I told you in January that I was headed abroad this summer. The plan was Bergen, on the west coast of Norway, but I flew in and out of Paris, so I got a few days there on either end at the tail end of July. I expected the trip to be about fjords and old wooden wharves. It turned out to be about art, and specifically about the kind of art that happens in the open, on walls and in stairwells, rather than behind velvet ropes.
Paris: 59 Rivoli
If you walk down the Rue de Rivoli, past the big department stores and the tourists heading for the Louvre, you will come to a building that does not match its neighbors. The facade is covered in art that changes, the windows are hung with whatever the artists inside decided to hang there this month, and the door is open. That is 59 Rivoli.
It started as a squat. In 1999 a group of artists broke into a long-abandoned bank building and started making work in it, and the city eventually decided that evicting them was worse than keeping them. Today it is a legal artists’ residence run with the city’s blessing, six floors of working studios, and the entry is free. You climb a painted spiral staircase and wander through rooms where people are actually painting, sculpting, printing, and building, and you can talk to them if they are in the mood to talk.
What I loved about it is that it is not finished. Museums show you the end of the story. 59 Rivoli shows you the middle, with the paint still wet. As someone who spends most of her life in the middle of a draft, that felt like home.
I did so much in Paris that it would be pages if I covered it all. Saw all the usual suspects - Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, ate all the food, and did all the shopping. Paris always lives up to its reputation.
Bergen: the walls
Bergen is built between seven mountains and the sea, and it rains there more or less constantly, which I was warned about. In late July the days are so long that the light barely leaves the sky before eleven at night, and the harbor stays busy well into the evening. But what I had not been told is that Bergen is Norway’s street art city.
The city takes it seriously. Bergen is where the stencil artist Dolk got his start, and for years the local government has actively supported street art rather than scrubbing it off, with commissioned walls and a policy of treating it as part of the city’s culture. So you walk down a rain-slick side street between wooden houses that are centuries old and turn a corner into a piece of wall art that was finished last month. Old and new, pressed right up against each other. If you write urban fantasy, that combination lights up every nerve you have.
Bergen: the fish market
The Fisketorget sits right at the head of the harbor, where it has been in one form or another since the Middle Ages, with the Bryggen wharf and its leaning wooden warehouses a short walk along the water. There is an outdoor market and an indoor hall, and between them you can find salmon, king crab, whale, reindeer sausage, and fish cakes that the locals actually eat rather than just the tourists.
Markets are one of my favorite things about traveling, because they are the one place where a city cannot pretend. Nobody is performing for you at a fish counter. You get the smell and the noise and the people who have been doing this all their lives, and that is the stuff I end up stealing for books.
Why a writer travels
I never go anywhere without a notebook, and this trip filled a good part of one. It is not that I plan to set a book in Paris or Bergen, at least not yet. It is that places like 59 Rivoli and the painted walls of Bergen give me textures I can borrow: the smell of wet wood and fresh paint, the feeling of art that belongs to a street rather than a collector, the way a city can be four hundred years old and brand new on the same block.
Urban fantasy is about the idea that something strange is hiding just under ordinary life. In both of these cities it is not hiding very hard. I came home with pages of notes, a very full camera roll, and at least one idea I am not going to tell you about yet.
If you have been to either city, tell me what I missed. And if there is a piece of street art in your own town that stops you every time you pass it, I would love to hear about that too.