We took it easy today, too! Mark and I went for a little walk before breakfast, around 7 am, and brought home some fresh rolls for us all to enjoy with the usual cold-cuts, jam, coffee & tea and boiled eggs. Then we hung out at Andrea and Peter‘s apartment, and she and I went through our Italian photos from the various museums at slow pace, talking about art and art spaces. She told me of some really interesting ideas about walking through cities (based on the work of a philosopher / urban studies guy named Lucius Burckhardt that I had never heard of, who invented a field he named „promenodology‘ (or Spaziergangswissenschaft), about the way people walk through the spaces they inhabit), and of an artist named Dorothee von Windheim who transfers images in interesting ways, for example with liquid light from paintings to gauze cloth, or from frescoed or painted walls about to be destroyed to other surfaces. We also talked some more about the technical specs regarding working with wax, which is something Andrea is trying to learn more about and adapt to her own art projects.
This took us until past noon, and then we made some quick pasta and salad for lunch, and took off for a little jaunt to the area near the Hamburg town hall (Rathaus), where there is an art museum for varying contemporary exhibits that just moved house (basically next door to its old location) and is so new that they offered 2 weeks of free entry to its current exhibit. So we checked it out, both for the interesting new space (with a „light courtyard“) on the second floor, and for the exhibit, which represented various very new photographers and videographers, including (most famously) Shirin Neshat, with both four very arresting photos and a very intense 15-minute video. But there were also some photos that show the enormous impact that human activity has had on the Carrara marble quarry, and some other really gripping images. Videography is always a bit more difficult for me to „get“ than still photography, but the projects were interesting.
Then we briefly checked out the town hall and walked to the Bavarian (!) restaurant where we were going to meet our friend Karsten when he got off work. He went to high school with Andrea and me, was my high-school boyfriend and became my first husband—so we go back a long long time! We had coffee and once he showed up with his brand-new electric bike, we all ordered very yummy Bavarian food and everyone except Mark and I had alcohol-free wheat beer (whereas he and I had alcohol-free bubbly water. 🙂 ), and had a great time. Karsten is very funny and I think we were entertaining the people at the next table as well as ourselves… except that I had a hard time keeping up with the translating for Mark, since everyone kept defaulting to German. We hung out until about 8 pm and then took the elevated, the subway, and the bus to get back home. We had a little ice cream for dessert and hung out until it got dark. Another nice, relaxing day.