The setting

Going nowhere seemed like a great, yet basically implausible idea in the beginning. After all, we had already decided to focus the whole of our efforts on making La Cite illuminaire a reality. Taking off to the deserts of Zaragoza for a week of rambunctious activity, art and all that jazz, just didn't seem like the road to success at the moment. Besides, festivals such as this one merely amount to enjoying someone else's creation, which, while great, can't really compete with the joy of attempting to make something wonderful yourself. The situation was complicated, however, because two of our closest friends were traveling through Europe on their honeymoon and had decided that they, and therefore we, were going. Then, as is often the case in our particular way of life, something great happened. We discovered a plan and in fact simultaneously found a title that would allow us to keep our focus, keep our friends and keep our life interesting enough to keep making interesting art. We would go nowhere with nothing and come back with something from everywhere.

The plan

The plan was exciting to consider. We would simply forge the two ideas into one using poetic license as the glue and inspiration as the excuse. We would go onwards to Nowhere with our friends but we would also pick up junk along the way. Junk, being our own peculiar muse and material for our work, would be collected in transit. Our plan was to leave with nothing more than intentions and the necessary tools to alchemize the things we wanted to find into the things we wanted them to be. What did we want find? We wanted to find metal that would serve as the skeleton of our tree and wood for a box. There was hardly enough room in the modest station wagon we were bringing to allow for the kind of junk scooping freedom we wanted, so we included a sub-plan to build and attach a large box to the top of the car. Just as Alrington Seward once said: "Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You drive home in it. You sit in your home, staring into a box. It erodes your soul, while the box that is your body inevitably withers... then dies. Where upon it is placed in the ultimate box, to slowly decompose." Despite loving this quote we tend think of boxes a bit differently.

The Journey

We left Firenze with the highest of expectations. La Cite had agreed to help fund our build and the ideas for the tree were popping through the roof of the car as we drove. It was exciting to be on the road again. After months spent either in front of a computer or halfway underground in the workshop, the idea of having adventures once again was showering our minds with the possibilities that surely lay ahead.

There are three modes of traveling that we know of.

• The HOWist approach:
  How are we going to get there? Where are we going to sleep along the way? How much money is it going to cost? How, who, when, where, what etc…. All answered beforehand to minimize the struggle of traversing landscapes to reach a destination. It's sort of an equation approach to moving around and it's definitely destination oriented. Usually the goal of a HOWist is similar to that of mathematicians who are forever seeking more and more efficient ways to solve problems in order to achieve quicker solutions. If there was a HOWist travel guide, it could easily bear the title "Solving the transportation equation in order to achieve the maximum number of destination solutions given different constraints (e.g. time, money, comfort etc..)".
• The TAOist approach:
  To enter a journey with no plans whatsoever to be the veritable "leaf on the river" or the wind in the tornado. It's an approach usually only adopted by those with nothing and the scary uncertainty of it is enough to ward off most people who can afford to travel from doing this. It is like letting the universe take the driver's seat for a little while. It is the antithesis of the HOWist approach. It is great at bringing about surprise and interesting events while traveling, it's also a great way to get stuck sleeping in the car, run out of gas, get lost, get taken advantage of and go completely broke before you get anywhere. If they had travel guide it would be called "Not buying/reading this book is the first step towards understanding the Taoist approach to traveling".
• The CHAOist approach:
  If the HOWist approach is far too goal oriented for anything interesting to actually happen and the TAOist approach is far to wishy-washy to actually accomplish the important goals of the trip, then the CHAOist approach is the synthesis of the two approaches. Entering the river of TAOism feels like a betrayal of ones own values and desires. The rigid route of HOWism feels like you may as well have just looked at video of Notre Dame from the comfort of an armchair. CHAOism is an approach to traveling that we were practicing long before we knew what it was. It's The TAOist river with options. Flowing through the river of circumstances but hopping out whenever you damn well please and finding another river, airplane, experimental all-terrain vehicle or whatever else comes along in order to achieve your goals. It's traveling with the destination on your mind but not consuming it. If the CHAOist had a travel guide it would be called " The who's how guide to getting where you what".

Perhaps if we had defined travel styles to ourselves as clearly as we have here we may have been able to prevent the trip outward from becoming such a disappointment. Of course, causality/life doesn't work that way and we had to discover the flaws in our road philosophy before we could revise it. We had a hard time with this part of our trip. We truly thought we were TAOist travellers and that the secret to a good time on the road was to remove all expectations and to let the trip unfold itself as we floated along and kept a watchful eye for signs of excitement. But we soon found ourselves being helplessly swept along in the most HOWist of travel manners (our least favorite kind if you couldn't tell). We had discovered a terrible flaw in the TAOist approach to traveling. Basically,if you want to take the TAOist approach, then you had better be prepared to play the victim because the moment you start interacting with a HOWist, you are going to be doing what they're doing. Unfortunately for us, our friends were/are the very definition of HOWist travelers and because we had never been stuck in a car with them for a long period of time, this came as an awful surprise.

But, after all, we had things to do along the way and a limited amount of time to do it. The festival of San Fermin in Pamplona and the Basque coast capital of San Sebastien were waiting for us, there was a house in Arles, France where we had been given permission to stay, materials to be gathered and, of course, an obscure art festival in the desert that we still had to find and to survive. There was a lot do and plans seemed almost necessary, even to us. In the end we did all those things and more, found lots of metal along the way to fashion our skeleton, swam in an ocean with actual waves and we even met a guy named Jesus who let us stay with him and his beautiful white kitten.

A good trip by most standards. So why were we let down?Basically we had expected to meet the unexpected but all we had done on the trip so far was manage to get everything done on some preconceived list. Nothing much new, nothing much learned, nothing too interesting. Art for us is new, art for us is education, art for us must above all be interesting. All the questions were clear and as a result all the answers were too obvious to be fun. A checklist adventure is no more fun than a successful trip to the grocery store. But contrast is necessary for recognition. Perhaps the greatest thing about the trip out was watching this shadow get weirder and weirder as it rippled alongside us..

And then, alas, something unexpected happened..

It was a dusty road we had to travel through as we headed out of Zaragoza into the wilderness. There was a last stop to stock up on food and then at long last, something actually happened. The car began to sputter and spurt and, without explaining anything to the passengers, it simply quit working and had to be pulled over to the side of the road for inspection. It wasn't a big deal since both men in the car knew something about internal combustion and there was enough tools in the trunk to solve whatever problem it might be with a minimum of time, effort and money. It may have been frustrating to break down only a few kilometers (something like 5 km) from the entrance to the festival but I would argue that this was the first real moment that all parties concerned started to enjoy the trip.

We popped the hood. Tried a few things, got it to start and rolled down the road a little ways. It died again. We, again, popped the hood hit something with a hammer until the car started again and we drove a little further. We did this about 3 times, slowly inching our way over the 5 km stretch between us and the festival. Each time the car would start we would all get extremely excited and give each other a wild chest bump thinking we had finally solved the problem and 3 times in a row we were duly informed by an unsatisfied motor that we had not yet found the solution.

It was the beginning of something beautiful. You see, problems are a welcome addition to the Okhaos crew, especially when they are unexpected and require us to get creative. The solution to this particular problem was to take out a sensor and swab a tiny wire with a q-tip to clean it off.As we finally closed the gap between us and the dusty festival where we would undoubtedly sink into depths of afilth we'd rarely known, it seemed as if the Tao had sent a little reminder to keep an eye on our hygiene.

It was just the perfect introduction to the place.When we showed up and began to inquire about whether it was possible to begin working on the sculpture and where we were greeted with "Ooh, are you the guys who were stuck a ways back", we would at this point confidently reply "yeah, well nothing a q-tip couldn't fix" which is the kind of statement that opens up doors in the kind of place we were at. They gave us access to their generator, permission to set up in the most central spot on the grounds and lent us tools and advice to boot. This was all unexpected but gladly welcomed.

We began to unpack our things in the middle of the opening night of the festival, until the next morning, when things began to heat up (nearly 40C in fact). We started to feel that the rigidness of the journey was falling away. There was a sense of freedom and wonders that awaited us over the next few days. We say freedom but in fact we were wholly captivated by our creation. We spent nearly every waking moment working on the tree and most moments thinking about it. The friends we made were people who helped us along the build and the best times we had were the moments in which we could see/feel our pile of junk growing into a tree.

I suppose we appeared to be strange characters, which is surprising considering it's a festival known for it's strange characters. For 3 days in a row there was little more than a pole sticking out of the ground attached to a washing machine buried in the sand. I remember hearing this group of Italians saying "I don't really get it, they are out there working on it all day but nothing really seems to happen". But something was happening and as far as we were concerned it was something great.

Forge 10 and the Chao

"What was plan A if you hadn't found someone with a forge while you were out here?"
Metalworking is serious business, people will tell you. Driving out to the desert with a bunch of junk metal and intending to make something out of it is ambitious to say the least. Our version of preparation before we set out was to bring a small propane torch, a pipe bender, and the experience of combining, surroundings with Archimedean wisdom. This would have been fine if our pile of metal didn't contain things like hardened steel roof supports and thick gauge bed frames amongst other things. Ambition is one the staples of our adventures and our projects but it became clear, after a few different leverage setups and our ludicrous attempts to soften up some of our heavier pieces with the tiny torch we brought, that we were going to have to choose between a weaker tree that didn't involve some of our favorite finds, or a fairly straight and boring skeleton with some ugly kinks in it. But Jeremy is often saying that all dichotomies are false and, in fact, a third alternative soon arose to raise us from the ashes of our disappointment.

We started constructing the piece despite our frustration and immediately ran into a small attachment problem. At this point we wanted to use a stainless steel drum from a torn apart washing machine as the base, allowing the tree to spin around on the spin bearing but we also wanted to be able to take it apart for transport. In our initial solution there was a difficult welding, and while telling someone about it they suggested that the Blacksmith camp would probably be our best bet.

.. the Blacksmith camp?!!

We were a little surprised/excited about the answer we'd gotten and we found our way over to this wonderful camp to have a little chat with them. It was a bit unsettling as we approached this group of cockney London gruffians whose style of dress and manner seemed straight out of a Mad Max film…. It was rather surreal. This scary bunch of guys, however, turned out to be the friendliest, most interesting and helpful people we would meet on our odyssey. They had endeavored to bring two small propane-fed forges out to the desert along with a pair of anvils and all the necessary tools to accomplish whatever metallic feats we might have imagined. Turned out that their welder had broke and they were desperately in need of a replacement one, which we were happy to lend them.

It was like a mirage, too good to be true. Not only did the trip seem worth it at this point, but it seemed completely necessary. We would never have used a forge back at our workshop because we simply wouldn't have thought of it. On top of that we had exactly what they needed, when they needed it and we were therefore able to immediately gain their good graces. Solidifying our friendship with a much needed tool loan and an excited interest in their craft we acquired their welcome permission to use the two propane forges they had strangely hauled from the back alleys of Bristol, England to the barren wasteland of the Zaragoza desert.

Working with 2000+ deg C forge fire out in this wasteland may have been uncomfortable to the body but it was simply beautiful to run into the strange opportunity as far as our minds were concerned. Watching the thick steel sections of metal we had collected become red hot and take on the plasticity of clay was something on the order of a mystical experience.

As artists who begin with dreams and work with a variety of mediums it is endlessly gratifying to watch the transformation of possibilities. Things go from no to yes, from can't to can, from no way to this way, all the time for us and it's great. It was not the first time that we saw a seemingly insurmountable obstacle crumble before the wonders of happenstance. Maybe it's happened a lot but the joy of discovering the Chao has never dulled for us. It was a wonderful example amongst many such events on our journeys of how the Chao always provides, provided you remain open to the idea of a solution and never ever give up.

There was a man taking pictures of us as we proceeded to forge pieces of steel into the shapes we willed them. Having talked to us before about our sculpture and having some knowledge of our situation he looked at us incredulously and asked with smirk: "What was plan A for the tree, supposing you hadn't run into a forge in the middle of the desert?"

We looked at each other and smiled as we both silently agreed with each other that this had, in fact, been plan A from the beginning. Maybe not a forge, maybe not here maybe nothing to do with tree at all but we had always intended on discovering something wonderful something chaoistic that would give this art piece the story, and therefore, the life we wanted for it.

The last night we were out there in the midst of the festival we spent some time staring at the creation thus far. It strangely kept flipping back and forth between something beautiful and a simple pile of junk, hunked together haphazardly. In those moments, while we were scrutinizing our hard work, this new piece of reality seemed like a piece of chaos pie that could taste however we managed to imagine it.

The return Journey

The inspiration for this project was an earlier work called “Names are one face of history”. It involved sculpting a tree out of olive tree branches and it was our intention to cover the skeleton we had constructed in the same style. Hundreds of olive branches from thick to thin, that would be braided together, fashioned and laid ready to give form to the tree. To do this, we headed to the only place we knew of to get olive branches this time of year, the small village of Calice Ligure.

Our new workstop was a small town with terraced olive tree ridden hillsides accounting for the majority of the visible land surrounding the summer house of Lyyli's family. It was another wonderful happenstance that we were able to discover a stock of olive branches not currently engaged in the business of growing olives. The pruning is typically done sometime in March and the burning not long after. Luckily the neighbors had been lazy this year and there were thousands of prunned branches lying unburned (it was July) on their terraces that they were only too happy to let us take.

We gathered hundreds of the branches and spent some time weaving them together into braids of 3. Preparing the material this way is a perfect warm up for what comes next as the mere act of feeling the branches bend in your hand as you attempt to twist them together gives an excellent sense of sinusodality, which is what we were going for since the beginning of the build. The branches, when weaving them, will only follow the wishes of the weaver so far before they break. Olive branches are remarkably flexible branches but they are they are limited nonetheless and they are limited by the bounds of sinusodality. Sinusodality is a concept Lyyli has brought to our team and one that has been universally employed at every level of every project we've ever done together.

Working Sinusodally begins to come easily when you reach the right state and after twisting branches for a day and letting our hands and minds learn the particular sinusodality of the branches we were working with. We went to work wrapping the tree in its skin and it wasn't too long before we had something we both loved. The only thing left to do was strap it to the roof of Harvey (the car) and take it the rest of the way back to Florence.

Driving on the freeway with this strapped to the top of the car was somewhat out of the question, both as law abiding citizens and as artists with a vested concern in their creation's safety. It was for this reason that we decided to make the slow, winding drive along the Mediterranean coast our route back to Firenze, a route that would take us some 12 hours of driving considering the speed we intended to go (60 km/h max). As we always try to do, we attempted to turn the burden of the long drive into a boon and driving along the coastline we found some beautiful stones that would become the base for our tree. Though we never found them where we thought we would however, it also became clear to us that Pietra Santa is called so because all its stones are like the saints. Maybe they were there once, but they are nowhere to be seen now.

Home at last

We had a skeleton, we had given the skeleton a body and we had given it all something to stand on. But those things are only foundations; it still remained to give the piece life, to give it light. We arrived on the day before we had agreed to put it up at La Cite and we had driven all night. Knowing this was the most important piece of work we had done so far we simply locked ourselves up in the workshop and kept working until we completely ran out of time.

We spent the next 48 hours completely committed to the project. We wired up more than 50 high luminosity LED lights and routed them through roses we created (condenser tubing from the back of old refrigerators are the stems and inner tubes from old bicycle tires became the petals). Mirrors were broken and fashioned to wire that would allow us to hang them, like leaves from the tree's branches. Many things worked and many things didn't. New ideas came up as old ones were thrown out. It was frustrating, it was awful and it was exhilarating. We fought with the material and we fought with each other until there was no more time to fight. We loaded up all we could, stopped at tire shop to get the battery container (used tire) and we left to place our tree at its new home.

We showed up around dusk to La cite after almost a month of not even talking to them and nervously inquired about where we should put the sculpture. We had worked so hard and had such a story to tell but there was no one really to tell it to, no one even seemed interested. The night we set up there was a small musical event titled "homeless bohemians". It was basically two Germans in their mid 30's with a keyboard, some pre-recorded sample sets and some very bad lyrics to songs that were probably meant to be ironically cute. We worked in the shadows.

We worked until almost 2 in the morning, hanging pieces of mirrors and twisting the wires through the tree. The concert was charming and was, in fact, ironically cute. At 2 o'clock the three looked… absolutely awful. It had looked beautiful before we had placed the lights, the mirrors and wires all over it, but now it resembled a Christmas tree. It looked as thoughtlessly and cheaply decorated as a Christmas tree at least. We received a couple congratulations as we left but there wasn't much excitement in them and even if the kind words were meant, they weren't welcome. We weren't happy and therefore we weren't finished.

We spent the next 9 days reworking and redesigning the tree. We were at the café most evenings and most days, playing with electronics, attaching more of this, removing some of that. As parties and summer activities went on around us, we worked. We worked until we loved what we had done. We continued on with our craft without encouragement and through disappointment. We poured everything we had into this three: money, time, labor, and effort.. but we now love it as it stands.