On Monday evening of Sept 21 I arrive in Brasilia, with a flight directly from Paris where I was together with our eldest daughter who just started to study in Paris. She had no choice but to come with me and see the part of the mosaic, depicting a scene of the judgement of Paris,  in the Louvre  which was found in the 1930 in Antioch (now Antakya/Turkey) and was split among the parties that sponsored the excavation at that time. Today you can see the parts of the mosaic in 4 different museums in the world: the Louvre Princton University, Worcester Art Museum and Wellesley College  in the US and some small parts of geometric patterns from the edge of the mosaic remained in Antakya Mosaic Museum I am fascinated by this story in archeological history. There is a great book about this and the mosaic: The Arts of Antioch: Art Historical and Scientific Approaches to Roman Mosaics and a Catalogue of the Worcester Art Museum Antioch Collection The book was one of the …

And I really feel that I  and THE MOSAIC have come home! Knowing that this home is not where my family is gives me a crunch in the stomach. The fish figures that were still wrapped for two weeks are taken out of their bubble wrap blankets and seem to be happy to hear the waves of the aegean sea for the first time. I arrange my workplace  in the patio in front of Santimetre’s former atelier. In the morning I just have to walk through the garden and down a few steps to be at  work. Finally I again manage to set up a working routine, especially for the background tesserae as they are placed mainly in line but still have to be put down thoughtfully in order to achieve a good mix of shades of beige. I can visit THE HOUSE for the mosaic every day and feel completely happy and relaxed. I can go and smoke a cigaret on the roof top of the atelier and see the sea and the sun …

This week its cutting, cutting, cutting stone. Now Mustafa has his pride and I am not allowed to join in. So I start making the first wall piece inside the adjacent room as the wind is so strong on the open roof that I am afraid that the small tesserae are being blown away. In the mean time Mustafa and I have an ongoing discussion how to know when there will be enough tesserae for the background and how we could measure it. Finally we have the idea to put the printed design on the floor and spread the tesserae slightly heaped on it to see if it fills the background. It is not so easy to do this in the strong sea breeze and incredibly hot sun on a roof top! So we wait until sunset one less windy day. This proofed to be a good method and by Wednesday we have enough tesserae. Thursday is packing up time again because Mustafa has to leave back to Ankara. He offers to leave me a …