Being alone in the boshut, it felt like anything was possible | Leila Anderson

Earlier this year I had a call from Marieke van Rooy, inviting me into a little collaboration, and a stay at the boshut of Sonja Prins. She thought it would be my kind of thing – the place, and the creative time alone. I am mother to a small child, and live with my Dutch artist husband in a small, woody area in Belgium. But I am South African, from Cape Town, and my natural habitat is low fynbos and rocky mountains. These European woods are an exotic thing to me. They are the woods of fairytales and British kids books. Walking through Sonja’s wood, drinking a coffee outside the boshut in the morning, inside a dense field of birdsong, I was living inside a story. I was even lucky enough to one morning see a weasel pop out from under the hut – an ultimate exotic animal, and my nickname as a child.

Maybe it’s was the woods, or the slow browsing through Sonja Prins’ life (in poetry), or the many works of fiction that I’ve been reading over the last while – probably all of these things and more – but there were things brewing inside me, slipping between life and fiction, desire and actuality.

​I came equipped for my stay with two axes and a recently written text. I spent my days at the boshut chopping wood, walking, writing, eating. I read poetry also, but interspersed it with two bestseller novels, both of which have been turned into films. And the performance that I was developing during my time at the boshut, The Woodcutter, has something of this filmic quality to it. I enjoy feeling my thoughts shift to words and my words shift to image and the images taking on life in my mind, like an internal book-to-film adaptation.

As I chopped wood, with a long splitting axe that made my back muscles scream, I imagined myself as someone else. An alter ego was emerging. And in the sweaty, focused concentration of woodchopping, I felt strong, and sexy.

​Being alone in the boshut, it felt like anything was possible. A brief, odd adventure. A fleeting habitation of place and potential other lives. Aware, also, of the women who were here before me, each of them finding their own freedom and sense of possibility in the place. Open for ideas. Quiet, except for the fabulous, trilling, sometimes raucous calls of the birds and, perhaps, a glimpse into the private life of a weasel.
 
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Thank you to Marieke for the gift of this collaboration. Thank you to Eric and Claudette for making me feel a welcome part of the place, and taking care of all the practical things.
 
xx
Leila Anderson

Leila Anderson was te gast in AnnAtopiA AiR van 5 t/m 10 mei 2024 |  www.leilaanderson.com