Luwtens Artist Room

“I feel like Laura Kampman has a sixth sense for intimacy. Creating soundscapes from telephone recordings she creates a space homely and vulnerable, making sound a texture and the inside of your head like someone else’s living room.”

Tessa Douwstra (aka LUWTEN)

Laura Kampman: Roof of Air, a sound project/label focused on phone recordings

Tessa Douwstra aka LUWTEN invited writer Bregje Hofstede to write a short essay on the theme of the beginning. This essay, titled At the beginning, will also be read by Bregje Hofstede at the beginning of the concert.

“Bregje Hofstede has had the courage to begin again several times. I read her books and pieces eagerly: feeling encouraged and humanlike as I flipped pages. She will write and read an ode to beginnings.”

Tessa Douwstra (aka LUWTEN)

In the beginning

The first time I saw him dance. A very ordinary boy, really, in a T-shirt and glasses, but it was his hands that caught my eye. Big hands. He stretched and curled his fingers, pulsing them to the music. His hands swam like jellyfish through the night.

I took him to my hotel. In those days I often took someone with me, I was adrift after a long relationship. I told the people I met not to fall in love with me, because I really didn’t have room for that; and, if that had proved irresistible after a few weeks, I said: I should have warned you.

The next morning we said our crumpled goodbyes on the doorstep of my hotel. Only at the station did I discover that I had forgotten my ID card.

I jumped on a tram that would take me back, and as it drove through Amsterdam, I called the desk to ask if they had found anything. The man across from me listened in. He wore an orange cap and a bag from Boni, and had craters in his cheeks.

Were you alone in that hotel? he asked when I had hung up.

No, I said, with a friend.

Then where is he? If he’s not with you, he’s not a friend.Tell me, did you do naughty things in that hotel? Did you let yourself be used?

None of your business.

Or are you still a virgin? She’s still a virgin! he yelled through the tram.

It was May. Everywhere the elm seed flickered, covering the canals like a yellow carpet. We stopped at Dam Square, the doors opened, the wind blew in a cloud of elm seeds.

In the hotel I found my ID card on the bedside table. Before I left, I took a sniff at the sheets to remember what it smelled like. That was the moment I knew: this is a start. And right away: this is going to hurt. A beginning only bears that name if there is a middle and an end.

A third love, or a fourth, is different from the first because it takes more effort to believe in forever, or for a very long time.

The more you start, the more each beginning loses what makes it addictive: the promise of longevity, of depth, of endless detail sprung from what is now almost weightless in the hand. Each subsequent beginning is more of a repetition, each new thing is less new. The more you start, the more the beginning loses what characterizes it.

The boy with the dancing hands and I moved together to a village in France. He was a city boy and was now focussing on gardening, which was new to him. In our first winter, the window sills and the table were already full of row after row of cardboard germination trays. Radish, carrot, pumpkin, tomato, cucumber, salad, although we didn’t see the difference when they came up, because the starting leaves are the same on every sprout: two green ovals. Only after a certain time does the differences come in: then serrated or round, smooth or hairy leaves unfold, large, small, green, veined purple-red.

After the last frost we would set everything out in our garden, which ran up the hill behind the house.

At the very top was a soggy spot, where I put a shovel in the wet ground one February afternoon. I scooped up a mouthful of dirt and the hole I left was immediately filled with water. The more I shoveled, the faster the water bubbled up from the bottom. Soon it poured over my boots.

I dug and I forgot why, I dug and I forgot time. After a few hours, the water splashed down through the vegetable garden and formed a pool under the apple tree. The sky was goldfish orange. Somewhere above me a thrush sang. My overalls tightened around the baby in my stomach. I leaned on the shovel, the colors and the sounds and the warm pounding of my blood seemed inextricably linked, they woven a net that carried me. I floated. A moment that lasted until the thought: I’m probably never going to be as happy here as I am now.

With that thought, the middle began.

We would stay in France until I finished a book, and for those first few months it was the most beautiful book you’ve ever read. In those first months it was still the book I wanted to write, and not the book I could write, with my idiosyncrasies and limitations.

It is only in growth and duration that something becomes characteristic. Own, interesting, and only then does it become difficult.

I’m in the middle of it. Every now and then I start all over again, or so I think, but more and more I just seem to have taken myself with me. Every newly opened document takes root in previously written words. With my new lover I have old quarrels.

I know I have to continue on the path I’m on. That in my writing I must seek the extreme consequences, the greatest individuality. That I learn more when I stay with someone not up to, but beyond the tough parts.

But I remain sensitive to the beginning. I can’t pass a chestnut in autumn without picking it up: a folded tree. The promise of something towering, to put in your pocket. The possibilities without the weight.

Bregje Hofstede

Nothing is without an end
Everybody is dying to begin again

“Four days before spring, LUWTEN celebrates beginnings. The innumerable possibilities, the endless sea of second chances. The hope that comes with the not knowing, just the “what” not yet the “how”. March is for sowing seeds. The only way to start is to begin.”

Tessa Douwstra (aka LUWTEN)