The last book that made an impact on you:

Notes for Soloists by Cia Rinne. Cia read much of the book for the 2009 Nýhil Poetry Festival in Reykjavík, and both her precise performance and condensed multilingualism had me wide-eyed.

A film that touched a nerve:

So many: the 1996 French film Ponette, the 1998 Japanese film After Life, Peter Greenaway’s documentary on Meredith Monk, Sigur Rós’ Heima, The Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom… Today, however, I’m feeling most touched by The Princess Bride, which has cheered up my under-the-weather self á la Fred Savage.

Who should play the lead in a film about you?

I’ll leave that at the discretion of Miyazaki Hayao and Studio Ghibli.

What CD should the reader put on while reading this?

Natural sound recordings of wolves, waves, and elves. (úlfa, veifa, og álfa??)

Favorite poet:

I tend not to favour poets, but do have poems that visit me often. At the moment, I’m haunted by Aase Berg’s “In the Guinea Pig Cave” (translated from Swedish to English by Johannes Göransson). LINK: http://www.conduit.org/online/aase/aase.html

Memorable teacher:

My Toronto-based voice instructor, Fides Krucker, taught me to bloom open my anus, perineum, and vagina in order to relax my pelvic floor and create more space in my resonating chamber.

What was the last lesson you learned?

I last learned how to use a ginkgo biloba tincture… “Take fifteen to twenty drops in a small amount of water, three times per day, fifteen minutes before meals. Salivate before swallowing.”

Most notable undiscovered artist:

Apis Mellifera Linnaeus.

Somebody‘s taking your profile picture – what should the background be?

Snæfellsnes, possibly Bjarnafoss or Kirkjufell.

Where is the dream?

Snæfellsnes, possibly Bjarnafoss or Kirkjufell.

A good advice for saving money during the financial crisis:

Get pissed off, not piss-drunk.

What is your most memorable food experience?

I once sampled over twenty different kinds of honey in the span of eight minutes; hallucination and increased heart rate ensued. And then there was that foodgasm induced by chocolate mousse in Béziers, France…

What’s the most important person you’ve gotten drunk with?

A lover.

What music fits the times?

A mixed playlist called “Fólk, jú!” that includes Sam Amidon’s I See The Sign, Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me, and Owen Pallett’s Heartland, with generous doses of The Be-Good Tanyas, Grizzly Bear, and Amidon’s Bedroom Community compatriots Daníel Bjarnason, Ben Frost, Nico Muhly, and Valgeir Sigurðsson.

Where is your love?

I am too shy to speak much Icelandic out loud yet (æ, this dastardly Canadian accent), though I will construct sentences and whisper them to pets and plants when no one else is nearby; Atli’s kitten, Steingrímur, got an earful of sweet nothings recently.

Wali Safi has been in the news here in Iceland quite a bit the last few months, even if neither his name nor photo has rarely been used. Wali is an asylum seeker and had this to say about his origins: “I was born in 1977 in the eastern part of Afghanistan. I have finished High school, and I was in my second year of Economics collage when I was forced to leave my country because of fierce war, insecurity and injustice. It has been almost 12 years that I am far from my country,” he says and adds that he prefers not to dwell too much on the bad experiences he had, both back home and at the hands of authorities in Europe.

Wali is quite the linguistic, speaks english, greek, persian, hindi and pashto. And he’s travelled quite a lot, although not exactly first class. “I have been living in countries like Iran, Turkey and Greece, and on my way to Iceland I have spent short periods of time in countries like France, Germany, Sweden and Norway and since June 2008 I’ve been living in Iceland, as an asylum seeker.”

And what has he been doing? “I have worked in a pharmacy as a non-professional worker, I was a volunteer in The Red Crescent Society in my country and have worked as an employee in different supermarkets. While I was living in Afghanistan I was playing different local sports which are not popular outside Afghanistan. But I also like running, swimming and cycling, music and movies.” And finally, where is he headed? “My dream is to complete my un-completed eduction and to have a normal, safe life, I think every human being deserves that.”

But enough with the intro, now it’s time for the nerd-questions.

The last book that made an impact on you:

I’m reading a book right now about the life of  Fidel Castro by Fidel himself and Ignacio Ramonet, but the book which I can say was in some way impecable was The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voynich. It is about struggles of international revolutionary in Italy.

A film that touched a nerve:
The Pianist … I think more words will always poorly explain this Roman Polanski movie, but I simply don’t like imaginary movies like Avatar!

Who should play the lead in a film about you?
Who will play it better than myself? My Life’s movie is still going on and I am playing it. Life is kind of a play which is ending when we end. But if still I should choose someone to play my lead it would be Wentworth Miller.

What CD should the reader put on while reading this?
I would like to suggest a collection of pan-flute by Gheorghe Zamfir, specially Einsamer Hirte, which is exactly my age and I’ve been listening to that since I remember.

Favorite poet:
I have been fan of eastern(central Asian)  poets like  Saadi,

of one essence  is the human race,
thusly has creation put the base.
one limb impacted in sufficient,
For all others to feel the Mace.
The Unconcern’d the Other´Pilght,
Are but Brutes with Human Face

Memorable teacher:
The most memorable teacher of my life was my late father, who was Professor at a Medical College.

What was the last lesson you learned?
Life is full of sudden surprises, some are good and some are bad, but there are always ways to survive.

Most notable undiscovered artist:
Everybody could be the most notable undiscovered artist.

Where is the dream?
Dream is in the Freedom.

A good advice for saving money during the financial crisis:
Stop watching commercials on TV.

What is your most memorable food experience?
When I was invited to a restaurant  to eat lobster for the first time in my life,  it was a real comedy.

What’s the most important person you’ve gotten drunk with?
I am not an important person, but one time I was drunk and I saw myself in the mirror and told myself  “You are really drunk”

What music fits the times?
Generally I’m listening to all sorts of music except heavy metal. But the music which fits the times from my point of view is relaxing music like the collections of Enya.

Where do you see your self in a couple of months?
My life is unpredictable, nothing is sure, everywhere or maybe  nowhere!

——————————————————

Will also be published in Icelandic here on Kistan.

Words:
Ásgeir H
Ingólfsson

Pictures:
Brian
Berg

Model:
Berlin

There are borders everywhere. For Damiel they were in the air, in his very existence. He could touch no one, yet he heard their thoughts, he couldn’t eat or drink because the food and liquid would simply go through him. Damiel was an angel in Berlin that became human just before the wall fell, he had had enough of his own wall and two years later the inhabitants of Berlin felt the same. Exactly twenty years ago.

Damiel was the leading character in Wim Wenders dreamlike Der Himmel Über Berlin (or Wings of Desire to use the highly flawed english translation), where angels wander over the Berlin of 1987, listening in on people’s thoughts and trying, usually in vain, to ease their suffering. And just like Wenders has often pointed out this picture couldn’t have been shot anywhere but in Berlin, nowhere else the distance to another person could be so faraway, yet so close, to paraphrase the far lesser sequel. Families were divided, friendships broken.

So when we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down we are celebrating one of the most important steps in the struggle for human rights. Not because there has been eternal happiness in the eastern part of Germany since and not because of it’s old role as the main battleground between the communism of the east and the capitalism of the west.

No, because it is probably the most powerful symbol of the most serious human rights violation of our times, namely borders. The walls that keep humans apart, the walls that tell us it doesn’t matter who we are, only where we’re from. The walls that are the cornerstone of most human right violators of our time, because these are the walls that keep us from escaping.

We feel the helplessness on our now skin now, with a deflated currency that makes most trips abroad now all of a sudden prohibitly expensive, too expensive to let into the desire to leave, it’s too expensive for many to escape Icesave and all the other bullshit. But yet lack of cash is our only hindrance, for most of the world said lack of cash has always been a problem but adding to that they got buraucrasy, visas and more paper-made Berlin walls then we can imagine.

But remember when the Berlin wall divided the city, divided families, divided friends? Remember how almost the whole wide world, sans a few beaurocrats, agreed: agreed that this was simply absurd, totally mad in fact. But why is it not just as mad even if the distance between family members is a little longer, even continents. Do they not still have the same right to meet each other if they so choose?

What are borders for? Are they for our security? Of course one could name instances when borders have truly protected the right of the common citizen, but much more often they are a method used to trample on those same rights. They are first and foremost a construction made to uphold the power structures to be and most of the injustices we’re stuck with in this world. Because borders are used by most people that take advantage of the misery of another human being, one way or another. For the last few centuries it has not been acceptable in western states for the state to put their own citizens into slavery. But if they were brought over many enough borders on the way it was all of a sudden acceptable, weather it be the black slaves of yesteryears cottonfields or the ukranian sex-slaves of today. Not forgetting the Irish slaves that form the basis of our DNA along with their Norwegian masters.

A wall becomes a gallery

Despite this I can’t deny that few things in this world fascinate me more then this wall. I travelled with a Brazilian companion in my first trip to Berlin eleven years ago and he wasn’t that well versed in European history (perhaps there are much more fascinating walls in Latin America that no one told me about?) so he spent an equal amount of time on all the places in his brochure. I was however getting slightly tired of it all when we finally came to the wall and I simply didn’t want to leave. Now the remains of the wall has been turned into a gallery, the East Side Gallery, where artists use those remains for all sorts of artworks – and most seem to be painted over in the end, a decade later I saw completely different pictures there.

And while I found the gallery fascinating the history fascinated me even more. This was the place where the world view of my childhood crumbled, a world view that most certainly deserved to crumble, and if it hadn’t happened I doubt I would ever have the chance to spend a few years of my life in Eastern Europe, like I ended up doing – yet the influence on me was miniscule compared to the life of millions of others – for me it was a question of a few years, for them a whole lifetime.

The wall and it’s heritage has of course inspired others too. One of them is Danish photographer Brian Berg who took the pictures that go with the article. He lives in Copenhagen and has worked for Berlingske Tidende (which I, in my ignorance, thought for a long time had to be a newspaper from Berlin with an oddly danish-sounding name). His next projects will be here in Iceland with Kristinn Schram, but he has previously done projects such as Baghdad, Arizona (first days of war, 2003) and Routes to Landscapes in 2008. Brian has just arrived from Berlin and sent me a bunch of pictures of the wall. Yet there is very little wall on those pictures, most of it had been torn down a long time ago, the forementioned gallery the main exception.

“The main idea of the project was too show the sorrundings of the wall as it is now ofcause without the wall. The picture are landscape pictures and with out any drama but with in the story of many of the areas there lies a tragedy,” he says and mentions the picture above. “Here a young man was shot 10 times in the cheast just a few month before the border open, in an escape attempt. The landscape is still marked by the wall, those empty spaces. It was not only a wall, because with the wall came a deadzone, an area, with barbed wire, so that the borderguards could overlook the area and have time to target those who tried to escape.”

The unification of East and West Berlin is not totally done yet though. “This made me realize that there is still a gap, empty factories on the eastern side and new one built on the western side. But also the housing blocks on the western side, and familiy houses on the eastern one. Geographicly and visually it is still different. Maybe not in the center, but on the outskirts.”

But why landscape pictures? “I don’t know why! Landscape photography, to me, gives a pleasure too look at, dreams and a nice kind of solitude, depending on the picture of course. Landscapes seemed the right way to let the wall tell the viewer a story, instead of it’s victims. The exercise is not to look for something specific, but just go looking and things will come too you.”

Along with the pictures Brian shared a few fascinating stories. “I met a lady, living on a small farm in the countryside, where I got lost with my bike. She told me that the nearby border patrol, the VoPo (Volks-Polizei) would come by a few times in the week, for cookies and coofee, but she was never in doubt that those same men would shoot her in the back if she made a run for it. I don’t think outsiders can really understand … living like that … at some point it becomes every day life.”

But yet the wall fascinates. And all borders for that matter. What world-traveller does not secretly count all the countries he’s been to? Borders are the places where countries meet, cultures and people, suddenly one language replaces another, sometimes the atmoshpere itself and people’s attitude completely shift in a matter of meters. Those imaginary lines have been the driving force of human history itself. But it should be all over, this energy, when people meet, when cultures meet.

It’s now twenty years since this fine lady that Brian met had to worry about being shot in the back if she ventured too far from her home. But there are millions who still have to worry about the same thing today. Palestinians in Ni’lin broke down a part of a wall to celebrate this anniversary, that job must be finished. The walls of Israel / Palestine are most certainly no better then the old Berlin wall used to be.

Then we must go on, starting with the walls in our heads …

But we’ll certainly take souveniers either way. See you when you get there!