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Monique Besten

Monique Besten

 

This is a safe haven for thoughts, ideas, images, try-outs, all the things that don't fit in my other blogs, the ones that are about specific projects.

Most recent articles

exercises in bein... 40

In a new light

The wind came out of nowhere and yellow leaves rained down in the sun. One got stuck on my black winter coat, like a brooch. A newborn was crying, the parents, seated at the table behind me, spoke soft words to reassure the baby that was wrapped in war...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 30

Today’s thoughts

FallingIn a month in which nobody familiar diedNot much happened, which was a big dealThe rain didn’t fall but the leaves didAnd when I tripped in the street one beautiful morning Landing face flat on the pavementI felt welcome almostThis world is not ...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 75

Weaving thoughts

 I like to tell myself I got as close to thinking like a sheep when I became obsessed by apples, but I don’t know if that is true. For weeks I walked with them and no walk was the same. It was the best part of the day, the two best parts of the da...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 85

A random day

 At 6.30 the darkness starts to lift and the blackbird sings his song. I don't know if it is the same one, the song sounds the same every morning and the bird looks the same but they might take turns and maybe they think the same about the person ...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 75

At the heart of things

First the world appeared and then it disappeared. Sometimes because it covered itself in darkness or hid in low hanging clouds. Sometimes because my gaze was directed inwards instead of outwards. Nature does that. It draws you in. And when you withd...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 40

Cookie overload

Some days even while starting the day with a walk through the city instead of opening the computer one can be confronted with cookie overload.

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 90

Identifying seeds

I often wonder what the use is of writing about a walk after you made it. It is kind of a walk in itself but much harder (or harder in a different way) than the actual moving through the world that is the starting point for this new adventure. The l...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 75

A stone protruding from the ground

There was a small stone in my mail box. It was sent to me all the way from Serbia. Freya Gabie had passed it while walking into Čačak and picked it up. It was dark grey, although that might not have been the original colour. It could have been brown or...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 75

High time to build a dragonfly

I read a beautiful text by a friend on Facebook yesterday. We never met. But five years ago she sent me a big envelope. I never replied to it properly but I take it with me to every new home. I took it out today and broused through it. I put on the rin...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 40

When I had wings

Sometimes the name of things, people, animals, are exactly what you see. I was reminded of that yesterday, when being asked: what is that black bird roaming around under that tree? I sang the first line of a Beatles song. And today, remembering it, and...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 70

On the edge of the middle of nothing

I failed. I was supposed to be at a beautiful city garden at 12.00 to watch a silent movie with a soundtrack made by a dj and drink vermut afterwards. I had reserved a ticket a long time ago. I left in time. I skipped the first metro entrance because i...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 85

Mercury

The day you decide to drag your big camera to the sea at 6.50 a.m. to be there in time for the sunrise is always a cloudy day. But it doesn’t matter. The appearance of the sun is something to watch, the red and orange and pink that come with it on a cl...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 40

Random acts of kindness versus random acts of violence

It was the first day that was longer than the night. Yesterday it counted 11 hours, 59 minutes and 12 seconds. Today the sun rose at 6.58 and set at 19.00. I watched it appear. Then read Rebecca Solnit. “I am, we each are, the inmost of an endless seri...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 65

A storyteller about storytelling

"What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all di...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 70

Garden feelings

Woke up with garden feelings. Walked to the sea to shake them off. Couldn't. Bought some more.

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 55

Alice in Wonderland

It is very possible in this city that you walk home hungry in the light of a supermoon and you pass a tray with small chocolate croissants leaning on a garbage bin asking to be eaten. And you try one and although it isn't as fresh as it was this mor...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 85

Poetry

On my way to the beach I found a collection of poems for children, left next to a garbage container. Most of them written by well-known Catalan poets, some originally French or German and some very old ones without a known author. The poems describe th...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 95

Next steps (a walk to the COP 26, 2020)

“Some people would rather have wings but we don’t, we have feet. We were born to walk. Scientists say that walking gave us our brain capacity, walking turned us into the human beings we are. Walking made it possible for us to have the desire to fly and...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 70

to bumble

  “I love a little bumble in the morning” I had planned to write and post, thinking about bumble bees bumbling around. You have to be careful about what you write though. What does it really mean, to bumble and was that really what I was doing? Wh...

Monique Besten
exercises in bein... 75

Art and nature

I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before. Or maybe I had but I had failed to recognise it. My first thought was that is was new, although I couldn’t imagine it was. And the bronze placque in the street told me it had been here even before I visited the...

Monique Besten
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thoughts

Collection · 2 items

pedestrian acts

By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.

Added by Asli Ozgen-Tuncer
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