Welcome to the eleventh edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses. This week we’ve got a short musing on trains, created by the Mexican filmmaker known as Gawx. You’ll also find out what declining an offer of fresh whale meat from a plastic bag may or may not mean when you’re a foreigner living in Greenland. Lastly, there’s a moving story by Denmark’s favourite fairytale writer, Hans Christian Andersen, tracing the origins of the national concept of hygge.
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For your sense of motion | Trains: A short story
Trains occupy an unusual place in our collective consciousness. Some days, they’re little more than metal containers into which commuters only semi-willingly cram. But, when you’re traversing regions, countries, and even continents, they feel like villages unto themselves: at once separate and part of the landscape outside their windows.
The Mexican illustrator and YouTube (and Vimeo) personality known as Gawx dubs them “gusanos de metal” – or “metal worms” – in his latest short video, simply called Trains.
In this 90-second video – made using “hundreds of train clips” from around the world – Gawx reflects on the “alternate version” of life that we see inside train carriages, where “stories pile up but only their protagonists know them.”
🔗 Watch Trains, which began doing the rounds after becoming Vimeo’s Staff Pick last month, here. Get a sense of how Gawx made the film here, and see his best-known video, THE CREATIVE PROCESS, commissioned by YouTube in 2024.
For your sense of boundaries | ‘Everything is possible’ in Greenland
“You don’t have to go very far from the towns in Greenland to feel that you’ve crossed a boundary from the confined to the beginning of the absolutely open, that you’ve stepped from the minutiae of the human ‘us’ to the edge of the non-human universe,” writes James Meek in a wide-ranging portrait of the country for the London Review of Books this month.
Meek makes the observation en route to the abandoned village of Sermermiut at the mouth of Greenland’s Ilulissat icefjord where, in the 1990s, one could find icebergs as tall as 300 feet.
But it’s the access that he gives us to Greenland’s residents that makes this dispatch such a satisfying read – like the fisherman who shoots seals for his prize-winning dog sled team and takes family holidays in Dubai, or the Trump-supporter from Maryland who’s lived there for 18 years and is “strongly against America absorbing the island.”
Chris Shull, an American pastor, is one of these residents.
“He holds services in the local prison. He runs a children’s club. He imports Kool-Aid from the States: the children really love it. (…) In a country that has far and away the world’s worst suicide rate, six times the global average, Shull says at least one man has told him he saved his life. (…) He takes as the sign of his acceptance not the invitations to parties where guests are invited to cut themselves a piece of whale meat from an open plastic bag, but the fact that people aren’t offended any more when he turns the whale meat down.”
Then there’s Kuno Fencker, a member of the Greenlandic parliament who compares the annual ‘block grant’ that Denmark provides Greenland (an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark) to heroin given by an abusive man to a child bride to keep her dependent.
“Fencker has never killed or tried to kill a seal, and saw no contradiction between, on the one hand, his attempts to draw a line between exploitative Danes and native Inuit, and on the other, his own partly Danish, partly Inuit ancestry,” writes Meek. “In his mind the Inuit/Danish distinction seemed more to do with the will to belong than with some form of blood right.”
As the country grapples with a cocktail of rapid modernisation, climate change, the tensions of colonial legacy, aspirations for independence, and Donald Trump’s very vocal desire to acquire the territory, Meek’s article shines a bit of light on a relatively impenetrable subject.
🔗 Read the article here.
For your sense of hygge | Copenhagen’s cozy corners
The Danish term “hygge” has grown enormously in popularity since it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2017. But, beyond being a word to describe cozy décor and a feeling of contentment, how do Danes explain “hygge” or “hyggeligt” places, and what are the concept’s origins?
As it turns out, Denmark’s favourite fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen is credited with the earliest recorded use of the word in Danish literature. Copenhagen local Pernille Schlander shares a few moving scenes from Andersen’s The Last Pearl – one of her favourite bedtime stories – in her VoiceMap tour about hygge, published last month.
Like much of Anderson’s literature, there’s a profound philosophical thread running through the narrative, as we discover the connection between a young mother, the ‘pearl of grief’ in the story, and hygge itself.
🔗 Listen to the story here. It’s location 12 on Copenhagen’s Cozy Corners: A Hygge Tour of the Danish Way of Life and you’ll want to skip to 00:50 to get past the directions for listeners out doing the tour.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire
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