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zoe introduces herself
where to start?
A european name - product of migration and integration: Zoe: greek word for ‘life’, absorbed into the English language as a girl’s name (virtually unpronounceable to the German ear). Svendsen: a danish surname, extremely common (virtually unspellable to the English eye). Great grandparents: from Wales, Italy, Denmark, Australia. Adult identity: divided architecturally and culturally between Cambridge and Berlin. Once you’ve entered whole heartedly into another culture, another frame, especially if that frame is bound by a language other than your own, you can never quite leave again. The pleasure today, of hearing two lads, no more than forteen, discussing cars down Broadley street of the Edgeware work as I’m on my way to work. All as usual: but I suddenly realise they are talking in German, and it makes me feel more at home.
I value my otherness in Berlin, but I encounter that city as home. In London it is precisely the opposite: I belong nationally and culturally, but I don’t feel at home - yet. It’s systematised hectic shocks me. I suspect I shall end up writing a lot about transport for this project: it seems ridiculously mundane, but I notice not only myself, but others too, defining their world by modes of transport. Movement around the city. Not simple in London. You never know when you start a journey when you are going to be able to finish it.
Expectations of the project: important to record from an early stage: I suspect that the cities we shall work in - and I’ve been to none before, other than Berlin - shall be more like London than Berlin. Berlin has an odd, peaceful busy purpose about it. It is a city of extremes, but these are contained by areas of the city and within political attitudes, and there are always people sitting in cafes - not obviously on business lunches. London is far more chaotic, a mass of individuals, struggling on to make sense of life - to live life at all - squashed up between the platform and the tube train. Extremes of life (and proximity to death) are lived out more explicitly on the streets of London. 1am, Saturday night, a desperate woman trying to sell a couple having an argument two plastic packed pieces of meat for a pound (1.5 euros) on a dark street corner. Pork chops? Who knows. People: sick, happy, in love, late, bored, tired, often tired, resigned, determined - swim in and out of your vision as you negotiate a path across the city to work.
Inevitably much of what I write for the next couple of months will route observation through comparison between London (present place of living) and Berlin (sense of home). I see London afresh through the eyes of someone to whom it is utterly foreign - I now know that cities don’t have to be like this. The question is: what are the decisive factors of living in a city? Any city? For out of that we can start to uncover the defining details that distinguish the varying cities.
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