THIS MUST BE THE PLACE—
BY Annika Hein

Letters from our global JANE community on where they are in the world and the poetry to be found in the corners of every day living.

Josh Berson
Writer

Where are you writing from?
Grunewald, on the western edge of Berlin—I’ve decamped here for a year from the other side of Berlin.

Where is the poetry of this place written, how do you see / hear / feel it?
If you head west from Koenigsallee, passing through the S-Bahn station and the A115 underpass, you come to a part of the eponymous green wood plaited with broad trails. On the weekends it’s popular, and there are the conventional landmarks: a graveled (more often mudded) carpark, a Gartenverein (co-op weekend cottages laid out in a grid), a “forest museum” and education centre. If you continue, at length you’ll come to Teufelssee, a popular swimming spot. This is hardly a wild place, and yet I cannot for the life of me figure out how the trails come together, even when I walk it with a satellite map. The topology of the place feels somehow kinked.

More broadly: Whatever poetry is to be found in Berlin is to be found in its weedy places, its gaps, its interstices, the places where, by virtue of its history of partition and the abiding lackadaisical attitude here, wedges of land have gone unclaimed or uncared-for. In this respect Grunewald feels oddly unberlinisch: everything is very well cared-for, there is not enough ruin.

Not long ago, by chance, I found myself walking past the Park am Gleisdreieck—had not been by there in years. Gleisdreieck used to be one of these places—an awkward triangle formed of train tracks, with a sand tip at the center. Then it was remade into a park. Eight years ago my partner was performing up the road at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, six days a week, five hours a day in a pitch dark room with a velvet light trap at the entrance. One afternoon—it was my birthday—I picked her up and we walked down the road to the Park am Gleisdreieck. We sat down on a bench opposite the newly installed skatepark, and she fell asleep with her head in my lap.

Your favourite place to go: for rest and for inspiration?
Berlin is steppe country, and it leaves me uninspired. I want mountains or the sea. So what inspiration I find here comes from made places. There is a kissaten in Mulackstraße that has parlayed what in Japan would read as provincial desuetude (Ramune in cod-neck bottles, daifuku mochi and dorayaki in cellophane, the Synergetic Voice Orchestra on the PA) into a kind of pastiche chic. I stand in the back nursing a sobacha and watch the tourists. When they start serving kāre raisu I’ll know it’s all over.

A piece of history from your place or a hope for the future of it?
Hasn’t enough been written about the history of Berlin? Eighty-some years ago the train station I mentioned earlier, now S-Bahnhof Grunewald, was among those where Jews were first deported to Łódź and Warsaw and later embarked for Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.

When I think of my own history in Berlin it is always winter—save that summer day in the Park am Gleisdreieck. Nine years ago I spent a winter living at the corner of Hobrechstraße and Schinkestraße, where, if I angled my body just right at the bedroom window, I could watch the stallholders set up for the Tuesday and Friday market on the Maybachufer, and the clank of steel pipes being inserted into collets is, for me, the defining sound of the place (that and the crunch of glass on glass when people deposit their glass waste in the designated bins, but naturally only during the designated hours of the week). I doubt it is my place to offer a hope for the future of Berlin—but I would love to see it shake off a certain glib self-consciousness that has become its brand. There is too much talk here about how edgy Berlin is, like a teenager obsessed with the image they project to their peers. A little sprezzatura would go a long way.

Nunez Rojas
Artist

Hello Jane Community,
I’m writing to you in rural NWS, Australia.
I'm relatively tucked away in correlation to my prior living in Brooklyn, New York.
It's as if I have gone full circle to the quiet existence I had as a child in the deserts of
Arizona.
The repetitions of faces, the markets, the hall dances.
wearing Gum boots half the time and always searching for avenues for cultural nutrition.
The landscape is made up of green hills speckled with black cows. Farms of various fruits
and tiny waterways make for much needed cooling off in the peak of summer.

Favourite place to go for rest and inspiration?
Inspirations visit me in different spaces.
First,
Libraries are essential, I love the smell of books and the way they feel in your hands.
I have come to explore more about my family nativity and the knowledge of this
supplements my practice.

The second is the water, I have an incredible lineage of anglers in my family.
My Paternal side are fly fishers and anglers
I have a shrine-like place in my room that has my grandfather's handmade flies.
Like an abstract painting placed on a bit of square khaki-coloured foam.
The colours of feathers and neatly twined bugs of all kinds.
They reflect the patience, and skill needed to be a real angler.
Respect must be in the person awaiting a fish, the space in the waiting time is sometimes
enough to bring me to a state of peace.

Thirdly,
In my Garden, the flowers are now spilling over and press against the very large
rambling cherry tomato plant, and the dill, and coriander are tucked in between.
Here is poetry in the care ritual of watering, pulling out weeds and watching the growth
of seeds. Yes, may it be the ritual.

The last place,
The Space to Dream, I drive ten minutes down the mountain to a road named
Duck Creek and there you will find a few sheep, a very barky dog and a row of sheds
overlooking a green valley nested in that is the creek.
I enter opening a roller door painted white, inside are my thoughts, research, ideas,
paper cuts, and painted materials some on the floors, others pined to the walls
upstretched and supple.
I also like to experiment with different forms to express concepts or inspiration.
Self-documentation, the self-portraits made in line with my painted work.

They sometimes give homage to culturally important figures that in my eyes are
important reflections of history, such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé they perfected a
mirror of contemporary Africa after colonisation.
Seydou’s studio had numerous props, from backdrops and costumes and the subjects
could choose between them.
It's storytelling, a narrative something I feel is part of my practice.

A piece of history from your place or a hope for the future of it?

The history of Australia is something I plan to learn more and more about,
sometimes seems very familiar in the storyline of colonised societies.
It's not something I’m comfortable to dive into, not being as informed as I would like to
be.
I feel just in my own personal understanding a knowledge of self and cultural identity is
the ground on with to stand.
This concept might be transferred to a country an idea of a strong cultural identity and
for its people.
So maybe this is the hope.
Thank you for reading.

Your friend,
Veronica Rojas
Nuñez