Man: Artist; Neptune; Tree...A Costa da Morte. The Coast of Death. It was to this inhospitable place a young German came in 1961. Later perhaps we could have qualified that further: a young German painter, an artist, a sculptor: writer of aphorisms, a mystic, a half-naked wizard whose magic turned stone into dreams and dreams into metaphor. Man was none of these things at the time he arrived in Galicia; he was a refugee from a misunderstood childhood, a wicked stepmother, and he was a tortured youth who had quite simply run away from home. During the May festivities in Camelle, twenty kilometers from Cabo do Vilan, along what is even today mainly a dirt track, Manfred Gnädinger arrived with his rucksack and his worn shoes and a couple of fellow travelers who quickly leave the story. Nobody dreamed that day that not only had he come to stay but that he would prove to be Camelle’s most famous citizen, a symbol of a lost and naïve age, and that his tragic death would put this tiny fishing port most securely on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Remembering Man:
An open letter from one who did.
Antonio Nodar, 05/02/2011
(Used with permission. All rights reserved)
A Prisoner of His Own Freedom…
(Dear Man) From childhood, I always heard about you. Beside the fireplace, those long winter nights, I listened to tales of a German who lived on a rocky spit of land in Camelle. Time passed when I arrived and discovered a world of forms and a feeling for you, someone your neighbors described as a little bit crazy. In one of the most inhospitable places on earth you made your garden. You gathered what the sea gave you with the passage of time, telling your story the rough storms, ignorance and vandalism.
When I was older, when I heard the news of the sinking of the Prestige, the first thing I thought about was you—that this time what the sea brought you was your end, surely as you intuited it would be. Mankind in his eagerness and greed destroyed your freedom and your small space beside the sea. And so you left it when your life and your garden became flooded; your fantasy choked by the tarry sludge, forever.
Man, stay where you are. The news that reaches me is bleak. They say they will make a new house; restore your garden. Don’t be surprised if they put an ice cream cart beside a souvenir shop; a mold of your spare figure comes to mind.
Man, that space without you is inert: you were the magician who crystalized it. I still remember chatting with you in your garden: my Leica, your statues, the music of the waves… Our talk now has become diluted with the friction of the past tense. Those verbal memories are lost in obscurity, dark. Some images I have never achieved in my life… I still mostly have understood the essence of every human being is that they are a prisoner of their own freedom. Yours were the rocks. From the side of the barren, everything continues the same: rain, as always; sometimes some fucking sun.
