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 dense low city along a wide brown river, scooters and markets below, a colonial spire, heat-haze - never been abroad

    Ho Chi Minh City

    Ho Chi Minh City — the old Saigon — a hot riverine city of a million scooters and French-colonial bones, shadowed by a war I grew up watching on the news.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a grand columned gate at the head of a wide boulevard, the low city beyond in grey light - never been abroad

    Berlin

    Berlin is a city cut in half and stitched back together within living memory — its hardest history left out in the streets rather than shut in a museum.

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  • Charcoal sketch of red-tiled rooftops tumbling down hills to a wide river estuary, a great red bridge beyond in soft light - never been abroad

    Lisbon

    Lisbon is a city of light and tiles at the western edge of Europe — a faded sea-empire that once sailed off the end of the map, and the man who never sailed at all.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the great ruined amphitheatre and ancient ruins among ochre rooftops, a dome standing beyond in warm haze - never been abroad

    Rome

    Rome is the city half my schoolbooks came from — a living town built on and out of the ancient world, antiquity underfoot among the traffic, never seen.

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  • Charcoal sketch of terraced green rice paddies stepping down a valley, a volcano standing beyond, palms, soft light - never been abroad

    Bali

    Bali is a small green Hindu island set in a vast Muslim sea — terraced rice, water temples, a volcano over the fields, and my own faith met in a strange far form.

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  • 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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