Back from Berlin! Thank you Sidi: you are a wonderful host.

Nomad thinking… I was very moved by the Garden of Exile, a space you find in Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum… The architecture/sculpture of tall slanted columns with the sloped ground plan of rough cobblestone—le “plan oblique”—gives visitors a nauseous sense of… “non-place”… The dramatic weather (it did rain) added to the atmosphere. Even in the land of the olive tree—on top of the slanted columns olive trees have been planted [1]—exiled populations have unsettled emotion… about being away from HOME. This moving architecture does speak to every person who has seen his/her home taken away, has been expelled, to all refugees, hybrids, immigrants, nomads of some sort…

So a wall came down. Some see in it the triumph of capitalism. I see the fall of a boundary—an inflated one, a corridor—the meeting of differences.

Talking to my nomadic way of seeing, Mies Van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie… as boundaries collapse with the glass panels, the reflective materials and dark painted architectural parts. It is cloudy in there :)

[1] For more information on the symbol/history of the Olive tree (in French / article in progress), read: Trois arbres symboles: le sapin, le palmier, l’olivier.