Arles • Japan • Clipped

Why bring Vincent van Gogh's voice to life today? What does it do to that person, to bring out the particularly strong aspects of his letters from Arles, and to write poems on them, to let them collide with words from today?
Van Gogh's outlook on life contains powerful contradictions and, above all, deeply felt attitudes and commitment to the world. It is global, romantic, realistic, raw, holistic, religious, uncompromising. Just like his view of art.

Everything he touches in his letters - as in his pictures - becomes timeless and "more-than-modern". It reaches for a future in which not only disasters and crises are seen, but also an intense, clenched hope for human communities, care for our planet, an opening of the horizons in each individual and in societies.

In the hectic rush of work that Vincent van Gogh experienced during his years in Arles, Japanese art forms an important source of inspiration. Japan is Van Gogh's image, his symbol of the pure, sharp observation and intuition that creates an art "more real than reality". Man needs the same abilities if he is to renew the world around him and live differently. You have to dare the leap out of the "ordinary" and think/rethink the world in different, strong colors.

Klippede (the name of a collection of houses in a colorful mid-Zealand landscape) is the place where a poet in 2017 simultaneously experiences Van Gogh's words and thoughts, and his own records of reality and the present, as sensed reports from the ubiquitous "global village ”.
The different times and places merge without much resistance.
It actually occurs to the poet that Arles, Japan and Klippede can ally themselves and talk together in that way.

The so-called utopias: people's strong ideas about possible, different societies, societies built on community, empathy and unprejudiced intelligence, for example, - it is true that they are drummed down, mocked and crucified repeatedly, but utopia's paths to new thinking can still be found , in art as well as in life.