i’ll write more when those ones are ready to upload. in the meantime i hope you enjoy this first batch.
click any of the images below to launch a slideshow in a new window.
here’s a crop of fifty-eight photos from last september:
- washington dc (ix 2009) : 14 pictures : in washington dc to represent one click orgs at harvard’s summit on next-generation governance, hiking the entire length of rock creek park, exploring the back streets.
- trapani (ix 2009) : 20 pictures : out and about in trapani in turbulent weather. abandoned marble factory, ruined tonnara, swimming off the rocks.
- stromboli (ix 2009) : 11 pictures : a stormy week with my friends on stromboli.
- palermo (ix 2009) : 13 pictures : the festa della madonna delle mercede in palermo.
in the last nine months i’ve accumulated an intimidating backlog of slides waiting to be scanned and uploaded. in an effort to catch up here are four sets comprising seventy-six pictures:
[ 23:42 monday 1 february - haggerston road, london ]
here’s a film of my journey to the los roques atoll, eighty miles off the caribbean coast of venezuela. it covers the journey to find matias on his coral islet, the omnipresent easterly wind, pop art hermit crabs, adrien’s friends on the yacht and on every side the cerulean sea.
yo finnair. when i checked in my bags at helsinki maybe that was a clue i was expecting you to put them on the plane or something? 2 days ago
livensaari was amazing. time for a shower in helsinki before traveling up to tuusula to give a talk about virtual governance in the morning. 3 days ago
