Permission to Work on the Street

Chapter 1: Of Streets, Statues and the Notion of Work

What is a human statue? A human statue is an anachronistic presence, an unlawful occupation of time and space. An imitator of a statue or sculpture, a shadow with its own life. The statue is placed before a hat, on a street, and the tinkle of coins plays soundtrack to a movement that flows out of inner, subjective rules of engagement. You could call it street art or entertainment, and it could be either. There is no governing body of statues (if there is it must be rejected). There are no lines between statues (if there are then they must accept overflow). 

Before we go to Montenegro, Kristian negotiates with a Serbian expat from Russia for our territory. The price is one Gold Clock Man. The newly costumed Gold Clock Man finds his bargained territory hijacked by Three Gold Statues from Macedonia.

And then, what is a street anyway? In school, street = small road. And then I learnt, and Tolkein told me, road is transport, road is movement, highways, traffic, distance, and stepping out onto a road, any road, is a dangerous thing to do. Who knows where you might end up? But street – street walk, street dance, street art, off the streets, grown up on the streets; well… People walk on the street, live on the street, sell on the street, culture is generated on the street, street is cool, somehow; it lends itself to a network of interactions, commercial and convivial. Street is authentic. So street art is art that occupies the street. 

I come to Montenegro from Serbia, but home is two Russian flights away, but somehow I am in Montenegro 5 euro in my pocket. Back home, I didn’t live on the street. In Montenegro, I am booked into a flat which we will pay for in unusual ways. So much for authenticity?

What makes you do something on the borderlines of acceptability? Social, physical and geopolitical boundaries are so deeply drawn that we don’t really need to state them anymore. Yet somehow, by random forces of circumstance we end up in a place whose existence we didn’t consider, satisfying our existential needs in ways we couldn’t have imagined. But it is partly circumstantially that we end up anywhere. The other part consists of a series of choices that are made in that blindness that comes with mad affection, or great desire. Maybe. 

Kristian is one part of my unusual circumstances, and we make a costume together. We call her the Ice Queen, but the kids re-christen her the Snow Queen. She has great three-clawed feet, a sword, a glittering crown that drips beads and her eyes are kohled, her only nod to her tropical origins. 

Work is a respectable word, even more than street. It’s the word that pot-bellied uncles and worrying mothers throw at you. Of course, the respectability is not universal. Street work, unlike street art, is the smell of something dangerous, some wild walk of shamelessness. Countries have even stronger views about work than parents. The work visa is a cherished dream of most Indians; the tourist visa is a strictly regulated path of rightness; the cultural visa is a vague inter-space and the business visa is the prerogative of people in suits. Street work is a visa that is rejected on suspicion, and certainly not stated. Is this stating the obvious? But it was not so long ago that looting, raping and pillaging, not to mention spreading infections, were the only things that justified the cost of travel. Of course, not everyone was travelling across continents back then. 

Is it ok to do this work there? Yes, you’re not selling anything, people give you money if they choose to, it’s goodwill (an old word). Is it ok for me to work there? Yes, you will be covered in make-up. Are you sure we’ll make some money there? Yes, someone told me that someone else made 100 euro a day last year. So a legal loophole for safety, make-up to look white and someone’s word for security. A risky proposition.

To quote a pioneer story, American frontier, brave pilgrims; a pioneer must have imagination, must love the idea of the thing more than the thing itself. I took this line to heart.

So I’m not exactly the bravest of pioneers, the boldest of adventurers. We come with peculiar luggage and bad tempers. We stick shiny buttons and spray-paint to settle down. 

Chapter 2: The Anatomy of Montenegro, the Landscape of the Statue and the Currency of Coins

Montenegro is a place with a coastline, so much coastline that there is very little country to meet it. We travel over craggy, inhospitable mountains, the black mountains that were named without a thought to political correctness, and down to a calm sea that looks like a great lake in a high valley. Tiny towns hug the shore, struggling to hold on to the crowds of tourists, the supermarket chains, the noisy cafes, the new city and the old city. The great waves of the Indian East coast could wash them away, but here the waters are slow, lapping pools. Pin down Herceg Novi, a town like a suburb, and then Baosici, its suburb. This is where we will stay, for a brief period.

Our first night in Montenegro, we are in Igalo. Igalo is a carnival of a place. People come to life here. The Green Man walks slowly along the coastline. Curious masses follow him. Coins start to jingle and laughter grows. A large green hand touches the head of an unsuspecting child, who smiles at the camera in a rictus of fear and excitement. I am strangely moved – jealous, afraid, excited, proud. A golden summer evening becomes a velvety, warm summer night. The sea watches us with its peaceful blue eye. 

There’s a simplified version of statues, ‘you stand still, they drop a coin and you move.’ But that’s not it, really. The way Kristian plays it, it’s a game of watching unconscious watchers, shocking them with a sudden revelation of your awareness of them. A sea of consciousness wanders over yours; you are marked and footprinted, and your stillness must have its revelatory moments. You sense, also, the fall of money. You start to feel the weight of the coin that falls into your hat, you measure the distance between, because who says that money is not an active participant? Money is the agent of your movement. 

The currency of coins, statues and East Europe. In Serbia we spend in dinars, about a hundred to one euro, but the value of the dinar is a freefall down a sliding economy and a desperate population. There are exchange offices on every street and they count their money in euro but the currency cannot hold, the country is falling apart, illusion does not come closer to reality. In Montenegro they use euro. Montenegro is not part of the EU. To me this seemed significant, that they camouflaged their identity with an uninviting currency. This is why we went to Montenegro, to earn in euro.

But unlike popular imagination in Serbia, the euro is not the symbol of riches. It comes in ones and twos, but rarely; it comes in 50 and 20 cents, more often, most often in ten cents, five cents, one cent. The fives and ones we collected in a plastic bottle, which we filled almost to the top. In the end we changed this, too, and got thirty-five euro. The tens we used for food and bus tickets. The rest we put into notes, which went on visas, tickets, gasoline, rent, momentary madness. But currency is more fluid than that.

In Montenegro we got euro, Serbian dinars, one Singaporean coin, Hungarian money, Kazakhstani money, one Canadian dollar, one American dollar, plenty of Russian, Bosnian and Croatian money. In the old days, back home, we used to collect coins from relatives who traveled abroad. I traveled further abroad than I imagined, it seems. In Croatia the currency is kuna, seven to one euro. Prices are similar in all these countries. The stability of the kuna seems to be hard-won, hard-fought. The Croats go to school and study hard and try to be a good younger cousin to the euro.  

The peculiar thing about being a statue, is that for a limited time and space, you can’t be anything else. Be in a sense of identity, maybe, but also being in a much simpler sense, like being afraid, being angry, being sleepy. To be all these things inside the state of being a statue is to resist them. If you spent a lifetime sensing a thousand imminent daggers pointed at you every time you walked down the street, how then do you accept the terrible calm of the statue on the street? Street, among other things, is also a space of threat.

On my first night as a statue, I am surrounded by a gang of teenage hecklers. I have the benefit of not understanding their language, but in one moment I unfreeze, and I tell them not to touch me. They all freeze. The foreign language is the last thing they expect. My alien state is a double-edged sword. My plastic sword, on the other hand, is a much simpler weapon. Imperceptibly, it becomes a part of me. I start to point it at people who threaten me. It’s a game, but it’s also a way of playing with reality.

Chapter 3: Tourists, Daysleepers and the Question of Permission

As a statue, who are your patrons, your customers? We were doing statues in the digital era, and people with cameras gathered around us like noisy fireflies – I was amazed to see what looked like five-year-olds holding tiny shiny cameras. We probably adorned a thousand facebook, but the real magic of statues happens somewhere before and after the flash, when you awaken a genuine shriek of surprise, or spot the slow dawning of realisation in the eyes of a three-year-old.

It’s a curious mix of fear and excitement, heckling and amusement that statues generate, both in children and adults. Yet, for all that you might make a grown man step back and then cover it up with a hearty laugh, it’s the fascinated gaze of children that transforms your paint into ice, glitter into gold, draws you into the inter-space between human and alien, snow queen, masked dream figure. If you remember something of your childhood then you might recall what dangerous creatures kids can be, how much pain and violence can bounce between you and your cute playmates, but also how monsters can loom so large around corners, how captivating a crown can be. Now imagine yourself surrounded by holidaying children, warmed by the sun and released school, unfettered to parents, and imagine yourself, you, vulnerable in stillness and armed with paint and plastic.

I am battling my Indian middle-class upbringing, which tells me not to put a hat out on the street – or even to be on the street, let alone work on the street. And yet, once you begin, there is an obligation to continue, to stay, to finish that round. There’s even a dash of competitiveness growing in me. It’s a game with urgency, with stakeholders and at moments, stakes through the heart.

Sometimes, when Kristian and I work together and start to compete before a big wild circle of noise, I see a boy or girl who simply cannot leave, who tries to give us both an evenly balanced attention, with that terrible empathy that is forced upon some children, and I see myself at the circus when I was a child.   

The streets are crowded with tourists and people trying to sell things to them. There are many levels of selling. The heavy-investment ones; cafes and hotels and people who put out chairs and put up umbrellas to establish their space. The lower-investment sellers of cotton candy, shiny objects, replicas of everything people see for real right before their eyes, jewellery, small framed paintings from the crowded bylanes and back halls of art.

Deeper down the alleyways of art’s smaller neighbourhoods come the street painters, spraying five-minute abstractions, portrait painters who capture the essentials in moments, street performances for children with a hat making the collections. Posters travel on boats, advertising Peter Pan. A beautiful young Bosnian woman dresses up as Pippi Longstocking every evening. Stages are makeshift and advertising is four hours every morning on the street. Perhaps the most mobile, making the most limited use of space, ironically frozen in his medium, is the street statue in the corner. 

On our third day in Igalo, we are sent away by inspectors. The streets fill up and the streets are cleared, periodically. We move to Herceg Novi, the clock square, where the Snow Queen faces off with the Green Man for three hours every evening with a small break for cigarettes and chocolate, hidden behind parked cars, where we are still often found and photographed. A bar like a stone box becomes the Base, where nightly drinks are drunk and makeup is hastily arranged before a small mirror. We listen to stories about the inspectors sending away an old woman trying to sell her knitting. It’s the kind of thing you expect inspectors to do.

At night, the buses in Herceg Novi are full of tanned tourists going back to the suburbs of the suburb, and mingling among them are two strange creatures with green and white ears carrying two giant clawed wire feet, which menace the tourists with the same intensity even at twelve or one in the night.

Depending on tourism sucks the tourist out of you. Statues are daysleepers, the nights are very long and you become a little embittered when you miss the beach four days in a row because you were unable to get out of bed. A grey film develops over your eyes, even as the sunsets start stretching themselves out into great golden lakes. You talk about the spending habits of Russians, Germans, Serbians, Italians. You discuss hot spots of tourist attraction. In Montenegro, the streets are full of Serbians, who have each exchanged one hundred dinar for that euro coin they drop in your hat. Another favourite topic of discussion is permission.

I grew increasingly outraged at my seeming entrapment. 

However, there was another problem building. Money was coming slower. We were recognised on the streets constantly, by children, adults, with makeup and without. Tourists were not circulating as much as we would like. We tried going down to the smaller square on the beachside and for a couple of days we had a great turnout which again dwindled as people started saying hello to us instead of the requisite response of shock and confusion. We finally started asking around about permission.

We were told that the tattoo stalls had been sent away from Igalo as well. The first time they send you away. The second time they can take away your things. An old lady who was handing out pamphlets told us that the tourists were coming less and spending lesser. It was all better before, before they cut down the olive trees and before so many cafes blocked the view and now it’s all Serbians who changed 100 dinar to get one euro. She whispered to us to go to Igalo. And sure enough, walking away from our missing audience, we wandered aimlessly down the walkway, the sea restlessly lapping at the shore next to us, and we found ourselves back in Igalo. Very soon, we were back to facing the inspectors. Didn’t we tell you to leave? Yes.Why did you come back? Because I have to work. Well, understood, but you can’t work here. 

In Montenegro permission to work on the street is granted months in advance of the tourist season. A registration fee must be paid and you must book your place. In places where you can work in Croatia, you buy a small plot for 1000 euro. The problem is, statues don’t occupy a space. You walk away for a smoke, you come back and there is a bikini bottom where your hat used to be. Or a sleeping dog. You can’t chase people away, you accept the fluidity of ‘street’ and move, or wait. Your space is defined in so far as people choose it. They might wander between you and your hat, bump into your sword, or form a perfect circle, the ideal audience that defines itself as much as it does you. It’s gratifying to form the focal point of a circle, but it takes away the unobtrusive nature of your work. You could book the place, legitimise yourself, but the returns don’t last very long. And what are you booking, really? Something that can be paid for in coins? If we handed over our little bags of earnings, would they be accepted as just exchange? After all, coins are our currency now. 

We try to bargain our way into Kotor, where the cruise ships come. The beasts at the threshold are the crazy cop, the drunk Norwegians who like to toss statues around, the human tooth found in the hat. However, once two more hopeful statues arrive with a car between them, we make our break with Herceg Novi and inch closer to the cobbled streets of Kotor. We move to Risan, where the suburbs are a little more wild, as is our landlady’s garden.

Chapter 4: Of Gypsies and Crises of Identity, Lines Crossed and Intersections Marked

Risan is a sturdy place, slightly overgrown with weeds, with a small port and tiny cramped stony beaches off the highway. Next to an abandoned building, we found a grassy spot to do our painting and wire-bending and foam-spraying. I found a beautiful stone bench built in a circle where bats flew silently across my face in the evening. A ten-minute walk away is Banja, a monastery where I spent an embittered afternoon. Walking unsuspectingly through a door, looking for what I thought was a small town, I found instead a church and a graveyard, complete silence and a sudden surge of alien feelings. I started to doubt my own substantiality. Road signs point to Banja and Roman mosaics, the two big attractions of Risan. Risan disconnected us from Herceg Novi and brought us into slightly closer contact with Tivat and Kotor.

Tivat is flat in comparison with Herceg Novi. They say that an Abramovic spent a vacation here, and they are building a port for rich people, with space to dock a multitude of yachts, to launch a thousand private parties. Still under construction, it looks for the moment like the dark side of Tivat. There is a strange neutrality to the construction, as though the tastes of a wealthy population are the same everywhere. The other side is electric. Our first couple of nights were the best of doing statues, showered with coins, a gathering of fans, and close encounters of beauty and strangeness. A passing bookseller finally unlocked the doors to the walled city of Kotor, telling us to work near his stalls inside the old city. He will get us that elusive permission. Policemen critique our performance and a reiki healer fixes my sinuses on the street. 

I’m not sure how to separate street and road when it comes to our movements in Montenegro. From Baosici to Herceg Novi we travelled on buses that seemed to go on all the night, on the line from Kamenari to Igalo. From Kamenari to a place near Kotor, there is a ferry on which you can load a car and when Dragan’s car arrived we took it to Tivat, loaded with costumes, fire show equipment and squabbling. From Kotor to Herceg Novi, the line stops at 10pm. From Tivat to Kotor and Kotor to Risan, the line stops at 12am. The lines are divided, and the line of places we worked in divided by them. We saw Herceg Novi as one side, the ‘bourgeois’ side, malled and suburbed, ending in Igalo where the night is a magical fairground that we were not allowed to participate in. On the other side Tivat and Kotor, the dark Kotor with its tightly secured Stari Grad where we dreamed of working and Tivat, where somehow strange energies bounced through the seeming flatness. 

We moved to Risan in consideration of the car, which turned out to be less bankable than we imagined, as Dragan went to Ada Bojana in search of some authentic backpacking experiences and a sandy beach. We stayed on, battling money woes. We took two buses to get from Risan to Tivat, and kept missing the late bus back. One night we hitchhiked from Tivat at 1am, got a ride to the ferry and arrived at Kamenari, beyond Risan. We had a late dinner from a bakery and prepared ourselves for a long walk home as morning threatened to steal into our night.

We were rescued by a car, but our body rhythms had to adjust not only to lateness but also uncertainty, now. Our travel expenditure had doubled, and it was getting harder to dive into supermarkets five minutes before they closed. When the car was around, we had another problem: damaged costumes. The feet of the Snow Queen fought with the hat of the Green Man and the mallet of the Crazy Gold Aviator/Norse God and they all came out bruised. 

So one night we found ourselves back in the square in Herceg Novi. It takes a complex number of oppositions to make a successful statue. If you attract a big crowd, you are likely to make more money, but then you also attract the attention of inspectors. If you stay long enough, you can negotiate with your neighbouring tattoo stall, the cop on the beat, work out a good transport routine, fix up a place to change into costume and back again. If you stay too long, you’re not a statue anymore.

You’re Kristian from Novi Sad and Priya from India who doesn’t speak Serbian and you are constantly prodded. You cannot be a statue and be a recognisable human at the same time. You are no longer mysterious, shocking; the kids ask you to do your creepy eyes look at them on your break and tell you that you should get married. So this return to Herceg Novi after a long break seemed like a sudden new rush of energy. 

We started out with a big crowd, not screaming out our names, and in five minutes I had to rush off to put back a fallen contact lens and fix the make-up, which had melted in the panic. Coming back shakily, I was slowly feeling the edges of the people around me with a sword when one man came right up to me. Even as I started considering whether he might be a heckler, I heard the words, Dodji, policija.

Being flashed a police badge when you are dangling in the space between what can and can’t be done in a strange land looks a little like your worst nightmare. I’ll admit, it never occurred to me to face it alone. If it had been an English-speaking policeman, it might have been a different matter. What I did was leave him guarding my bag and run across the square to Kristian screaming cop! Cop! A conversation that I couldn’t understand followed, and then I was given to understand that he wanted to see our passports. I handed them over and realised that he was walking away with them. He’d already vanished before I learnt that we were supposed to go to the police station at 9am and pick them up the next day. 

That evening, we came to ‘our’ bar and drank a shaky rakija. The owner told us that this was a very unusual occurrence. The guy at the next table told us that he knew the policeman, and messaged him to tell him to stop harassing us. Our former landlord made peace with offers of support. The next morning we were given back our passports and told not to return to Herceg Novi, and to thank our friend at the bar. For what, exactly? In the evening we found out that our very short detention was without a legal basis, that it was not even within the jurisdiction of the policeman involved. Interestingly, the conversation at the police station was mostly about me. It seems the policeman, off his beat, saw me and thought I was a gypsy. 

One night when I was working outside the walled city in Kotor, I found three small black-haired children standing in front of me with mouths open. They remained more or less in the same position until an American dropped a coin which fell out of the hat, and walked away without noticing. The three kids started bobbing up and down madly, pointing at the hat and waving to her. Other people came up, parents and children, and they were all given the same complicated gestures to pick up the coin and put it in the hat. Watching them from my own costumed invisibility, I wondered why nobody reacted, no one heard them or saw them, they came, dropped coins, took photos, laughed, my slight head turns were met with screams but the three kids were invisible. Why didn’t they pick up the coins themselves? I started getting frustrated watching them. Finally, I turned and gave them my curious-inhuman-threatening-warrior-queen stare. All three screamed, picked up the coin and dropped it in the hat, ran in circles for awhile and then hung around giggling.

While we took a break, they came and fingered the crown and gawked at Kristian. I told him about the mysterious untouchability of the coin and the invisibility of the children, and he told me they are gypsies, they probably know they will be accused of stealing. 

After awhile, it became easy to spot gypsies (I use this word because nomadic tribes in India don’t call themselves Roma, and I can’t let go of a connection once I’ve seen it). Unaccompanied, cautious, and treating the hat like a workspace. Their interactions with money were completely professional. They never wanted to play with coins like other kids. They always stayed to chat and to finger Kristian’s hair and try on his hat. What might authenticity make of them? They are mostly street performers or musicians themselves, young enough to be charmed by statues and old enough to know what the hat is. 

Emotionally bruised by the police visit, financially battered, we came back to Tivat, another former safe space. We worked for one hour before Dragan and Kristian spotted some communal inspectors – who check street workers. It seemed like all our safe spaces were vanishing, and we started to see ourselves more clearly. One Indian and two, sometimes three Serbians. We arrived in buses or in a battered, overfilled car. We were working on the street but not occupying it. We were working but not for a regular income, not for wages. We were performing but not on a stage. We were not locals but we were local tourist attractions.

It doesn’t help to see yourself more clearly sometimes, when all you see is uncertainty, you see the pegs and the holes and nowhere do you fit, you are permitted to do something but not, your space is created out of interaction and denied out of personal idiosyncrasy. We were standing on a precarious negotiation of race, culture and country, and it is perhaps only the art in street art that saves you from being submerged by the entertainment and the dangers of the street. However questionable the definition of art is, it is still an indefinite answer that has some acceptance.

Chapter 5: Of Innocence Lost and Regained, the Call of the Pied Piper and the Carnival of Kotor

But the bookseller in Tivat did not fail us, and at the very end of our trip and money, we got permission to work in the walled city of Kotor. 

Kotor, Stari Grad. The great stone arms of the fortress in the mountain seem to hug the paved alleyways Kotor. The old city is a network of paved alleyways that looked like they could be washed by sea water and wait with the patience of a rock for it to dry, be clean again. Stairs disappear to the left, weighty Venetian architecture blocks your view on the right, you can be lost and then find yourself still within its walls. We dreamed of ourselves appearing around street corners, our costumes blending perfectly with the walls behind us, catching a spot of light, past a deep shadow. This is a place for mad laughter to echo, for carnivals, for running along corridors, a place for Ulrica to stand on the battlements, hair streaming in the wind. Masked faces must dance before you in the night, music will float in from a distance and fade when you try to catch it. 

I forgot to be miserable in Kotor. At night, after a long sultry evening of statuing, we would buy beer at the all-night supermarket and sit in the dark on the stairs and watch high heels clattering by in the light.

This was the background which put together all our little scenes and made them come alive, and this pause between work and the long search for a way home was the space that transformed being a statue, dragged it out of exhaustion, unwashed make-up and heavy bags, infused it with a magical essence, made it a space to walk through the streets at night and not to see Kotor but be a part of it, and we are not street artists, we are not performers, we are the shadowy corners that spring to life, the cool black sea outside, the warm night and the shifting faces with white and green ears that play on the boundaries between reality and illusion. When you come to see a place, do you also see it looking back at you? 

At the end of August, I got my Croatia visa, and we began to work in Kotor, Stari Grad. We worked outside of a little square shaded by a tree, a former graveyard where the bookstalls were set up. We changed in a library, greeted courteously every day by a book-reading, bespectacled librarian. We worked in a daze of heat and sweat. The air is still and stifling in the old city, the sea breeze is blocked by its walls.

We had permission. The chief of the communal inspectors waved at us when he passed and asked us how the bilo was. But there were unmistakable signs of departure in the air. Summer was slowly fading, tourists were departing and we were also tired, loaded with laundry, starting to think of going home. It became clear to us that I would not manage to pay for my ticket to India and Kristian would not be able to buy a laptop. We made enough money to go to Croatia, where we had been planning to work for two months. We came back in two days, blocked by the great wall of Dubrovnik. 

When we came back, something was missing. All the kids had gone back home, gone back to school. Summer was over, and they had vanished like the Pied Piper had taken them all beyond the mountains. We could still work around time of the cruise ships, but in the heavy morning heat we couldn’t stand for long without passing out.

In the night, we took turns to rest, now, and I have a very strong memory of the Green Man alone in the alleyway, night fallen on grey walls, his hair trailing under his green hat, and getting this feeling of stolen beauty, brought back in a sack from a short spell of unauthorised time travel into the past.

In L’Illusioniste, a 2010 French animation, the world of magicians, puppeteers and lonely clowns is eulogised in hand-drawn greys and blues. In the end the broke, embittered magician is booked by a marketing agency to pull bras out of hats in shop windows. On our last night in Montenegro, we were trying to make money for our train tickets home. The bookstall owner offered to get us permission to work near his shop in Podgorica. The sales assistants wanted us to stand next to the door.

In front of a glass door, I became a mannequin, not a statue. Very few people realised I was human, and I started to feel inhuman. The hand-drawn magician in the shop window started to pass before my eyes. I walked away for a smoke. Then a very small gypsy boy came up to ask me for a cigarette. Before I could get over the shock he had cast a cool eye over my hat and told me how much I made. He shrugged and signed that it was not bad, under the circumstances.

A little later, Kristian and I were fighting over our spiritual fall from grace when we suddenly heard a clink. The less-than-ten smoker gypsy had dropped a coin into my hat. I went back to work because this was an audience that really made me want to perform again. He came back from somewhere with a handful of coins and dropped them slowly into our hats, with wide-eyed fascination. He demanded a coin from a nearby parent and then showed her chubby daughter how to put it in the hat. When we came away, he lit our cigarettes with an easy gallantry and then lit his own. This encounter stayed with me, all the way back to Serbia on the bus to Novi Sad.

So what is a street statue, and what is a street, and what is permission? Were you brought up on circus stories, did you dream of wandering musicians, travelling theatre shows, do you dream of sea voyages to bring back parrots and pirate gold, do clowns make you afraid, does a glittering crown catch your eye, does a sudden green hand grab your shoulder in the dark?

Is a street statue an anachronism, something that’s nostalgic for that time before visas and racial profiling and fluctuating currency rates? Is permission a piece of paper that you should have applied for with a calculating six-months-in-advance mind, or is it the twisting threat of human interaction?

In Kotor, we met a couple selling jewellery on the street. We got into the usual conversation, and they told us that they were gathering together a group of street sellers/performers to apply for permission next year. So we could all be a little more official. Gaps of possibility were opening around us. There was a cop who took our passports, yes, but there were others who bought us drinks, or analysed our costumes, watched us from afar and told us they would have liked to bring their kids along to see.

We came back from Montenegro financially slightly worse off than when we’d headed out, but we had perhaps not fully understood what we were doing there. This was not a stopover between Serbia and India to gather some ticket money and restore connectivity, or even an adventurous holiday. We spent more time in this place than most tourists. We paid for food, rent, transport, alcohol, cigarettes, the costs of living.

At a photography workshop some time back I had asked the participants to imagine themselves as hunters, becoming part of the landscape, participating in the cycle of growth and decay, life and death, but armed with a camera. In Montenegro we were part of the change of seasons, the great noise of arrival, the silence of departure, the shifting light over the coastline, and so much more. Is it still possible, in these times of documentation and rigid enforcement of restrictive rules, to travel on a pair of clawed feet, to challenge a group of sea-loving tourists with a sword, to slip between the lines, even across continents? The Snow Queen says yes, maybe.

Author: Priyadarshini John
Travel partner and performer: Kristian Al Droubi
*All images in this piece were shot in Stari Grad, Kotor, and part of a photo performance titled The Story of the Feet.