Berlin, Germany

01.02.16; 11am

Julia Alice Correia has Portuguese roots, but she has lived in Berlin (Germany) for 21 years.
Here she has her family and her job.
Julia Alice has two sides:
_Julia needs activity
_Alice needs quietness…

Julia likes to work for herself and it is in her new space, a nice cafe recently opened in Prenzlauer Berg, selling sweets and Portuguese products, where we meet for our interview.

Her shop is her working place and her House at the same time.

Along her life Julia Alice lived in many houses as her mother had a lot of energy and was always changing to a new place.
As a child she thought that the house was not so important and that the change of spaces, sounds, and atmospheres could be a good adventure.
Nowadays, as woman of 54 years, mother of two young boys, she values the stability of a physical space as something very important.

She had her first house of her own when she was 24 years old and this experience made her understand the importance and the meaning of it:
House: as a place where one can always return.
Protection and freedom: the possibility to enter and to go out.
In the beginning Julia thought that a House is just inside ourself, but now she understands it also as the space made of walls and rooms.
Alone or with someone else…how to find a balance..
…between the inside and the outside...
…between our space and the space of someone else...
how to find an equilibrium that would represent a possibility for Peace…?

She defines the question of the House as one the most important questions in life.
House as space for creation;
creation of her own space to create herself.
The space in the balance between fullness and emptiness to permit an internal equilibrium.

Silence just until the point it does not turn into emptiness just as the pleasure of
empty walls, and the need of something to decorate them.

Julia compares herself to a snail, an animal she really likes:
if the snail is touched it hides in its shell; when It feels comfortable it begins to discover the surroundings again.
Julia likes to go to visit Portugal and then come back to Berlin/home. Back to her flat, a space that she needs structured in order to find herself.

Berlin, an individualistic city, permits a process of discovery of one own’s identity, and permitted Julia to understand what a house means to her and the importance of creation.

As a child Julia remembers the sound of her mother's canaries that she could not listen to while eating, this is maybe the reason why, now, in her house, sounds and noises have to find their moments in alternation with Silence.

She compares natural sounds of the countryside regulated by the daily cycle
with the amalgam of noises of the city.

Of time in the countryside, she remembers animals, neighbors calling each others, her mother screaming, children playing outside, and silence when the night was falling on the day and the day was drawing back.
For Julia it is important to go back home and find her silence:
if there is not emptiness nothing comes….because all is occupied!

Julia makes an interesting distinction:

Home as a base, that she identifies with her life in Berlin, and Home as the place where her soul meets with her self…this is Portugal...

with its noises, the smells of Lisbon, the chestnuts in the street, the sound and the perfume of the ocean…

...”I feel home…”.

Julia loves the "outside" and to live and walk in the streets.

She defines her self as ambivalent:
she absorbs what is around her and, and at the same time, she maintains a distance with what surrounds her, as protection.

Just at home she does not need to do this.

“It is always this ambivalence transported until solitude: a desire of staying alone and the sadness of feeling alone. The wish of having love, and not knowing how to love, a relation and a lack of desire for the other”

“Freedom is living this ambivalence without conflict…it is always research…”.

When she feels free is when she is alone, but this doesn’t mean that in these moments she feels happier…
She feels freedom in the relations with her friends… because friends accept how we are.

She feels prisoner of her self when she is in the search of the perfect moment that doesn’t exist.

She speaks about the people from the countryside as more free, more creative, and stronger.
The City is something that limits the person she says.

The Countryside is the need of creation since not everything is provided.
She underlines how the stronger social net in the countryside, permits a feeling of belonging, that, in turn, permits one to feel at home.

…and Angola?

Julia also lived in Angola when Portugal was reigned by the Salazar dictatorship.
She reminds the space, the freedom, the sea, the colors and the relation with the locals that her mother considered as part of the family, arousing suspicion from other colonizers.
The freedom of Angola and the shock of the return: skirts becoming longer, absence of sensuality, in order to become, or at least appear, as all the others.
Freedom as possibility.

Possibility that needs to be associated with the capacity of making decisions!
Equilibrium again!

-…and security?
Security is perceived when we discover that we are sufficient unto ourself, when we know what we are capable of!

...to listen is to imagine...

Thank you JULIA ALICE!!! for this inspiring moment! for making me feeling at Home when I visit you!

Good listening!

SPACE:

This interview recording took place in Julia's new shop.
It is composed by two big spaces, with a minimum of decoration, two big windows and a glass door facing the street in the direction of a small garden.
The space has some reverberation but still the voice is clearly understandable even when background music is playing.