Helgoland

When I think about Germany the last thing that might come to my mind is probably an island. Surprisingly, Jakob told me about this archipelago, where he's planning to go tomorrow in order to shoot a video for his next exhibition (Jakob lives in Kiel, close to the northern coast of the country ). According to Wikipedia, the locals speak an Heligolandic dialect of the North Frisian language called Halunder — how cool sounds that? The best thing I found so far about the island is the motto explaining its flag, so down to earth as naïf as "Green is the land, red is 'Kant' (edge), white is the sand. Those are the colours of Helgoland!", simply the colors you can find within its layers if you imagine it as a cake. Everything looks pretty in Helgoland: the houses, the boats, the grass, the police vans — oh wait. I always felt particulary interested on these kinds of micro-systems/climates, on how these geographical conditions develop people's minds, relationships or values. I instantly made a link between this image and the documentary 'Its the Earth, not the Moon' by the portuguese director Gonçalo Rocha, which starts with the aim of making a movie about everything on Corvo — the smallest island from the Azores Archipelago — its landscape, its cows, its people, their stories, their houses, their jobs, their thoughts, their circumstance of living on such a small place. I think that part of the seduction or fascination one can find within these narratives is the use of a small metaphor in order to comprehend a bigger reality, just like Lars Von Trier also uses the small village of Dogville or the plantation of Manderlay to illustrate and reflect on, among other ones, the concept of democracy. Imagining Grace departing from America on a boat with the gangsters to dock on this place for a new set of adventures is not hard to imagine. (And that cave on the left side, oh, it makes me think that the island is hollow, with a huge, complex and dark underground).