FAMILY STORIES OF CIRCLES AND SPIRALS
Circles/Spirals 1)
Memory of Grandpa Sherm
Spirals appeared in my mind as my Grandpa told me stories as a child about the immigrants from Scandinavia who were used to farming on mountains and fjords. Upon first immigrating to the Great Plains, the immigrants were laughed at for continuing to plant their crops in spirals, instead of the long rows favored by US Agriculture on the wide, flat plains of the Midwest. The story always made my Grandfather howl with laughter. When I draw spirals, I think of my Grandfather and how the land influences the people that live on it, and how that memory sustains or changes.
This story supported my thesis question because our conversations reference the cyclical nature of time that is made evident in my video editing. The spirals that my Grandfather conjured in my mind are also reflected through repeated spiral imagery in the cyanotype mobiles and within my videos, in particular the spiral drawn in snow in my video, Pledge Allegiance.
Circles/spirals 2)
Interview with Great Aunt Megan
Discussing our trip to Germany together in 2015, where I visited Berlin for the first time, and we visited extended family in Hamburg and Niedersachsen[1]. We also discussed our visit to the Immigration Museum in Bremen, where the vast majority of German emigrants left from, including our Ancestors. My direct Ancestor, Herman Friedrich Langhorst, left Germany because of changes to inheritance law with family farms. Once the first brother departed for Turtle Island, he eventually wrote his other brothers, Gerhard and Johann, about the economic opportunities available and they later also emigrated.
Once every generation or so, someone in our family from the US takes the trek across the sea to Germany to visit with relatives and, in particular, visit the old family farm and Bauernhof[2] in the small hamlet of Borg and surrounding hamlets where we have Ancestral farms or Bauernhöfe. The tradition in Niedersachsen when a building is constructed was to write on the outside front wall the year it was built and the residents. On our trip to Germany, people were very welcoming to the ”Americans” who had come looking for their Ancestral homes. The trip felt like moving in circles. The last family trip to Germany was taken in 1953, when my Grandmother was a teenager. She travelled with her Aunt Minnie to visit our German family.
While I was in Niedersachsen, visiting family, I began to consider Place-Memory for the first time. In my last conversation with my Grandpa Sherm before his death, he told me that “I thought all my life that I knew where home was-Minnesota. But the first time that I made it to Scandinavia, that was when I realized that my true home.” Resulting from this conversation I began to wonder how Place-Memory would influence my experience on this trip to visit distant family. Initially, I didn’t feel a particular connection to the quiet hamlets and large farms, but one day we went to the house where my direct Ancestor, Herman Langhorst, had lived. This property felt different, somehow it felt charged and oddly familiar. My Aunt Megan, Tante Hildegard and Onkel Hans were walking through the yard, speaking with the current owners while I took photos. I turned around and gasped, the scene in front of me, one that was so mundane, was a location that I was sure I had dreamt about. The familiar scene was an old wooden gate, and beyond that gate a dirt road, a copse of trees casting dramatic shadows and a rolling field behind it. I had dreamt this; I had been here before. This story supports my thesis questions in regards to circles of repeated actions of my Ancestors and Place-Memory. In addition, this story reinforced the way that time moves in a circle; my family trip to Germany in 2015 echoed my Grandmother’s family trip that she took in 1953.
[1] Lower Saxony
[2] German for farm house