from Tallin, 20/04/24
It's already been 20 days since we left and we've been in Tallin in Estonia since yesterday after a good stopover in Sweden, split between the island of Gotland and Stockholm.
Visby is half the size of Sète, a truly charming town, set on the sea and steeped in history, the stronghold of great Hanseatic merchants, fortified and in what way over more than 3km, a World Heritage Site with, for such a small town, a dozen churches, many of them grandiose ruins that have been beautifully restored, and lots of pretty little houses on narrow cobbled streets that go up and down towards the port. It's also a very popular tourist destination in summer.
Gotland's position makes it a strategic, key location in the central south of the Baltic Sea. In fact, during our stay, several Swedish ministers met there to discuss setting up a military base for NATO (sic). It's not the best of news, but it's the only thing that reminds us of the political tensions with Russia at the moment.
We've been crawling all over the place, trying to see everything, find places and make contacts. The old town in every direction and the island itself from north to south and east to west. It's really beautiful, really natural, with wild, rugged coastlines. In the north of the island, Faro, the place where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot his films, is described as ‘Isolated in the middle of the Baltic Sea, it embodies an ideal that is both frightening and attractive, austere and exhilarating, a place of absolute artistic integrity’. We fell in love with the place, unfortunately knowing that this postcard image hides an invisible evil of a really polluted sea and high political tension, which you don't really realise on the spot either.
A nice contact has been established with a view to setting up a Baltic Sea map. It's still very confidential, and it's planned for 2026 for a listed site. Given the enthusiasm of our contacts, we entrusted a small signed and numbered map of Jean Denant so that it could be used to help the project progress on site. A seed is planted 😉
Stockholm, the magnificent Stockholm, the royal capital on the water. Over 20,000 steps on the first day and we've kept up that pace. Traffic, parking, contacts and installation permits were all a bit tricky.
On the outskirts of Stockholm, we also visited ‘Artipelag’, a magical place nestling in the pines by the sea, which offers, among other things, a superb art trail through nature punctuated by splendid and imposing works of contemporary art. I came away enthralled and convinced that this is the place to be for a large map of the Baltic Sea by Jean Denant, but it's very complicated to get in touch with the management, because it's a high-level project in a very closed environment. It will take time. One of our friends, a Swedish gallery owner with a presence in New York and an international reputation, was won over by Jean's work and agreed to act as a go-between. A second seed has been planted 😉
Hugs and kisses
Christina and Martin Bez
<*)))>>< & <°/////////><
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