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THE LAND
CHAPTER 2 

Beatrix (Bix) Fife

2019.11.13

Some people keep a beautiful memory of a place after they have left it and some create a beautiful image of one before they have been there. Some people do both and some people do none !

The place I grew up in, even now I dream of it and want to go back there. I keep its beautiful image in my mind. The country where I just arrived, I had a beautiful image of it before coming. The mountains, the sea, the kind people. It is such a wonderful place, everybody says, and I think so too.

 

I arrived a few weeks ago and it is already Winter. Autumn was short and cold, smashing red and yellow. Now all the leaves have fallen from the trees. It snows and it is dark. People around me speak the same language that I speak at home, but I notice that it is different. The way they look at things, the rhythm, what they talk about. It is slower, and spoken from another viewpoint. They speak about where they come from, small or big cities by the sea or in the mountains, what they do and what they like. When I tell them something, they seem to understand but not why I say it. What they say means something else to me and what I say means maybe something else to them. Their image and my image of a word seem different.

They have a lot of silences in between the sentences, which I am not used to. There are few jokes.

Little by little, I discover that my world and their world are different, through the same words we say.

I tell them that I grew up in another country, but I belong to this one too. They look at me strangely and say

– I couldn’t find out where you were from.

– You are different.

-You have a foreign accent and name.

 

I start missing my friends from my previous country. I miss the things that I was doing before. I miss the laughs, the books, the sounds, the talks, the food, the rhythms and the melodies of where I was before.

Sitting on the carpet in my room with my legs crossed, I make a little altar with pictures and small things that I brought from where I was living before. I am very tired, and my body doesn’t want to move, feeling very heavy. Laying on the floor, I gaze sideways at the altar of my past. I will soon be 18 years old. Outside the window, the day is dark, the white snow dampens everything into a deep cotton-like silence.

I don’t have words to express what I feel. The light outside the window is blue. My room’s carpet is blue. I am feeling blue. It is called depression.

I made this painting a few years later, when I was able to start to express what I was feeling.

Oil and pastel on paper, 27 cm x 24 cm

 

CONTINUES NEXT MONTH

Beatrix (Bix) Fife
Beatrix (Bix) Fife プロフィール

Born in Stockholm, Bix grew up in Rome in a Norwegian, British and Italian family, speaking 3 languages. At the age of 7, her family moved to Paris, where she completed her secondary studies in French schools and also learned to play the classical flute.

While studying at university and management school in Oslo she also started to paint and to do theatre. She was a trainee for 6 months in NYC at the New Dramatists’ studio. She then studied art in Oslo and at the Fine Arts Academy of Budapest. In 1990 she won a prize in an art competition in Austria, giving her the opportunity to come to Japan. In Kyoto, she studied Japanese calligraphy and worked with performance art between 1995 and 1999, with philosopher Michael Lazarin and musician Mamoru Katagiri (Marki) and played music for dance companies in the Kansai area from 1997 to 1999. She moved to Brussels in 1999 continuing to paint, to exhibit works and to give concerts. As well as learning to play jazz at the Music Academy of Brussels, she played in the Bix Medard electropop group and founded the Brussels Language Activities, school of language and culture. She received a Master’s degree in Sciences du Langage at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, in 2008.

After moving back to Tokyo in 2010 she started Bix&Marki, a musical duo of original French songs. Bix is a painter, a singer, a musician and a linguist. She sings, plays the flute and writes the lyrics of all the Bix&Marki songs. While working on her music and painting, Bix teaches French at universities, specializing in role-play and language through art and personal expression.