“Dear Mother: I have a very very heavy schedule and I have loads of home work so I was not able to write sooner. […] The first thing we do in the morning is to put on shorts or go in our pyjamas outside for excersises [sic]. We get up 5 mins of 7 and have to be out 3 mins before 7. So you see it is really to wake you up good.”87
I had come across the letters written by Eleonora Deren during her school days in Geneva to her mother in the USA a few years before beginning my PhD project, in a book (now out of print) documenting Deren’s life.88 I had heard of the École Internationale in Geneva, because I had lived close to the school for a time, and encountered the English-speaking expat children who make up the majority of the Ecolint’s pupils every day at the tram stop. Unlike today, in the 1930s the school was not only aimed at an international elite, but was also based on the concept of communicating and developing alternative models of education with local roots.89 In the letters sent by Deren between the ages of 13 and 16, she describes the daily routine, excursions and activities, as well as addressing wishes and requests to her mother (permission to dance with boys, money for school socks, reports on how long her period lasted, etc.)
“The wind howls around the chimney in our room at night after bed. It will be one of my fondest memories. You know we get out and do setups [situps? LvN] before the sun is up and we do it in the dark. It is real fun. Even sometimes I get up at 6 in the morning and get dressed and go out and watch the sun rise and walk around in the dark. That is the only time I have to meditate. The life is very fast here.”90
By the time I began my PhD, I had forgotten the book. It was due to a coincidence that I resumed my search for traces of Deren in Geneva. For Jacob’s first day at school, I went to his new home. The family were expecting their second child, and had moved not long ago. I had received the address some time in advance, and knew where that part of Geneva was located, but I did not know the surroundings. Although Fanny, Jacob’s mother, had sent me several photos of Le Corbusier primary school beforehand, I wanted to have a look myself before school started. It was only when I walked into the empty school yard and heard – in spite of the silence – the echo which fills the air with anticipation as soon as the bell rings and the children stream up and down the stairs, that Maya Deren and the École Internationale entered my mind. I realized that the school couldn’t be far from here.
Two schools, two experiences of school, at almost the same location, in different times. This coincidence could be seen as unimportant. For me, it provoked an inexplicable desire to search for traces of Maya Deren in the area nearby, and perhaps to come across further connections which would confirm my sense that this coincidence was a ‘sign’. The sign meant seeing this coincidence as a suggestion that Maya Deren’s experiences could be important to my study of temporalities. Chiara had already been wandering through my mind for a while, but now she had a task: I sent her to the archive of the École Internationale. She could follow up on this faint trace of Maya Deren. Together we entered a ‘time of adventure’.
“[A] purely adventuristic person is a person of chance. He enters adventuristic time as a person to whom something happens. But the initiative in this time does not belong to human beings.
We may take it for granted that moments of adventure-time, all these ‘suddenlys’ and ‘just at that moments’, cannot be foreseen with the help of analysis, study, wise foresight, experience, etc., alone. Such things are better understood through fortune-telling, omens, legends, oracular predictions, prophetic dreams and premonitions.”91
The geographical proximity of Jacob’s school to Eleonora’s – a curious coincidence – encouraged me to pursue the Chiara-Deren story further as a research strand of its own alongside the case studies. I could not explain the connections between the fields of investigation, but I was sure that a connection existed [K is for Knocking]. I realized that with a fictionalizing approach I would not require causalities in advance, but that instead, these ‘inexpressible connections’ would be exactly what was needed to drive the process of exploration. Making things plausible is part of the process of inventing a story, and because Chiara as a character is tasked with the Deren research, the role of contingency is not to provide an explanation. Instead, it becomes a source of intrigue, part of the endeavor to involve the listener in the research process.
Through the invention of Chiara [C] and her search for clues about Deren in the archive of the École Internationale, perceptions and thoughts about asynchronicity opened up which I could not have arrived at without her [I is for Imaginary Friend]. If I had been at the archive without my fictional doppelgänger, I would have found the same few photographs in which Deren is identifiable, as well as her contributions to the school newspaper Philia. But because the aim with Chiara was to develop a story, an emotional connection with figures from a different time (Maya Deren) and a different reality (Chiara – fiction), the focus shifted from the existing Deren material to the parts which were missing. Absence became important. With the copied letters from the out-of-print book, mute documents which had been collected without context in the archive began to speak to me: in this way, an old tree in the courtyard of the École Internationale (which is named Alexandre) becomes just as much an object of experience as an unassuming photograph of girls doing their morning gymnastics.
Chiara changed my behavior, my perceptions and my attention during the time I spent researching in the archive and sifting through my own material. The process of translating an observation or an experience into the character required a slowing down and repetition of my examination of the archival material, as well as a speculative broadening or deviation in my actual perceptions. For example, the detail of an arm which is out of line in the photograph of girls doing their exercises in sync would not have struck me without Chiara. In the archive, Chiara and I (it is hard to say which of us) had enlarged this small photo to the maximum size of an A3 sheet on the copier, but we had not noticed the hand floating between the rows of girls, who are all turning away from us. Even when I decided that the image should be important to the story, and had photographed it and filmed it and incorporated it into the montage (“synchronous moment between us”), I was focused only on the cliché as whole: synchronized gymnastics as a disciplining practice; the tension of anonymity (Maya Deren could be one of these girls). Only when I conducted various writing experiments with the character of Chiara did I look again at the A3 enlargement: I looked at it through Chiara’s eyes, because I wanted to write about the way she might think about asynchronicity.
Chiara saw the asynchronous arm immediately. I cannot believe that I had overlooked it the whole time. Chiara was already thinking further and speculating about possible interpretations of the ‘unruly arm’. Perhaps the asychronicity had actually never struck anyone because the deviating movement was so minimally out of place that no one would have noticed it in real-time. That would make it a product of the photograph (or of fiction). Or one could imagine that although the girl did not stay in line with the others, her rhythm was in tune with something else, e.g. a song, a sound from the surroundings, her own heartbeat or her breath… Or that an inner protest was consciously or unconsciously breaking away from the uniformity.
Chiara helped me to approach the material in a different way, leading to different insights: rather than being interested in the material as potential proof, I moved towards an approach which is concerned with materials as a potential source of knowledge through speculation. Chiara gave me the power to embrace a certain lack of discipline, a kind of disobedience to the ‘research object’, and encouraged me to make use of not-knowing and uncertainties as a transformative force.
