Hans Theys

 

 

 

 

 

Shirishir

 

(Free Walking / Flâner)

 

Letter of admiration and hello from a flaneur

 to the long-legged ones that bring joy and beauty 

in our homes and hearts

 

ሰላም Selam! Greetings! And hello to you! I want to speak of my admiration, my long-legged friends, and I want to say hello to you who lightly walk into our lives and into our homes and bring us joy and beauty, to broo-e’gar, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and all his friends, the so-called Flemish Primitives. (For primitives you are called these days, because you were the first ones, the very first ones to use oil paint, just as my people was the first to invent equality, and blindness to skin colour, because we all come from zebra wombs so that sometimes the baby is pink, sometimes banana-coloured or caramel or cinnamon and sometimes coffee-coloured or pitch black. Which is why I have four brothers and five sisters from the same mother and father and we all have different colours.)

 

And I think of Jan van Eyck and Hugo van der Goes and Jerry Bosch and the old Bruegel, of course, because my friend and I we write this letter in the city of Brussels, where Hugo and Bruegel lived and where it is said Bruegel started his many long walks along the river Senne, to meet with many many people to see their customs, hear their stories and taste, smell their food.

 

And we are writing this in the year 2024, some 500 years after you lived. And we want to speak to you of free walking, flâner as it is called in French, or ‘shirishir’ as we call it in my country. Because this letter came to me 
in Amharic, which is one of my two mother tongues, more especially in the form of Arrada, which is the streetwise, slanglike, urban version of Amharic, which I use without being afraid to be considered a villager. I now translate the letter into English for my friend Tayiz who will transcribe my thoughts according to his own experience, feelings and impressions.

 

Before I speak of my trade, I want to tell you that I was born in a place that is called the cradle of civilisation, because we invented equality, as I said, and compassion for our neighbours. For it is well known that the Abyssinian Christian state Aksum gave shelter to first followers of the first Islam prophet Mohammed during the first hijra at the beginning of the seventh century. Such is the case that I was born in the land of the oldest artist studio cave, the oldest animist rituals, the oldest churches, hewn out of rock, and the oldest Mosks. It is also the land where the Abay starts flowing, the river which is considered the largest tributary to the Nile. And I want to add that I believe it is beautiful to build a church by digging, as if God resides in the earth, in the smallest particle of dust. (Interestingly, the first church was built upon the advice of a bee, which is also a shiny particle, but this is another story.)

 

In my land of origin, we have no fixed family name. In addition to our first name, we are assigned the name of our father and his father and his father, as far back as we wish to. This seems to be a liberating condition. It means that everything starts with you. You are the creator of your own life. Maybe this custom springs from the customs of nomadic peoples, who don’t own land and only a few belongings. Their legacy is mental. It’s what they can carry in their heads: knowledge, experience, stories, words, language. But what you do with this legacy, seems to be up to you. At the same time, however, the lesser importance of the family tree seems to heighten the value of the people in its entirety. And therein lie the limitations of the individual. You are encouraged to walk alone, but not too far away.

 

Somehow, as a child, I dreamed of being a painter. How this came about, I do not know. How about you, guys? How did this dream come to you? The only thing I remember, is that I asked my father to help me on my way. This was a natural thing to do, because I saw many people asking him for advice.

 

My father had been a shepherd who loved studying. He acquired a law diploma in England via correspondence and became a judge. And he was a mediator. And he was there for all the people. When they were ill, he brought them to the hospital. When the road was broken, he helped them fix it, shovel in hand. When they quarrelled, he mediated between them. No wonder I went to him to discuss my quandary: how could I learn to be a painter? My father was puzzled. How to help me? Around us was society, with its expectations. And in him lived the conviction that only hard work amounts to something. And how could painting be hard work? ‘Try to learn English,’ he told me. ‘Say “sky”.’ And I repeated the word ‘sky’, of which I knew it referred to the blue expanse above us, but I looked at my feet. And I thought of the Amharic word that sounds the same: ‘sky’, but means ‘until I see’. Until I see, I thought, until I see. 

 

I don’t know how things were in your times, dear long-legged friends, but in my land, in my times, there is a crack where society and artfulness meet, akin to the rift where the learned people meet daily life. It’s the awkward place where two worlds meet. The society has its rules. One does not scratch. One does not put one’s finger up one’s nose. Bulgarians don’t like it when you blow your nose in public. For the Mongols it was a sin to disturb a fire with an axe, to fish meat out of a boiling cauldron with your sword, to spit out food, to urinate in a tent and to wash clothes. In my land one does not show one’s foot soles. And one does not announce one wants to become a painter. But you do it. And then my father, the judge and mediator, saw a loophole and proposed a compromise. ‘Wait until Summer,’ he said. ‘Draw and paint in Summer.’

 

Sometimes my mom took me to the market. It was a huge market, the biggest in Africa, the third biggest marketplace in the world. And you could buy anything there: socks, carpets, car parts, candles, cinnamon, tomatoes and flowers. And we went together, my mother and me, and she held my hand, and I held her hand tight. And when we approached the boundaries of the market, this loud, tumultuous place full of movement, smells, colours, textures, objects and people, many people, a scary crowd, I held her hand tighter, but she bowed to me and whispered: ‘I will do the shirigood, you do the shirishir’, which meant: walk freely, let go, let the moment come to you, let it go through you, don’t be afraid, relax, it’s all right, let go, let go.

 

Indeed, the market was an exciting place. It was divided in different areas called ‘tera’, probably related to the English word terrain and the French word ‘terre’ (earth). You had the books-tera, the battery-tera, the nail-tera, the honey-tera, the textile-tera and so on. My favourite tera was the ‘what do you have’-tera. And everywhere were people yelling, bidding, pleading. And there were pots and pans and metal spoons and radios and the loudest place was the tera of the blacksmiths, the fire makers who made the noisiest banging techno music you ever heard. And the cars around us had their own language, announcing their arrival, warning and avoiding each other, a song of engines, brakes and claxons mingling with the clamour of the market. And because the air was clean, we smelled the paint and the holy stink of the cars from far away. And I loved these smells. We have five senses, but to perceive the total spectacle of the market you need six or seven. 

 

And at the market, doing the shirigood, which is the practical way of dealing with things, my mom drew my attention to impressive tall people, walking straight but relaxed, impressive nomads with shiny teeth and dangerous daggers, dressed in the most beautiful fashions, with the most beautiful hairdos, thousands of years old, carrying their heritage in their heads and orienting themselves with the stars, such as Sirius, the barking star that announced the swelling of the Abay.

 

Then came the day I was accepted to the art school. And many many people wanted to study there, but only a few were selected, not more than twenty. And for this reason, the students came from all the regions of our country, from all kinds of places and with different walks of life. And the school was our sanctuary. And when I drove to the school for the first time, everything looked different. The road was different. The trees were different. The houses looked different and the sky. The school was beautiful. And it smelled like oil. It smelled like heaven.

 

Next to the school there was a cabin with a roof of corrugated iron. I think in Flemish you would call it a ‘kot’. And in this cabin one could find the school’s entire collection of paintings, including works by alumni. Under the sun-heated iron roof the paintings spread their smells. And wondrous smells they were, because due to a lack of proper materials, we used cooking oils to mix the pigment and lamba (gasoil used for lamps) instead of turpentine. And sometimes we organised shows in the beautiful exhibition space upstairs, a room with beautiful sunlight, and then I volunteered to get the paintings from the cabin, because I loved to be there, with the paintings. There I started to talk to paintings, to listen to them. Some taught me how to be tender. Others showed me how to be a warrior, a ‘zeraf’, a hero who protects the country against an invader. Others made me laugh or cry. I listened to their stories, but I also looked at their bodies. Because some of them were turning yellow, because of the food oil, and others cracked. Some were folded and some were crumpled. And for the first time, I realised that paintings are not just images, but also had a body, and a life of their own. Some were eaten by the food oil and others became crazy and took their own life because of the benzin. And when the sun was burning on the roof you could smell this shed from afar, it attracted you from afar. And when you brought the paintings to the exhibition room, they spread their smells abundantly and joyfully.

 

And for years, living in Brussels, I took care of my family and my home, I kept our affairs in order, I kept the house tight, I cooked for my family, and once these practical things done, once the shirigood done, I set out for a walk. Several times per week I went for a walk. And after a couple of minutes, after walking one block, I arrived in a wide street with beautiful trees and beautiful houses. One of these houses bore the date 1923. And every time when I passed this house, when I passed 1923, I said to myself: ‘This is where my free walk starts, this is the beginning of my flâner. And I whispered: ‘shirishir’. And I checked whether my spinal cord was open and stretched. I checked whether my left side matched my right side. I checked whether my body was balanced and symmetrical. And I checked whether my ligaments and my Achilles tendon were well stretched. I tried to send my energy to my fascias, the liquid tissues between my bones and muscles and skin. And then I balanced on my toes, and I felt all my weight pushing against the earth, and I felt the earth gently pushing back, for it was there that we met, at this sacred place nobody talks about.

 

I checked my breathing, I leaned forward on the tip of my toes and light-footed I went. I tried to grab the expanse of the universe, the whole earth, under my toes. Breathing in and out, without pushing, without stress, open, listening, looking around me, embracing the moment, embracing the beauty of everything, letting the things pass through me, feel the passage of things.

 

Fortunately, Brussels has many different communities, neighbourhoods, histories, architects. For that reason she 
is a fruitful place, she articulates your flâner, your wondrous stroll, she doesn’t drop you, she never lets you down, she never lets you fall, she feeds into your journey. On my journey through the city I met many people, people whose names I didn’t know, people of whom I didn’t know where they lived, but whom I knew well. We spoke, we smiled, we shared information. We knew about each other. No names, but stories. Sometimes I fell asleep thinking about them, about their questions, their fears, their beliefs. And in this manner the complex texture of Brussels became the spirit of my shirishir, of my life as a flaneur.

 

When I start my shirishir, I feel in my pocket to see if I brought the tape. I always take tape with me, rolled around a pen. This tape is my camera, my recorder. It registers the spirit of my flâner. When I arrive at the international phone cabins, I use it to glean, to harvest marks, traces, scribbles, doodles. I look for signs left by the users of the phone cabins, and pressing my tape onto them, glueing them, I take them with me on my journey. My tape is my camera, my footage gatherer.

 

But before I go on, my light-footed friends, I must tell you about these telephone shops, about what people are doing there. For things have changed since you roamed this earth. During the last centuries many new things have been invented, in an unsuspected act of making, comparable to the invention of gunpowder by the Chinese or the printing press by the Germans. In the shops where I cultivate footage, people come to make photocopies, which are a kind of engravings, but made faster. And they come to these shops to speak to people who live in faraway countries in a manner similar to two people who know of each other what they are thinking. For many people in Brussels were born very far away, like me, and like to talk to their families and friends at home. And they can do this, without moving, just by speaking into a box, which is linked to another box with a kind of rope. And their words travel through that rope. And they reach another country, very far away, where your father or uncle or mother or friend can hear them and reply. Take two coconuts, if you can find them, or two wooden mugs or clogs. Drill a tiny hole in their bottoms and connect the holes with a long string of leather, or a strong thin rope. Then talk into the mug, while your friend, with the rope stretched, puts his or her mug to their ear, and you will see what I mean. Many more things have been invented. For written words and even images can be sent through such a rope with the speed of lightning. And it only takes some tiny moment to reach the other 
end of the world.

 

While I am recounting this, you should imagine me roaming the streets of Brussels and dreaming this letter. My shirishir, my flâner has an unlimited time. I don’t know who I will meet in the street, for I have been doing this for many many years. As I said, I don’t know the names of the people I meet, I don’t know where they live, but they are my friends. The flâner itself gave rise to these friendships, to this awareness of the lives of many people, such as my friend A, who has lived in Africa, South America and Asia, but somehow ended up in Brussels. I call him ‘If-you-say-so’. If-you-say-so has a dog. And he is married to X. I call her ‘Zeal’. Zeal is a very sweet person, you want to lodge yourself under her soft and warm pigeon wings. If-you-say-so knows a bunch of things, he has stern beliefs, he can be quite motivating, but he is also very direct, very ironic and very critical. Nothing meets his standards. 

 

Did I tell you, my long-legged friends, that nowadays one can also carry coconuts in one’s pockets? That one can talk to anybody with a tiny box you can carry around, with no string attached, but only a mental one, an invisible one, that carries your images and words, written and spoken, to anybody who wishes to receive them? This is why nowadays you see people talking to themselves everywhere, because they hide a small coconut in their ear and talk to someone who is not next to them but far away. It seems they are crazy, but apparently they are not.

 

For us painters, the pocket-coconut changed the way we think about painting. Our best friend is the telephone in our pocket. For instance when I meet If-you-say-so, I have to protect myself sometimes, not to be swallowed up by his tornado of discontent and negativity, and I quickly draw my phone from my pocket and show him a new drawing or a new word, to pull him into my world, I might say, or to find a joyful meeting point. For if you are in a good mood and you meet If-you-say-so, it enriches you. If you have a bad day, he pulls you down.

 

If-you-say-so’s wife, Zeal, has soft pigeon wings, as I have told you already, and she likes to visit the flea market. And that’s where I meet her, quite often, because my every flâner brings me to the flea market, where I listen to the paintings. And then we meet, near the end of the market. And around two o’ clock, when everyone leaves, you can find her strolling about the marketplace, looking for abandoned tiny objects lodged in the cracks between the cobblestones, picking them up and putting them in her pockets, for she will put them in envelopes and send them to friends spread all over the world, hoping they can attach meaning to them. For we can do this now, send paper to all places, or fold it into the shape of a flat bag and hide small objects in it, and have them brought to the most remote villages and dwellings.

 

And now, my light-footed friends, I want to talk to you about my working method, but not without telling you how I dream about your way of being, your perseverance, your love of paint, your inventivity, your problem solving. For they call you primitive, because you were the first, just like they call my people primitive, because we were the very first to make beautiful music and masks and costumes and hairdos and spiritual ideas, all things that were at the origin of your spirituality and your painting.

 

When I think about you, looking at your paintings, the first thing that comes to mind is the wondrous size of your paintings and how they relate to our bodies. For it is said that the houses in Italy had small windows and big walls, allowing the painters to make big paintings, whereas the houses in Flanders had big windows, to let in the light, and smaller walls, so the paintings were smaller. And maybe this is why Italian painting is more about fantasy, myths, history, heroic feats and solemn processions, while Flemish painting is more about real people and about earthly things. And it also gave me the idea that in your workshops paintings were handed over from thy to thy, as babies, where each person who worked on them did his or her own thing, very slowly, without rush, with a lot of care, for many layers had to be applied, very minutely. 

 

Today paintings are not close anymore. In the seventeenth century a painter named Velázquez attached his pencils to long sticks, to be able to paint from far away, and half a century ago people started throwing paint at the canvas or putting the paintings on the floor to have paint drip on it. And since the middle of the nineteenth century, prepared paint is stuffed in metal tubes, allowing the painter to paint outside, using ready-made colours.

 

Your paintings seem to be made by a community, by many people working together, discussing love affairs, troubles at home, the subjects treated in the paintings and matters relating to the craft itself. I imagine everybody being connected around the making of your paintings, men and women, young and old, sceptical and dreamy, practical and witty. This magical conversation starts in the kitchen or in the garden, before the actual work. Everything is discussed: the stretching, the priming, the subject, the composition, the first drawing, the correction of the drawing. Even the nails are discussed, the rabbit skin, the stinky glue, the linen. Before you start painting, you play the drums to test the newly stretched canvas. Sometimes the position of a hand, a leg or a head is changed. Elements are removed, hidden, added. Everybody is surrounded by good people, surrounded and tuned by talent, skill and hard work. To create the colours, endless layers must be applied meticulously. Light and shadow have to be predicted and created. The most privileged artist had the right to add 
the last touch and to varnish the painting, to seal it. 

 

And all of this without photographs! For today, people surround themselves with photographs: a kind of prints on paper, made with a box that captures the world like a mirror. The world, by way of light and darkness, is captured on a thin material, a kind of shiny, transparent parchment resembling the first thin layer of ice on the water in a trough and then transmitted to paper. The result resembles a painting, but smaller, more detailed and less inventive. For this box doesn’t compose, doesn’t create, doesn’t narrate. It just registers, or makes us believe it does. And it is not like a painting, because it needs a fixed angle to look at it, unlike paintings and sculptures that can be looked at from all sides.

 

And later people even invented moving photographs, which are shown in large dark rooms called the devil’s house in the country where I come from, or from within a kind of cupboard with a window, which we call the mesmerising box, the box of magic and hypnosis. And indeed, many people are captured by it, as rabbits by 
a large fire. And there are places in the world where people make these moving photographs all day, and the most famous of these places are Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood. And they are very, very successful.

 

And to me this is a sad thing. For these large dark rooms and magic boxes are mainly used to show people who are quarrelling, fighting and killing. For nobody knows how to paint anymore, so we don’t show people who paint. And if we see people make music, they are not really making music on the spot, but repeating the same thing all over again, ad nauseam, for most viewers and listeners prefer repetition, but without being able to watch a thing that doesn’t move, like one of your paintings. And so we are living in times that are difficult to explain to you guys, because nobody knows how to paint like you, nobody really knows how you did it, and everybody is oblivious of how you planted seeds, how you slaughtered animals, how you treated hides, how you cooked, how you made music, how you danced, how you played. Nearly all crafts are gone, and adult people have become like white maggots, never growing legs or wings or eyes or ears, just eating, fornicating and annoying each other. For everybody is forced to sit still from age two, the whole day, and listen to chewed out stories, till they have unlearned to speak, to think, to feel, to sing, to dance and to draw. Few people can draw. Few people can write. Few people dare to make mistakes, take risks and learn from action. And for these reasons nothing gets better, and we go from bad to worse.

 

And now I want to say something about my method to make art, how and where it comes into being. And part 
of it I already told you, because I like strolling through the city, just like Peter Bruegel liked to go for walks outside the city, just like all of you long-legged people liked to stride, to wander, to see, to hear, to smell and to touch. And these strolls bring me to the telephone shops, as I have told you, and to the flea market, as I have told you as well, but I have not recounted yet what draws me to the flea market, so allow me to explain and let 
me come to the main point of what I want to say. For inside these telephone shops there are smaller cabins  with telephones  and that is where I leave my drawing papers, where the people who use the telephone scribble on them, without thinking, and later I gather them, to live with them. And at the same time, I harvest traces with my glueing tape, which is a roll of sticky transparent paper. And these traces are my friends. I read them, I study them, I look at them for many years. It is my favourite thing to do. And they become my fellow workers, my companions, just like you guys are surrounded with friends and collaborators. For it is a strange and lonely world we live in, far away from our father and mother and siblings, far away from our city of birth and far away from our old friends. So I adopt collaborators everywhere, to make my work.

 

And now I come to the second important thing in my method, in my manner of making paintings. And it is 
a market. Because when I swiftly wander through the city, I always head for the flea market, where I hope to encounter more people, more objects and, especially, paintings. For many painters have made small paintings, on wooden board and on canvas, and other people use these paintings to decorate their dwellings, but at some point, they get rid of them, and people gather them, and bring them to the market. And it is a strange place, this market, because here people don’t sell flowers, or vegetables, or animals, or knives, or baskets, or earthenware. For they only sell used stuff, old things, sometimes more than one hundred years old: irons, cogwheels, vases, sledges, masks, wooden spoons, lace, clothing, etchings, books, paintings, fossils, stuffed animals, bones of ancient creatures, needles from the Ice Age, one thousand year old objects from China, furniture from your times… Objects from all times and places come together here, after a long life of ups and downs, ins and outs, standing and falling, being cherished and being forgotten, from all times and from all over the world they come together here to get a second chance, their last chance of resurrection. And all people who come here, if they have patience, a good mind and a clear eye, can find something of value to them, which they can acquire and take home. And if they have no money, they can wait until the market is over, or come back the next week, and wait again, until the coveted object falls into their lap. And this is what I want to say, because this place is very important to me.

 

When I entered the storage cabin of the painting school in Ethiopia, it seemed I came out of the stuffy cabin of society. O the smell of oil paint and a gathering of paintings waiting to be outed, to be shown! In this cabin I started to listen to paintings. And when I arrive at the second-hand market, a similar bliss comes over me. Everywhere you go, you find paintings. Old ones and new ones, fresh ones and old ones, big and small, torn and repaired, dark and pale, stained or scratched, pristine or peeling off. They’re not yours. Their nobody’s and everyone’s. Anybody can pick them up and study them, weigh them, smell them, talk to them, dance with them. Sometimes they are wet, sometimes they have been wet many times, but are dry again. They are living beings, whispering things, singing things. I developed a way to listen to them, to open myself for their stories.

 

When I first arrived in Europe, everything was strange to me: the streets, the houses, the people, the food. Everything changed: what I saw, what I ate, what I drank, what I thought. I was young and lively, but I had been brainwashed and hypnotised by Hollywood, the home country of magic boxes. I had weird expectations. But when I discovered the flea market, it was like a homecoming. All the objects taught me about my new life, about the past, about the future. They were a blessing from the past, opening the present. And my dearest friends, of course, were the paintings. Some of them were silent, some of them laughed, some of them were crying, some of them begged me to take them home. And I did.

 

Typically, they were lying on the cobblestones, sometimes on a carpet. At the end of the market people leave them, smash them, trample them. I looked at them, listened to them and saved them from the rain and the dust, from people who rip them out their frames or cut out the canvases to reuse the support. If I am too late, I pick up the cut-out canvases and bring them to my studio. I pick up the paintings that have been ripped out of the frames and take them with me, taking care not to be bitten by the nails at the corners that had fixed them to the frames. (Pain-things they were, sometimes.)

 

And in my studio they all meet. My studio is the laboratory, the experiment-place, the research-place, where the drawings and traces of the phone shops meet the paintings from the flea market and live together, talking to each other, talking to me, recounting stories, inventing lives, creating images and textures by joining and splitting, fission and fusion, intermingling and contaminating, hiding and revealing, mystifying and clarifying. 

 

For this is the modern era: we are all connected, people from all places, ages and gender identities. Things old and things new, things known and unknown. But we don’t get heavy. Swiftly we go, with long skinny legs, like stilt-walkers, like happy insects we go, and make. And all this I wrote in Amharic, which has many words that sound the same but have different meanings, as in many languages, but in our country we enjoy this, we dream of double meanings, and we talk in secrets. And thus wax and gold are one and the same thing, for no jewellery is cast without wax, and no wax is made without the golden sun, the mother of painting. And the sound of a word is like the cast of a meaning, and one cast can have many meanings. And I am the wax and the world is the gold, and I want my works to be like bees.

 

Anyway, I have to stop writing now. I hope to continue soon for I still have many things to tell you.

 

Greetings!

 

Ermias & Hans

Molenbeek-Montagne de Miel, 22 November 2024