Gothvos Stones & Memory Cairns.

Mick Kidds Cuthbert Way.

Mick Kidd is one of the creators,(along with his school pal Chris Garratt) of Biff since the mid-1970s. Chris Garratt creates the artwork - a mixture of collage, found images, tracings and original drawings, and Mick Kidd is responsible for the text. I first met both Mick and Chris in the Isles of Scilly where they undertook seasonal work during their studies and formative collaborations in text and image, I was a whining school-boy, creeping like a snail unwillingly towards oblivion, they were a breath of something electric with origins in a cosmopolitan otherness emanating from the evil empire on the Mainland. Since those early days they have created their astute observational strips juxtaposing the theories and practice of urban cultures into manifestations of our contradictory times with wit and urgency as well as a great many other artworks for over the last 30 years. In July 2013 Mick Kidd set out for St.Cuthberts Way, a four day walk from Melrose Abbey to the holy island of Lindisfarne, another Scillonian connection for Mick could have been St Cuthbert's friendship with seals, those mythical sirens beckoning the hapless mariner into perilous rocks and fogs of unknowing.
St Cuthbert's Way runs from Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland in England. The route climbs over the fringes of the Eildon Hills before following stretches of the mighty River Tweed and the Roman Dere Street. It then passes Cessford Castle before a fine hill ridge is traversed en route to the attractive village of Kirk Yetholm. The route then skirts the northern edges of the Cheviot Hills to cross the border and descent to the fine old market town of Wooler. The final stretch crosses the Northumberland countryside for the dramatic finale across the causeway to Holy Island and its dramatic castle and ruined abbey.
 On this occasion a heat wave was a greater cause of any meteorological concern, it was not until reaching the Cheviots with a cool mantle of cloud cover and a granite landscape that a possible reaction was sensed and brought forth. The stone from  Mounts Bay, Penzance was positioned in a dip onto the fine grained surface of a semi exposed Cheviot boulder, there it was photographed and there it remained. 

Mick Kidds walk along St.Cuthberts Way

It wasn't until Mick had reached Lindisfarne that he sensed another similar reaction at the sight of another similar sized stone in the Holy Island Gardens, that the stone had the word "Phlox" scrawled upon it gave rise to a lot of potential metaphor, particularly as the castle and gardens are the location for Roman Polanski's 1966 film Cul De Sac: a causeway classic in living black and white, the sort of material that Mick and Chris would lovingly transform into a metaphor for some miracle of culture reduced or inflated to urban cliche. Phlox is a native american plant used by Americas original inhabitants as an eyewash and a blood purifier. The roots were also boiled to make preparations to heal venereal diseases. Mick's dilemma was met by taking a photograph of both stones whilst thinking "maybe I should have waited till I got to Lindisfarne before placing the stone so everyone would wonder about the name of a plant they had never heard of!"

Mick Kidds arrival on Holy Island after walking along the St Cuthberts Way.

    The Wild Blue Phlox (and other Phlox species) was one of the first native american wildflowers

to be collected by European explorers and exported to Europe. Because this plant

cultivated well in Europe, it became a very popular flower.

    In Victorian Britain, young women frequently carried bouquets of flowers, which commonly included Wild Blue Phlox. 

This flower symbolized a proposal of love and

a wish of pleasant dreams.

An empty space in which artists and audiences allow their imaginations to meet and make the impossible, possible.

Taylors Island, Carn Morval Scilly.
The journey between incidental and potential cairns: ephemeral markers purposefully lost or specifically found, the beginning of a cairn and the end of another. Walking defines the spectacle and the spectated. The body in the space taking hold of the potent object and placing it, displaces it in a unique composition, a tabula rasa or a hard-wired intuitive response to those forgotten piezoelectric sensitivities?. Either way, there is a decisive moment, a sensory phenomena to experience. The querents hand in touch with the stone, imbues it with warmth and so begins walking perhaps aware of other stones, cairns: a single placed stone or piles of stones heaped high and hundreds of metres wide at the base. Familiar sights, similar material and effecting similar responses. Could cairns attract less visible qualities like a magnet attracts metallic objects, via the hand that conjures them or the great time-span of their existence or the etymology of  cairn ? Is stone the basest of materiality or would stone dissolve and transfigure into something unknown, for example during the Earths eventual and inevitable meltdown. Twinkle twinkle... will erased gothvos stones finally burn their way into the atmosphere of some distant star, How I wonder what you are.

St.Warna's Well, St.Agnes, Isles of Scilly - taken from inside the well.

The ephermeral approach to cairn building is to start a new cairn with each placed stone, the stone inevitably proves to be a powerful attractant to the aimless peripatetic who will pick it up and examine it or move it or gaze upon it and in so doing enlarge a network of happenstance, they connect to the sunken Gear Rock as it marinates under the sea in the spirit of Carreckloes forest, the castle in the forest the submerged landscape, the mountains of Mylor Slate and fierce heat of the volcanic magma initiated by the Sun and the origins of our own matieriality.

Peninnis Head towards Buzza Hill.

Cairns are heaped structures, they invite both participation via contributory intervention with additional stones and via the physical sensation of ascending. etymologically cairn can be applied to any horn shaped structure, in particular Mountain tops where the piled up composition references the mountain with scale, the vertical dimension of the cairn contrasts and completes the horizontal direction of the pilgrims journey across the landscape over distance.

Ascending and Descending simply by walking up a hill or down a hill are seminal moments for the sensitized observer, in walking up the hill they become increasingly isolated from the familiar, they also begin to stand out from the crowd below. They stand at the top and signal to the crowd below, waving, everyone sees them, they are all spectating this one performance and this one performance is both a moment of revery for the performer and a moment of sharing for the spectators. The primal non verbal paralinguistic gesture: to point with the finger and to will those fellow spectators not to look at your finger but to trace your fingers direction and look up at the person waving on top of the cairn.
First there is a mountain then there is no mountain, then there is.

Zennor Hill from Zennor Head, West Penwith Cornwall.

Cairns, heaps and tumeli, we walk past them everyday. Piles of stone, sand and gravel. The construct, the deconstructed, utilitarian, devalued, sacred, profane and each unique pile of rubbish intended for some secular purpose, bulldozed stones at the edge of a field, a religious offering - can these be of any conceivable interest?
Three or Two stones are used to mark claimed but uncollected driftwood from the foreshore in the Isles of Scilly by the foreshore walker too laden to carry the booty of the sea, or too optimistic that there will be better stuff coming ashore further along the coast.

Porthcressa Bank, Isles of Scilly.

Mick Kidds walk along St.Cuthberts Way

GODHVOS GOTHVOS

Riham Isaac's Gothvos 

Riham Isaac

I have been wondering where this precious stone should be placed until finally spontaneously I found its place. Today 9th of March 2014 I went to the Dead Sea in Palestine. It was raining softly but the weather was beautiful; I sat there in the sea on top of the mud for a few hours when I realized it is time to place the stone where I was sitting. I found a suitable spot where it fits the shape of the stone completely and decided to leave it and never know what will happen to it. Will it transform into mud? Will it drift away? Or will somebody find it? This symbolic meaning of its vague destiny meant a lot to me as I am in a moment in my life where I need to control less what happens in my future. I want to let go of my fear to love and be loved. I want to let go of my fears of unpredictable and uncertain future and rather embrace these changes. I want to let the waves shape the way and surrender for whatever possibilities it will draw me to. I want to place myself there in the middle of these great opportunities that life is giving me and be it!

http://electronicintifada.net/content/taking-you-home-palestinian-walks/7623

Emma Allegretti

Montale-Forse un mattino andando

Perhaps one morning walking in dry glassy air, I will turn, I will see the miracle complete: nothingness at my shoulder, the void behind me, with a drunkard’s terror. Then, as on a screen, trees houses hills will advance swiftly in familiar illusion, But it will be too late; and I will return, silently, to men who do not look back, with my secret.

Montale-Forse un mattino andando

Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro, arida, rivolgendomi, vedrò compirsi il miracolo: il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro di me, con un terrore di ubriaco.

Poi come s’uno schermo, s’accamperanno di gitto Alberi case colli per l’inganno consueto. Ma sarà troppo tardi; ed io me n’andrò zitto Tra gli uomini che non si voltano, col mio segreto.

From the submerged forest beneath St.Michaels Mount, Cornwall to high up in the Italian Alps, Emma Allegretti makes her reference to the Italian poet Montale describing intense thoughts on the nature of time and space, this was the voice that accompanied Emma's walk to such powerful and everlasting natural phenomena.

Two groups of quarries (Mont Viso and Mont Beigua, Italy) were the source of the Alpine axeheads that circulated throughout western Europe during the Neolithic. The quarries on Mont Viso (Oncino: Porco, Bulè and Milanese), discovered in 2003, have been radiocarbon-dated, and this has revealed that the exploitation of jadeites, omphacitites and eclogites at high altitude (2000—2400 m above sea level) seems to have reached its apogee in the centuries around 5000 BC. The products, in the form of small axe- and adze-heads, were distributed beyond the Alps from the beginning of the fifth millennium, a few being found as far away as the Paris Basin, 550 km from their source as the crow flies. However, it was not until the mid-fifth millennium BC that long axeheads from Mont Viso appeared in the hoards and monumental tombs of the Morbihan, 800 km from the quarries. Production continued until the beginning of the third millennium BC, but at this time the distribution of the products was less extensive, and the process of distribution operated in a different way: tools made from jadeite and eclogite are still found in the French Jura, but the extraction sites at the south-east foot of Mont Viso no longer seem to have been used. The variability in the geographical extent of the distribution at different times seems to be related to the social context of exploitation of the high-altitude quarries, which were only ever accessible for a few months each year. Bolzano is the final resting place of Otzi, the mummified 'iceman' who was found in a glacier on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991. 5300 years old and no grey hair - although he apparently suffered arthritis, worn teeth and had been mortally wounded by an arrow. There is a where the ancient one resides -  kept in a freezer. Alarms sound if the equipment malfunctions and an ER team relocates him to one of the three reserve coolers. When first discovered nobody presumed he was so old and precious. Apparently it is not uncommon for bodies of long-dead climbers to be spat out of glaciers. So Otzi was treated in a very rough and non-archaeological fashion when chipped and yanked from the ice. A jackhammer was used at one stage. It took three days before a forensic scientist spotted the bronze age axe. The rapidly thawing Otzi was snap-frozen and security stepped up to its current level.

From Tregaseal to Scilly

GASTON BACHELARD, in The Poetics of Space, invites recognition of the ways in which interior 

and imaginative landscapes, such as cupboards, houses, and forests, resonate in the 

phenomenological worlds of poets, novelists, explorers, and artists.

With my back turned away from the magnificent Carn Kenijack and the Tregaseal Stone Circle also behind me, the Gothvos Stone in the foreground leads the spectator across a verdent meadow of chemically enhanced grass, over St.Just, over the sea towards a present but invisible Isles of Scilly.

Porthenys - Mousehole.

"Famous" for christmas lighting and the Starry Gazey folk tales that fuel the winter processions and pub theatricalities there remain in Mousehole the workings of a fishing village albeit overshadowed by a partially immersed tourist industry invading the stone hearths and tidied houses rendering the pre and post Christmas holiday awash with the ghost of its former habitants.

In the microcosm crystalised particles of base minerals compress as they do elsewhere, here the Granite fountain urn between the Penzance Lido and the Yacht Inn conspire towards a scaled alignment, the Penlee Headland and the voided quarry being excavated - not for mineral extraction now but for development into property.

The Pinhole aperture in this modified lens helps to focus on the infinite detail and lack of optical distortion, theres a feeling that one is unfettered by the laws of scale or proportion, like childhood feelings of being dwarfed by the natural powers that impact on existence, like the revelatory moment when looking up into the milkyway on a clear starry night. 
The photograph above taken from the edge of a Penzance sited ornate granite fountain looking across the Gwavas Lake in the Mounts Bay to the Penlee Headland creating a montage into which a widening narrative is embedded. It is difficult to read the photograph for standardized scale and proportion, the small aperture and long exposure create a synoptic contrast, the granite dish of the fountain in the foreground looks like the rough terrain of another promontory, the plane of the water in the granite dish looks like a continuation of the seawater between the headland and the fountain. The curve of the fountain echoes the "curve" of the mounts bay. To the left of the palm tree is the Penlee Elvan Stone Quarry, a large void in the headlands natural slope. Further South lies the submerged Gear Stone - a thus far unsubstantiated source of Greenstone for ceremonial Axe heads. Latterly the quarry was the source of Elvan (greenstone) for Roadstone ballast in tarmacadam and concrete. The connections between the widely found Axe Heads and the many roads that lead out of Cornwall to everywhere else, the undocumented, mythological sea routes connecting stories - masking histories, human activities, physical and cerebral and dialogical    Film editing is an art that can be used in diverse ways. It can create sensually provocative montages; become a laboratory for experimental cinema; bring out the emotional truth in an actor's performance; create a point of view on otherwise obtuse events; guide the telling and pace of a story; create an illusion of danger where there is none; give emphasis to things that would not have otherwise been noted; and even create a vital subconscious emotional connection to the viewer, among many other possibilities.

 Towards Treen below the waterline.Stone Axe Head Stories

Gothvos; Theatre of the Body, Theatre of the Mind.

Dromology in Fes with Andrea Cusamano

Terres...Formes...Terres

This Gothvos placing was carefully undertaken in a stolen moment beneath shadey date palms by artist/performer  Andrea Cusumano whilst in Morocco performing Terres…Formes…Terres at the behest of the Ducci Foundation in the city of Fes or Fez (Arabic: فاس‎,) the third largest city of Morocco, with a population of approximately 1 million. The city has two old Medinas, the larger of them is Fes El Bali. It is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is widely believed to be one of the world's largest car free urban areas. Al-Qarawiyyin, founded in AD 859, is the oldest continuously functioning madrasa in the world. The city has been called the "Mecca of the West" and the "Athens of Africa". Andrea writes of this moment between the physical demands of his performance schedule: "Came here yesterday for my performance. Spent the day buying the materials in the souk. What a tiring day but rewarding experience. I am happy. The show felt really good and I am happy Fleur was so good with me on stage. A bit too dark...but if I don't take it now...there won't be time" (the Gothvos moment photograph)

Andrea Cusamano Terres...Formes...Terres.

- John London -

 'We saw a frog here outside the house in which we were staying in Sóller, Mallorca. It jumped into what looks like a secret irrigation channel. So the stone reminds us of its presence.

August 2013'

Autochthonous reaction in Sóller and the hidden Frog.

Sóller (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈsoʎə]) is a town and municipality near the north west coast of Mallorca, in the Balearic Islands of Spain. The town is some 3km inland, from the Port de Sóller, in a large, bowl-shaped valley that also includes the village of Fornalutx and the hamlets of Biniaraix and Binibassi. The combined population is around 14,000. A famous tramway, the Orange Express links Sóller to Port de Sóller.

Sóller is linked by the historic railway, the Ferrocarril de Sóller, and by a highway with a toll tunnel, to the Majorcan capital ofPalma. The Ferrocaril was built on the profits from the orange and lemon trade and completed in 1911. The Andratx-Pollençahighway also runs through the valley. The present-day economy is based mainly on tourism and the expenditure of foreign residents, complementary to the agricultural economy based around citrus and olive groves.

Chloe Kenwards Dead Sea Scroll Down

Chloe Kenwards journey to the Dead Sea.

 Mineral Beach, The Dead Sea, Israel

At one side of a quiet beach on the Dead Sea, a naked stone sits amongst clinging salt deposits, oddly clean in a salt-contaminated world. Salt stalactites are bonded unforgivingly to its surroundings. Sun evaporating the shore water to leave strong white crystals on every rock and stone.

Haze floats in the air, as if steaming from the sea, which merges the shimmering colours of Jordan across the water. Blues, greens, pinks, and reflections are confused amongst the haze.

It is the lowest place on earth, 400m below sea level. The air is thick with 10% extra oxygen; the sea, 30% thick with salt.

Floating in the Dead Sea is a disembodying experience. Legs become useless at propulsion, as they cannot be submerged in the water, and unbalance the body, the bather losing control of their centre of gravity. The water, loaded with minerals, stings the skin, and warns not to be swallowed or splashed into eyes.

Salt is a mineral that sustains life in the right quantities – too much, or too little, and we would not survive. Tiny, individual, delicate crystals become a strong force in numbers. Our diets, and the history of food, were irreversibly changed by salt.

I wonder what the stone will look like a year from now. Caked with salt on the shoreline, or washed onto the seabed, in a dead world, which sustains no life. Ingratiated into its new surroundings, no longer a souvenir from foreign lands.

Chloe Kenwards journey to the Dead Sea

Chloe Kenward - The Dead Sea scroll-down.

Chloe Kenward is a travel photographer and lighting designer

Whilst awaiting Harvey Grosmans placing...

Harvey%20Grossman%20Interview-1.pdf

 Gothvos placed by Jacqueline Awieh in the historic town of Falmouth Jamaica.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Falmouth was one of the busiest ports in Jamaica. It was home to masons, carpenters, tavern-keepers, mariners, planters and others. It was a wealthy town in a wealthy parish with a rich racial mix. Within the parish, nearly one hundred plantations were actively manufacturing sugar and rum for export to Britain. Jamaica, during this period, had become the world's leading sugar producer.

As a result, starting in 1840, Falmouth's fortunes as a commercial centre declined after the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. This decline and lack of support for development has left many of its early buildings standing. The streets are lined with many small houses known for their unique fretwork and windows, major merchant and planter complexes, and commercial buildings, all dating from 1790 to 1840.

While Falmouth saw little commercial advancement after the 1840s, houses continued to be built. The town's buildings, the old and the not-so-old, make up the historic townscape of Falmouth. These shared characteristics weave the varied building styles into a distinctive pattern of early Jamaican architecture, and a critical mass of each variety makes the town an unusually distinctive place.

Papillon was shot on location in Spain (doubling for the French locations in the film) and Jamaica; the prison set was constructed in Falmouth, Jamaica, and was the largest in the film, running an expanse of 800 feet. The Devil's Island and Indian village sequences were filmed in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and the scene featuring the arrival of the prison ship was lensed in Kingston, Jamaica. Unfortunately, the tropical island proved to be a troublesome location due to unpredictable weather, the plentiful abundance of ganji (marijuana) which affected the productivity of several crew members, and numerous thefts, resulting in the loss of costumes, set props, machinery, and other items to the tune of $30,000.

Gothvos Mis En Abyme

The Guilemene by Elizabeth Howard.

Tramore (Irish: Trá Mhór, meaning "big strand/beach") is a seaside town in County Waterford on the southeast coast of Ireland. This Gothvos stone was placed there by Elizabeth Howard, a performance artist from Tramore, who I hope will contribute further when she writes a little about the experience - or not the experience, perhaps some other matters will be prevalent in Elizabeths perception in this event. When I received these photographs I was really overjoyed.

The Tramore Gothvos: Tramore is my homeplace and the town where I grew up. My parents still live there, but I moved away when I was eighteen, and I have lived in many different places since then. When I am asked to close my eyes and think of a peaceful place, I imagine that I am flying over Tramore Bay on a sunny day.
The bay is horseshoe shaped, and is full of rocks which makes it very dangerous for boats to sail in, and because of it's proximity and similarity in size to the haven of Waterford harbour, it was often mistaken for the safe passage, and sadly, many ships were wrecked there. As a result, the headlands on either side of the bay are marked with tall stone pillars. The two pillars that you can see in the picture are on Brownstown head, and out of view but just to the right of where the photo was taken are three pillars, one of which hosts 'The Metal Man' who is said to warn the ships with the rhyme 'Stay out, stay out, stay out from me, for these are the rocks of misery.' There is a four mile gap in between the two headlands and my granny was the first woman to swim from one to the other. Ninety years later my sister swam the same route. The day the picture was taken was the day after I had discovered that I was about to embark on a PhD course of study, and it was also the day before my boyfriend asked me to marry him. The picture was taken at a point in my life when big change was afoot, with new journeys starting. However, it was taken in the place that will always be home, where I will always be that girl who grew up in that house. It is the significance of integrating change into the constant that made this experience extra special for me.

Elizabeth Howards placing of the Cornish Gothvos Stone in the Guillemene Tramore Ireland.

Tremadhevas in Ynys Gybi

Mynydd Twr Holyhead Mountain, Caer Gybi.

Gothvos at Wylfa ,Trwyn Pencarreg

Tremadhevas at Ynys Gybi looking across the "inland sea" from a standing stone near Treardurr beside a disused windmill, the causeway from Ynys Môn to Caergybi/Holyhead. Performing amelioration and  composing with ameliorative effects.
How did this come about, in view of the supposition that there was no major influx of population into the island of Britain during the iron age, nor for that matter during a thousand years and more before the iron age? This is one of the considerations which caused Myles Dillon to argue that it was the Beaker Folk, around 2000 b c, who brought the Celtic language or languages to Britain. He asserted that the celts carried the indo-european inheritance westwards from the heartland of Indo-Europa in southern Russia at much the same time as the Aryans carried it eastwards, to India. This theory helps to explain the survival of some of the earliest elements of that inheritance among its westerly legatees - the celts - and among its most easterly ones - the Aryans. The theory also helps , argues Dillon, to explain the substantial differences which developed between the British version (P-Celtic) and the Irish version (Q-Celtic) of the original Celtic tongue.
The Beginings, Paviland, Tinkswood and Llyn Cerrig Bach; A History Of Wales by John Davies, a thoroughly excellent introduction and in depth study of Wales.  isbn 0-14-014581-8  

 Walking, Photography and Intervention around Ynys Gybi, Walking and placing: Pedestrian Mobility in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Walking is our fundamental mode of relating to the environment, of comparing ourselves to a sense of place and space. In the modern period, this human practice has also become a literary theme, a mode of writing and performance as much as a form of movement in space. Thus it represents a mediation between man and the world at large: the corporeal movement in space and time, and the reflection of that movement in literature and the arts. It is from this two perspectives that the exploration of  walking has been turned into both an aesthetic framework and a form of ‘mobile’ contemplation, from John Gay to Paul Auster, from Wordsworth and Thoreau to Richard Long and Harriet Tarlo, from Rousseau to Rimbaud and André Breton.

Walking is an empowering aesthetic consideration, a form of reflection, an ambivalent metaphor; particularly in consideration of walking from the perspective of  historical, ideological, aesthetic, philosophical, and poetical implications. How can we delineate the semantic field of ‘walking,’ ‘rambling,’ ‘sauntering,’ ‘roaming,’ ‘hiking,’  ‘perambulating,’ but also of the Aristotelian ‘peripatetic school' , The “flâneur.”Walter Benjamin, Andre Breton, Baudelaire.  How are these values compared to such practices? Can walking increase or broaden ones knowledge of a place? What are the differences between rural walking and urban walking? To what extent has walking questioned the distinction between the rural and the urban? If major texts in this tradition, such as Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Wordsworth’s The Excursion, focus on the rustic, walking is not only a rural phenomenon, but is also a reality of contemporary urban life. Walking as a literary genre evolved throughout the modern period, and, how, following its heyday during the Romantic period, has it been redefined in connection to modernist issues? To what extent does the aesthetics of the ordinary and of chance, which seem to be associated with walking, relate to aspects of postmodern nomadology? 

Limitless cultural strands and approaches and literary history are found in all philosophical aspects of walking. Alternatively, while analyzing representations and practices of walking, we are equally interested in studying instances of (inter)textuality and cross-disciplinary fertilization. For example, how is the activity of walking related to literary genres: are aesthetic depictions or representations of walking intrinsically narrative or poetical? The various links between walking and writing or reading, the connection between walking and creativity, or the diverse ‘textual transcriptions’ of walking might also be considered. Furthermore, the complex temporality of walking, next to its relation to space, is also crucial. This temporality is usually marked by an ‘intensified’ temporal awareness, which is antithetical to the modern emphasis on speed as a symbol of modernity, and which privileges a sense of place over that of space. One may also think of the connection or analogy between the rhythm of walking and that of a poetic text (as in the notion of ‘foot,’ traditionally the basic unit of poetic scansion). In all of these different senses, walking encapsulates both the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence; it thus turns into an important cultural symbol, a site where the outside world meets with the intimate realm of human reflection and creativity.

From Glastonbury Tor in secular conditions.

The Logos of Gothvos

 A narrative may extend beyond the limits of verbally conveyed text, it may function as a containing concept for all modes of signification including the anecdotal, in this case :photographs and rituals or actions .

 The Logos as a signifier with an extending mode of signification may be theoretically challenged with a discourse narratology. 

Discourse narratology is an option analysis that determines the form of a narrative (Jahn 2003) in attempting to describe in which way these choices are embedded in broader socio-cultural situations. In this way, narratology can be integrated into a systemically oriented history of Performance / Scenography in which the interaction between the closed system of the performance and its Umwelt, the larger cultural, historical, social, and artistic context occupies a core position, which references the more specific study of narratology with the broader framework of systemic theory. As a consequence, discourse narratology exceeds the more traditional 'story narratology' which limits itself to the construction of several narrative units into a story, as if a narrative were a self-containing unit, independent of the external worlds.

From Mulfra

In 1987, Patrice Pavis suggested a theory regarding the translation of dramatic works. The idea of 'verbo-corps' has been described as "highly theoretical" and criticized for leaving "a gap between theory and translatory practice which cannot be closed". The theory suggests a culture-specific union between language and gesture used subconsciously by every writer. Pavis suggested that the translator needed to be to able to comprehend the union in the original and reconstruct it in the translation

Boskednan stone circle with Gothvos completing the gap between theory and translatory gesture.
 (grid reference SW434351)  A partially restored prehistoric stone circle at Boskednan, around 4 miles (6 kilometres) northeast of Penzance in Cornwall, United Kingdom. The megalithic monument is known as the Nine Maidens or Nine Stones of Boskednan, although the original structure may have contained as many as 22 upright stones around its 69 metre perimeter.

Mise en scène: In film theory (film theory: film theory seeks to develop concise, systematic concepts that apply to the study of film/cinema, mise en scène [mizA~sEn] refers to everything that is to appear before the camera (camera: Equipment for taking photographs (usually consisting of a lightproof box with a lens at one end and light-sensitive film/instrumentation at the other)) and its arrangement – sets, props, actors (actors: A theatrical performer) , costumes, camera movements and performances. The term was coined by early French (French: The Romance language spoken in France and in countries colonized by France) film critic (film critic: more facts about this subject) s and means literally "put into the scene" or "setting in scene." In auteur theory (auteur theory: the auteur theory is a way of reading and appraising films through the imprint of an auteur, less creative director (director: Someone who supervises the actors and directs the action in the production of a show) s are sometimes disparagingly called "metteurs en scène"

Chûn Castle looking towards Watchcroft.

GASTON BACHELARD, in The Poetics of Space, invites recognition of the ways in which interior and imaginative landscapes, such as cupboards,houses, and forests, resonate in the phenomenological worlds of poets, novelists, explorers, and artists. Gothvos: in placing and re presenting paralingual indicators, resetting their composition.

Gothvos ha Tremadhevas

Morvah Well Gothvos

Gothvos in the Embodied Memory

The area of 'embodied memory'. According to Paul Connerton the body can also be seen as a container, or carrier of memory, of two different types of social practice; inscribing and incorporating. The former includes all activities which are helpful for storing and retrieving information: photographing, writing, taping, etc. The latter implies skilled performances which are sent by means of physical activity, like a spoken word or a handshake. These performances are accomplished by the individual in an unconscious manner, and one might suggest that this memory carried in gestures and habits, is more authentic than 'indirect' memory via inscribing.

The first conceptions of embodied memory, in which the past is 'situated' in the body of the individual, derive from late nineteenth century thoughts of evolutionists like Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Ernst Haeckel. Lamarck’s law of inheritance of acquired characteristics and Haeckel’s theory of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, suggested that the individual is a summation of the whole history that had preceded him or her. (However, neither of these concepts are accepted by current science.)

Gulfwell

Trevaylor Woods Stream, Gulfwell: History and Geography of Cornwall by the Rev. J.J.Daniell. Truro 1894.3rd edition published by Netherton and Worth, Truro.Parochial History. ST.GULVAL pp439 - St.Gulval -Deanery of Penwith, Pop 1623, acreage 4355.-Gulval was anciently called Lanestly. The church is architecturally one of the most interesting in Cornwall, or at least in Penwith. It is early English [sic] with perhaps some still older British walling, the remains of an ancient oratory. All the windows are filled with stained glass and there is a good organ.
Between the churches of Gulval and Madron a stone serves as a foot bridge called the Bleu Bridge bearing this inscription 'Cnegumi Fil Enans' Enans is said to have been the first king of Amorica.
In draining land between Marazion and Penzance there was dug up an earthen pot containing a thousand Roman coins of the emporers between A.D. 260 and 350.
In this parish is Gulfwell or the Hebrew Brook over which an old witch used to preside and divine things past, present and future by incantation of it waters.
Vebatim and not necessarily the views of anyone other than Rev.J.J.Daniells.

Descendant of the Sun-Goddess: Nao Nagai takes the stone to the mountain

The following story is retold via an unorthodox translation from a tour and heritage guide to Mount Kirishima in Japan where Nao Nagai, took the Gothvos stone to place at the foot of a sacred tree. A long time ago in mythical times the gods ruled the world, when the gods looked over into the lower world from a pontoon bridge from the  heavens, there was an unformed thing like an island in the sea showing dimly through fog. The Gods took a trident which became an emblem to the island. This is said to be the origins of the name Mount Kirishima.“A trident dropped down by the Gods piercing the top of the mountain”  An oracle was received from the Sun-Goddess (Amaterasu Oomikami from Takamagahara Field). Ninigi-no Mikoto descended on top of the Holy Mt. Takachiho-no-Mine. If you can believe a fantastic narrative regardless of the actual appearance of the Holy Mountain, and see the rusting three toothed trident " Ama-no-Sakahoko - Heavenly Upside  Down Trident " staked on top of the Mt. Takachiho-no-mine. You must believe this is not the devil's pitchfork.

This is a dangerous place to descend upon from Heaven. The Kirishima Mountain Range has 23 volcanoes, 15 craters and 10 caldera lakes. At the end of the Edo Period, on the second year of Keio, in 1866, Sakamoto Ryoma made the first honey moon trip in Japan to Satsuma. He climbed Mt.Takachiho-no-mine  with his wife Oryô and saw the Holy Hoko with his own eyes and touched it. He sent a humorous letter to his sister Otome writing about the details of the honey moon trip with some illustrations The trident lance " Amano Sakahoko " is rusted. It belongs to the gods and not human beings. The preservation of it is up to the gods. It is not a cultural heritage object which might exist in the pragmatic world. Mt. Takachiho is the major summit within the Kirishima mountain range.  The hike to the peak of Mt. Takachiho starts after you clear “Uma-no-se”.  On the way to the peak of Mt. Takachiho there is a shallow canyon called, “Senri-ga-tani” better known as, "Ama-no-gawara", but long ago it was called “Haimonkyu”.  It is said that, “Haimonkyu” was the site of “Setaogongenkyu” (former name of Kirishima Jingu Shrine) built about 1400 years ago.  Specific details of “Setaogongenkyu” are unknown, but it was destroyed during the eruption of Mt. Ohara and later rebuilt at the foothill of the mountain.

By whom it was staked ?  Presumably by God Ninigi-no Mikoto ! Once upon a time it was here that we received the oracle of the Sun-Goddess (Amaterasu Oomikami), and monkey Tabiko of seven God and guidance gives hand an order for three kinds of sacred treasures (sarutahikonomikoto), and grandchild God niniginomikoto gets down out of Japanese Olympus (takamagahara) on earth. When the Japanese founding of their country myth and the history began from Takachiho peak where they wrote down the first step of a "descendant of the Sun-Goddess advent" to be told that God once came down here to earth from heaven.

Nao Nagai works in visual and sonic references in live performance and is inspired by the "little" interesting things that happen in everyday life, i.e a man jumps out from nowhere in front of her while cycling and shouts “What time is it?”

Nao Nagai takes the Gothvos to the sacred tree

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Gôze Saner . Fiction & Non-fiction Gothvos in Pedasa

Contrasting images of the same Gothvos Stone placed among the stones of the Pedasa locale by Goze Saner,

The softly focussed Diana camera utilizes 120 rollfilm and 35 mm film. The camera uses a simple plastic meniscus lens, the Diana has been used to specifically take soft focus, impressionistic photographs somewhat reminiscent of the Pictorialist Period of photography, using contemporary themes and concepts, known as lomography. The low-quality plastic lens has been celebrated for its artistic effects in photographs, normally resulting in a slightly blurred composition that can evoke a 'dreamlike' quality and atmospheres not ordinarily encompassed in the detail of digital photography. Goze takes two photographs to prove the contrast between these differing media and two stories of the same situation in her walk in Pedasa Turkey.

An interest in the past, an interest in collective and individual memory, is extremely resonant to our contemporary thinking. Finding methods to articulate and express individual and collective identities, which find themselves under pressure, transition and dominated by consumer processes, all these considerations are becoming increasingly important. National, regional, religious and/or local cultural identities present today link back as consistent entities, today they may be observed as nothing more than actions, changes or conflicts usually associated with secularization, industrialization, globalization, migration, or many other political, economic, cultural and/or religious. From this position, culture is seen as shaped under the influence of processes that exist in constant mutual tension.

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Such processes referring to the term memory occupy a central role.

The Gothvos project aims to contribute to the study of cultural memory by unlocking narratives about the past (and their canonization), and to offer relevant critical observations on the manifestations of cultural memory that are not essentially ‘narratives’. This approach provides a kind of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary access to cultural memory taken from various perspectives.

Faced with the following questions: how do we recall, remember and forget? 

Which stories are ‘permitted’ and which are ‘forbidden’? 

How does the past determine the present and shape the future? 

How do the various discourses of the past determine the social and personal identities?

 How are our deepest emotions, desires and fantasies articulated in the present through the discursive space of memory?

 What are the relations between memory and monuments, archives and museums? 

How can we understand the dual nature of monuments: as tools of ideologically driven memory (fixed memory) and/or as constant sources of creative construction and opening up of memory?

 Does technological development influence the process of remembering the past? What are the implications of a digitalization of memory?

 What kind of history is created by the massive use of digital technologies (i.e., online archives that are encoding/decoding their users’ memories in virtual space)?

 How do the systems used for production affect the ways that use, protect and work with memory?

 In what ways is cultural tourism associated with memory? How does it reflect the local and global histories in terms of which narratives are being produced and consumed?

Gothvos in Iasi.     Genovel Investigating Geographical Spatial Histories

As a contained element of the space One’s body might be perceived as a modifier of the space being engaged in its continuous transformation.

At its own pace, one’s body moves writing the space, tracing shortcuts or building distances - reaching with clarity a spot or wandering through the labyrinth of the space.

Its driven energy, walks the body till the point where eventually stops in the intuited space.  

The particular space is now converted in a practiced one by the presence of ones body. The site becomes specific and framed by the presence of the released Gothvos stone.

Its constructed removal from the aboriginal place started weaving horizontal chromosomic expansions with the conscious land.

In its potency the signifier might become the consciousness of an alter-space in space, sharing its ancient Cornish alchemy with the fertile ruins of the mediaeval princely courts, bridging the city and the neogothic palace. 

The unpredictable site would now be exposed to an auspicious omen.

The body in its new state, nurtured by the performed action pauses for a moment then moves, leaving the space unpracticed until a new body that already started moving would practice it afresh.

The stone would stagnate for a moment too. The body in its consciousness would arrive, invited to unveil those vertical circular heights and depths raising its question. The question might dissolve into answers, which, at their turn would melt into more questions like a never fulfilling yet wholesome search.

Genovel Alexa

Iași (Romanian pronunciation: [jaʃʲ]; also historically referred to as Jassy or Iassy) is one of the largest cities and a municipality in Romania, Iași has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life.

"The Bard is often accused of anatopism -- that is, getting his geography wrong. Why else would he, in The Taming of the Shrew, put a sailmaker in Bergamo, a landlocked city in Italy, ask critics?"
D. Murali; Shakespeare, 'Literary Equivalent of an Electron'; The Hindu (Chennai, India); Dec 2, 2007.

Exeter College Oxford - Floreat Exon.

Exeter College Oxford

"Homer may have taken some slight and temporary liberty with the facts, but it does not amount to the major anatopism that some commentators have found in it and should not be taken as evidence that Homer did not have firsthand knowledge of the area."
John Victor Luce; Celebrating Homer's Landscapes; Yale University Press; 1998.

Exeter College is the real life basis for the fictional Jordan College in Philip Pullman's novel trilogy His Dark Materials. The 2007 film version of the first novel, The Golden Compass, used the college for location filming.

Exeter College is the fourth oldest college of the Oxford University.

The college is located on Turl Street, the location where it was originally founded in 1314 by Walter de Stapeldon as a school to educate clergymen. From its foundation Exeter has been associated with a number of notable people, with one of the most notable being the novelist J.R.R. Tolkien.