Geert Mak: In Europa. Complex circumstances can best be described through simple structures. One of my design teachers told me that when you are stuck with a difficult matter make a sketch of it every hour, it will clear up things for you. Similar frames are set by sonnets, pecha-kucha nights, or rules like the ones given in this blog, where you are free to write up whatever you like, as long as you do it every day for sixty days in a row. This will eventually form a common thread running through the thicket of the matter.
The quest of examining the state of Europe at the end of the 20th century was answered by the Dutch journalist Geert Mak by setting up a simple working method. 1) Leave your desk and travel through Europe with a caravan. 2) Find places, trace incidents, provoke encounters, listen to gossip, and the like. 3) Write up a newpaper column on your findings every day.
The result of this time travel is a book that brings the whole complex mosaic of the last century to life: Gallipoli, Ypern, Dublin, Guernica, Stalingrad, Ausschwitz, Dresden, Budapest, Tschernobyl, Danzig, Belfast, Berlin, Srebrenica, … .The hopes, the deaths, the memories can all be read in the places. This is a placebook, indeed.