Never Been Abroad

Category: Dreamt

The Dreamt room holds the foreign places I have never been to — cities and far landscapes built from films, photographs, documentaries and other people’s memories rather than from any visit of my own. It is a standing record of armchair travel and Fernweh: the abroad longed for from a desk and drawn in charcoal, because I have never been abroad and have no photograph of my own to show. These are the places I keep meaning to go to, and somehow never do. Start with Zürich, Venice or New York.

  • Charcoal sketch of a wide Singapore bayfront skyline of varied glass towers along the water, ships massed on the strait under a heavy tropical sky - never been abroad

    Singapore

    An engineered tropical city-state — order, glass and greenery conjured out of equatorial swamp in a single lifetime; the cleanest, most arrived city there is.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a dry city spreading to the foot of high snow mountains, a blue dome and minarets among the rooftops - never been abroad

    Tehran

    Ancient Persia at the foot of snow mountains — a place the world only shows me through its politics. I want the older thing beneath: gardens, blue tile, tea.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a great flat plaza and cathedral, the city spreading to two snow-capped volcanoes on the horizon in hard light - never been abroad

    Mexico City

    A vast modern city sinking slowly into the drowned lake-capital of a vanished empire — the dead kept close to the living, two volcanoes on the edge of sight.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a curving canal, a humpbacked bridge and a row of tall leaning gabled houses reflected, a few bicycles, low cloud - never been abroad

    Amsterdam

    Amsterdam is a city built below the sea and held at a tilt — ring canals, leaning gabled houses, bicycles past counting. I dream of all that cool water from the hot plains.

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  • Charcoal sketch of grey zinc rooftops and chimney pots running to the iron lattice tower in haze, a glimpse of the river - never been abroad

    Paris

    The most pictured city on earth, the world’s default dream of elsewhere — I have seen Paris ten thousand times and not once. Saturation is its own distance.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a harbour of white sails under a tall slender tower, green volcanic cones behind the low city, islands on the water - never been abroad

    Auckland

    A city built across dozens of dead volcanoes, strung between two oceans at the far edge of everything — as far as Sydney, and then further still.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a glass-tower skyline on the water with snow mountains rising right behind it, a seaplane low over the harbour - never been abroad

    Vancouver

    A young city where the mountains come straight down to the sea — glass towers under snow peaks, rainforest and ocean pressing in at the green edge of the New World.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a small northern town of low rooftops above a broad bay, a long snow-streaked mountain ridge across the water under a pale wide sky - never been abroad

    Reykjavík

    I was born into heat and crowd, so the place I dream of hardest is the emptiest one: Reykjavík, a bright little town at the rim of the world under far too much sky.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the sail-roofed opera house and the great arched harbour bridge across a wide harbour, ferries low on the water, headlands beyond - never been abroad

    Sydney

    Sydney sits on the far underside of the planet — the longest flight there is, the seasons and the stars turned upside down. I dream of it for the distance alone.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the grey Thames, a bridge and a domed cathedral or clock tower in haze, gulls, low cloud - never been abroad

    London

    The foreign city I know best without ever seeing it — read my whole life in a borrowed language I made my own. I write even this in the tongue it sent us.

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