FIELD NOTE 02 · Copenhagen, Denmark
Who gets a seat?
The long table stood between a workshop and a patch of vegetables. Nobody asked who we were before handing us plates. For a moment it seemed that we had found an answer before properly understanding the question.
Liv, who had cooked, said the place worked because everyone contributed. A man at the far end said it worked because everyone was free. Then somebody asked whose turn it was to clean the kitchen, and the two explanations began to drift apart.
Later, Liv showed us a rota covered in crossings-out. ‘The interesting part of a community,’ she said, ‘is what happens after the nice photograph.’
I drew the table from the notebook on a scrap of paper. She recognised the empty chair. An older traveller had stayed here years ago, she said, always asking who was missing from the room. Nobody remembered his name.
The evening meeting lasted longer than dinner. There were raised voices, a compromise, then someone quietly began washing plates. Perhaps living together was less a settled arrangement than a practice of returning to unfinished work.
Before we left, Liv tucked a postcard into the notebook: a workshop in Busan. On the back was another question. What do you owe a stranger?