Thomas Imboden

The Unrecognized Father (I)

2008-06-22T10:55:00.008+02:00

I met Nuha last night in Zurich, and one of the issues in my "unrecognized" series came back into my mind.
    Nuha is one of three adopted daughters of mine, did you know that? Not really formally adopted as such, but very much part of the family. She was, in 1999 and 2000, one of the most enthusiastic students at Salaam School, when we lived in Malé (Maldives), a dancer. Not the most talented I would say, but the most persevering and determined. She became one of the four members of Salaam Dance Company (which is another story) and finally assistant teacher for Nicole Müller and then Deborah, the dance teachers from Switzerland.
    When we closed Salaam School and I left for Colombo with my "real" children, she kept on bugging us and pressing us to help her fulfill her dream of becoming a dancer. This resulted in quite some efforts to raise funds for her education, to find a place for her to study and get her career going. Hmmm, but we did not serve it to her on a silver platter: she had to go herself and do the presentations with sponsors in Malé, and some of them said yes!
    As a first step, she came to Sri Lanka while the fundraising drive was under way, and started several parallel dance courses: one at Deanna's ballet school, one with Sujeeva (yet another story!) in Latin and Freestyle, and the most intensive one with the famous Khema de Costa, in Kandian Dance, the classical traditional Sri Lankan upcountry school. After some frustration, Nuha left Deanna and took private classes with Mrs. Galina, a russian ballet teacher at the Russian Centre in Colombo. This went on for almost 9 months - you could say it was a pregnancy - until finally the funding and sponsoring came together.
    My very good Swiss friend and dance pioneer Malou Leclerc, was willing to take a risk with Nuha, and she allowed her to join the Performance Year in Switzerland, a class of actually completed young professional dancers from all over the world, whom she exposes to a severe training and individual coaching before sending them off to the reputed stages. A family in Neuhausen was hosting Nuha, Balair (now Belair) sponsored her ticket, and the school fees were donated by Maldivian sponsors.
    Long story short: Nuha ended up staying for two years. She then realized how tough dancing is as a profession, and went back to Maldives as the first ever professionally trained dancer of her country! She has since performed on stage numerous times in Maldives and abroad (e.g. in Berlin for the Tourism fair!), and is currently teaching hip hop and modern dance at the National Centre for the Arts in Malé. She has kept contact with many of her friends in Switzerland (most among them my son Andreas, her "brother"), and is visiting them regularly, sometimes combining it with workshop visits.
    Last autumn, she was invited by Elisabeth Moir International School in Colombo to choreograph the show "Breaking Bars", with my second son Nathan as director. I look forward to many more stints with her, and Nuha seems eager to take another look around in Colombo. She does not know yet that she is invited to be with us for the coming Christmas/New Year season, where she will finally meet one of her other "sisters" for the first time... (and that's another story as well!).

Me, The Unrecognized Banner Artist (II)

2007-12-07T07:28:00.000+01:00

The banners I selected for this second post have, with a few exceptions, been unpublished or rather uncirculated until now. Ever since I visited Sri Lanka first in 1983, I have been fascinated with Buddha statues. Their symmetrical and harmonic composition seems to draw my eyes and mesmerize me. During one of my research visits to the Ayurvedic Hospital outside Colombo, I saw a small damaged, cheap statue on top of a cupboard, and I took a snap with my then old analog Nikon - a picture that has survived and is now with a friend somewhere in Indonesia... I'm not a Buddhist, although I studied Buddhism - and in fact the Sri Lankan version of it, Theravada - during my University years in Zurich.

My new camera and this fascination resulted in a random number of photographs taken of Buddha statues during 2005 and 2006, usually small ones, and usually not in Sri Lanka, where they are plenty. Out of these, I developed some banners, mainly working with inverting images and adding them together, to enhance the effect of symmetry.

This was my first Buddha banner, based on o photograph by the German photographer Jean-Noël Schramm, who went in search of "surviving" Buddha statues after the Tsunami. During his exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Colombo, I took a picture of this one and manipulated it. The only such banner with a Sri Lankan Buddha, who miraculously remained unharmed in the tidal mayhem.

This ebony Buddha is Sri Lankan, but sits in a house in Switzerland, with a family who has spent many years in Sri Lanka. I was invited to a meeting of ex-SL residents in Switzerland, pretty close to a village I once lived in, and found this statue. As the meeting went on, I could not resist its attraction and took many pictures, then manipulated them.

This is my favorite Buddha banner. I discovered the tiny golden Thai style (hence also Theravada) Buddha in a shop window in Zurich, on my way from a friend to the railway station. All I remember is: it was a very quiet Sunday morning, the roads were deserted, and I was walking fast, until the view struck me. Out of another version of the golden Buddha, I designed a birthday present for Cora de Lang, an Argentinean artist friend living in Colombo.

This is most likely a Thai Buddha as well, discovered in a Thai restaurant in Zurich. I was invited for dinner by Thomas Hardegger, a college friend of mine, and his wife, during one of my visits to Switzerland. And there, behind my back, was the stone carved statue. In a way I was irritated to find a Buddha in a restaurant (what about the Buddha Bar?), but it seems it's the fashion now.

This Buddha was amazing, and for some unknown reason brought back memories of my psychedelic past (another blog post?), and of my past in general. It is taken in a restaurant as well, in Lucerne, Switzerland. I had intended to meet Lia, my once girl friend from college days in Sarnen, and to my surprise, she had also invited Marcel, my friend, and her former husband. In fact it had been him who had introduced me to Buddhism in 1974 or 75, when I was ready to jump from LSD to meditation, shortly before I discovered TM. He was a psychologist at that time, a Zen practitioner and teacher. A great revival meeting under the Buddha's watchful eyes!

This is the Buddha of Shaxi, in China. Amazing, how he reminds me of a Christian God statue of the Middle Ages. And a reminder that most of China was once Buddha-Land. The restoration of this particular one was done with the support of archaeologists from the Technical University of Zurich. I visited the exhibition documenting the excavation and preservation of the Shaxi site in Zurich, together with my son Andreas, himself a great photo manipulator (see the link to his Deviantart site).

Me, The Unrecognized Banner Artist

2007-11-17T11:20:00.001+01:00

Well, this heading is not quite accurate: I have been circulating my banner artwork with my e-mails quite regularly, and I have been getting encouraging comments on them here and there.

Designing "sleek" & "cool" banners for e-mail use has become a real hobby of mine, particularly after acquiring a digital camera and using my own pictures. (Consecutively, the banner output has dropped sharply after my camera became defunct...) I was partly inspired by the annoying experience of receiving huge e-mail image attachments, which took ages to download and hence turned out to be very impractical for e-mail use. I wanted to have images that fit the readers' e-mail box, show up immediately, are less than 100 KB and convey a pleasant or useful message.

Recently, it has become difficult to use these banners, since many have introduced filters that keep any embedded image files away from their inbox. Hope I will tackle this new challenge! Please give me some useful hints. I noticed that some spammers are able to get through the filters with image-like messages... My pledge however is: I don't want to abuse my reader's trust and lure them into buying some fishy products, I just want to convey my messages in a pleasant & eye catching manner...

Here are some samples!

This is a funny Easter banner, which I circulated in 2005. I was philosophizing around the issue of perception, and remembered the "four blind mice". The banner shows them with a fifth mouse, which I actually consider the "seeing" one...

This banner was taken on two occasions from the same bridge at the lake of Zurich, Switzerland. I spent almost two months there on new assignments. This was shortly after the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in late December 2004. I wanted to bring out the peaceful atmosphere, but also show the stark difference between winter and spring.

This is an early attempt at banner design, an Eid greetings banner for all my Muslim relatives and friends (I am the unrecognized Muslim, by the way - refer to one of my future blogs for this!).
The citation from the Qran at the top of the banner is actually a "translation" of the calligraphy, which is at the same time very modern and very ancient, referring to some Arabic font styles of the middle ages.
I soon abandoned vertical banners, since they are not reader-friendly.

This was one of my first banners in 2003. I took the pattern from a friend's website. She is a mosaic artist and has created many unusual, fantastic works of art in public places, parks and gardens.

These are my kids! I did this banner, since I was too lazy to send individual pics of my children to friends, and I kept it ready on my desktop, so I could easily drag it into any e-mail when responding to "how are your kids...".
Actually, a renewal is due now with updates, since Tamara turned 14 recently and Naaz is just about to turn 24...
Ehem, this is also an allusion to me as an unrecognized adoptionist (if this term exists).... another blog post then! 3 of the 4 are my "physical" kids, and one is "adopted".

This postcard was designed in Forcalquier, in Haute Provence, France, during our summer holiday there in 2006. Lurs is a medieval village on top of a hill, and I have spent many holidays there while my uncle and aunt had a house there (you can see it in the shade on the right of the clock tower).
The picture was taken by my son Andreas, and we did some patching up to erase a signboard in the foreground.

This banner was hardly circulated - a limited edition so to speak. I did it on Pentecost weekend itself, when I was at my mother's home. I stole the flower, a Pentecost rose, from the Internet and did some research into its meaning and health benefits...

Many of my current banners are work and project related. Actually, each event that I organize or am somehow involved in, gets its own banner!
They have proven to be quite effective communicators, and their circulation can go into thousands, depending on the event partners and their mailing lists, and of course depending on the mood of the recipients, who might spread them further among their friends.
This one is for the exhibition opening of "Oasis of Silence" (ref. www.oasisofsilence.net) in Bangkok, Thailand.

Me, The Unrecognized Poet (II)

2007-10-23T17:57:00.002+02:00

Now that some light has been shed on my first poem ever published - tracking the original soundtrack that inspired it, and hopefully getting it - I feel an urge to come out with my second poem, maybe not chronologically, but logically the second.
This is a very simple song, and while I came up with it I was imagining a young girl, sitting somewhere on one of those magical Maldivian beaches on a distant island, trying to figure out her feelings and mood swings... dreaming about her fisher boy.

Fisher Boy

Fisher boy -
I long for you
All day long
While you are out at sea.

But when you
Are on land with me
I just wish
You were at sea.

Why is it,
That I want you
So near me
When you are gone?

And that I
Wish you at sea
So much when
You're close to me?

Fisher boy -
I long for you
All day long
While you are out at sea.

Fisher boy -
Fisher boy...

At that time, I signed with "Song Lyrics by T.L. Aazim, Malé, 3 October 2002". For those who don't know, Aazim is my Muslim name, and T.L. stands for Thomas Lukas (guess there will have to be a post on "My Unrecognized Names", at some point). I was having a melody that went around in my mind for the song, but could not get it quite right: Summertime.... but it was somehow unfitting for a Maldivian setting.

Finally, I got Nashid from Zero Degree Atoll, a famous Maldivian band, to help me and compose the music for it. He came up with a simple guitar tune and a soft swish of waves as a background sound, such as you can hear on Maldivian beaches. He got a singer to come to his studio and try the song, but I was not quite happy with the result. The tune however made it into the Official Guide to Maldives CD (2002), which I produced at that time, and played as a default loop. If I find out how I can isolate it and post it, I will make it available on my blog... Meanwhile, I lost track of Nashid, and I could not find out if he ever got the money that I had left in Malé to be handed over to him for the composition. If someone hears of him, let me know!

I almost forgot: One of my then staff members, Nasir, did an adaptation in Dhivehi, the local language. I really can't judge it, but whoever gets to read it in Maldives, give me a feedback!

Masveriyaa

Masveriyaa ey magey
Inthizaaru kurevey
Konme hindhu kolhehga
Beyrah kanndah dhiyaamaa

Kairi vee maa kalaa
Bey nun vanee
Dhurugaa huru mah

keyh vehey beynumee
Gaathu gaa hunnan
Dhurugaa veemaa kalaa

haadha haa beynun
veyey Kairivaan

Masveriyaa ey magey
Inthizaaru kurevey
Konme hindhu kolhehga
Beyrah kanndah dhiyaamaa

Masveriyaa ey magey

Me, The Unrecognized Poet

2007-10-20T09:12:00.003+02:00

My first post is about... my poetry, or rather lyrics. Totally unknown to the world. When I lived in Maldives between 1999 and 2001, I was running a small school for the performing arts, and I was in touch with a number of local musicians. That must have been an inspiration. There were also some "encounters" that helped my creativity. And there was always a tune floating around that made me forge the words in certain ways, me being a world music afficionado. Once settled in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the urge to write lyrics ceased as suddenly as it had arisen...
The first poem was in French, and has its own peculiar story, but read it first!

La fille de Malé

La lune qui se lève
sur l'île de Malé,
c'est la même lune qui
sur tout le monde se lève;
c'est la même lune qui

Mais la lune de Malé
a une couleur profonde,
qui n'existe pas du tout
dans d'autres parts du monde;
qui n'existe pas du tout
dans d'autres parts du monde.

C'est la lune d'une belle fille,
la lune de mon amour.

Et la peau qui se trouve
sur les corps de Malé,
c'est la même peau qui couvre
toutes les femmes du monde;
c'est la même peau qui couvre
toutes les femmes du monde.

Mais la peau de ma chérie
à une couleur profonde,
qui n'existe pas du tout
chez des autres femmes du monde;
qui n'existe pas du tout
chez des autres femmes du monde.

C'est la peau d'une belle fille,
le drapeau de mon amour.

If you are not familiar with French, try my English translation or adaptation, which I did some time later. Unfortunately, it does not have that poetic touch carried in the French original:

Girl from Malé

The moon that is arising
on the island of Malé
it is just the same moon, which
in all the world arises;
it is just the same moon, which
in all the world arises.

But the moon shine of Malé
has a very deep deep color
which does not exist at all
in other parts of the world;
which does not exist at all
in other parts of the world.

It's the moon of a beauty,
the moon of my one love.

And the skin which you find on
the women of Malé,
it is the same that covers
all the women in this world;
it is the same that covers
all the women in this world.

But the skin of my beloved
has a deep deep color
which does not exist at all
on other girls in the world;
which does not exist at all
on other girls in the world.

It's the skin of a beauty,
the linen for my love.

Gilberto Gil, the famous Brazilian musician (now minister of culture in his country!), wrote one only song in French, in honor of the millions of slaves that were shipped from Africa to the Americas. Most of them were first brought to the island of Gorée, off the coast of Senegal, from where they were packed into ships like sardines. Gil sees himself as a descendant of these slaves. The song is simple and beautiful and is called "Ile de Gorée" (Island of Gorée). If you try to download it on the net (which I did many times), you will be unsuccessful. If you are, let me know! The song was published in its original form on one of Gil's many CDs, which also seems to be off the market... mysterious. I forgot the name of the CD in the meantime. I was a proud owner, but the CD vanished in Malé, as have a few other favorite CDs of mine. My French lyrics are very close to the song lyrics, with just a few changes (e.g. Malé for Gorée, etc.). So I owe him tribute. Let's say, if someone turns this into a hit...
As to the other sources inspiration, I will be discreet at this point. However, my French adaptation was worked over by a French teacher from La Réunion, who lived in Malé at that time and had done some other translation work for me. I had mentioned the poem in a conversation to her, and had then mailed it to her without further comment, for editing. She must have forgotton the context, and took it as my attempt to make advances at her! Of course I had to correct the situation, after which she gave some helpful hints.
Depending on the response, I will post more lyrics and will invite musicians to turn them into songs!