The Possibility of the Impossible: A Dialogue

Part one of a conversation with Deborah Osberg, the subject of our most recent film.

Deborah Osberg is an artist, philosopher and farmer living off-grid in the Serra da Estrela in Central Portugal. A couple of weeks ago we spent a day together to begin exploring her story, which expressed itself through Serra’s third film: Possibility.

Naturally, there was a lot of interview dialogue that had to be left out in order to keep a sense of suitable pacing and fluidity in the visual format. This is why I decided to transcribe it for anyone who is interested. I hope it can give an added angle of depth to Deborah’s story and her experience of living out the possibility of the impossible. (Part 1/2)

Adrian: Imagine I don't know you, right? I know nothing about you. A bit like when I showed up here the first time, I just found this person living in the forest by accident. How would you begin to try and describe yourself, who you are, what you're doing here?

Deborah: I ended up here as a result of feeling really stressed in my previous environment. We were living in the UK. And it was a question of how to manage the situation, whether to do things differently or to leave. Ultimately, I decided I was going to leave.

I had a long relationship with living in the bush in South Africa in my younger years, and even to the extent of being a zoologist, working in the field in nature reserves in Southern Africa. And I kind of wanted to get back to that after a long period of working in an office. I was an educational philosopher working in an institution in the UK, and while it was an absolutely incredible job, I just needed to make a change and get back into a more peaceful, quiet, supporting environment.

So I started looking around in the UK for places to be, and very quickly I realised there was absolutely no possibility of returning to the country or even starting to live in the country in the UK. Cost-wise, I didn't have enough finances. It was not a possibility.

So I started looking further afield. We were looking at other places where British people had settled, and there was a lot of publicity about going to live in Portugal.

I ended up looking at a lot of places, and we came up to Guarda area, which is where I am here, to look at a house for a friend of mine, which wasn't suitable for him at all. But while we were here, the estate agent said, this is just another place I want to show you, and he brought us to this valley and showed me the most amazing ruin, the granite ruin.

I just knew I needed to be here in this valley. It reminded me so much of South Africa, of the wild places that I'd been working in before, the huge granite rocks, the forests, the low density of farms and people. So I thought it was possible for us to settle here and ended up coming here.

I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for at all. If I had known, in retrospect, I would have thought a bit more about coming here, perhaps been a little more reticent about coming here, but I didn't know how difficult it would be to be here. So we just packed it all up and I took early retirement.

We moved here to this piece of land and we had no idea even where our boundaries were on the land. We didn't even know there was a river running through our land and the house was a ruin. We thought we'd live in a truck for a while until we fixed the house, but the house had a roof. So we just moved into the house and we just took it from there. We just solved problems as they arose. So that's basically where I came from and how I just ended up being on this little piece of land here.

Adrian: What was that feeling that you had when you were in South Africa, in the bush, and how does that connect you to what you feel now?

Deborah: Well, I grew up really loving animals and always wanting to work around animals, thinking I would be a vet because that's what people do. They grow up liking animals and their parents tell them, well, you're going to be a vet. So I went to university to be a vet, but quickly realised that wasn't going to happen.

So I ended up being a zoologist. I felt part of the bush. I felt very African, so much so that I never wanted to leave Africa at all. There was no reason to come to Europe. I lived in Africa for the first 40 years of my life without any intention to ever leave Africa. I got very involved in the political issues in South Africa as well. I was living in South Africa during apartheid era and working at a university and quickly becoming very politicised around educational inequities, which is basically how I ended up in Britain. But I loved South Africa. I loved being in the bush.

I ended up as an educational philosopher to try to sort out some of the educational inequities in South Africa because I felt just living in the bush and being close to animals was too selfish. I needed to be more socially involved and doing something to help the system. So 20 years of a career in South Africa ended and the next 20 years was a career in Britain as an educational philosopher. And I'm hoping the next 20 years will be here on this farm which might see me out.


Adrian: So it's a bit like coming full circle then?


Deborah: It feels like it, yeah. It certainly feels like it.


Adrian: And when you think about your place now within the farm, with the animals and all of the living things that exist within this space, what's your experience with the theme of symbiosis been? How would you articulate that?


Deborah: It's very interesting because my first career as a zoologist, I was an evolutionary ecologist, so I'm very interested in the idea of symbiosis. My second career as an educational philosopher, I was engaged with how do you live with others that are different from you, which is another form of symbiosis.

So symbiosis, it's interesting you pick that up, has been a really important aspect of my life. And it's difficult. Symbiosis is not such an easy thing to achieve because it's not just a harmonious living together with something that is other. The other thing is radically different from you and has different principles and ideas and different ways of life. And you have to cobble together a way to be together, which can work. And in a way, that's also defined so much of my life, growing up in South Africa as a white South living in a country which is mostly a black population, black suppressed population, and trying to figure out how to be white in South Africa comfortably without feeling appalling all the time because of what is going on, how to do something to improve the relationship. So I ended up trying to do that.

It was about working with systems where things cooperate together, informed by the political situation which was happening at the time, it was about learning how to live together with otherness.

It reached a point in South Africa where I couldn't continue. I felt that I was furthering a subversive system by being an educator because I was, in a way, I ended up educating or designing an access course for black students. But I realised that that access course was mostly to help black students become more like white students, so that the whole apartheid system, even though the apartheid was being dismantled, the whole white run system could continue without a glitch.

It was a peaceful transition out of apartheid. But nevertheless, I started realising that there was something deeply wrong with education, something very colonising, and I had no idea how to deal with that as a zoologist. So that's what drove me to pursue the whole idea further.

So I ended up being in Britain, doing a PhD in educational philosophy and theory, looking at issues around colonisation, issues around knowledge and power, and how issues around knowledge and power are dangerous, and how they can control people, and whose knowledge is of most worth, and why, and which knowledge is going to be taught.

These things troubled me for the next 20 years. I wrote a lot of academic papers around it, and all of my work in Britain was around that issue. I think that came directly from South Africa, and it's about symbiosis, and it's about living with otherness.

And then living here, really to put into practice living with others in a whole different way, coming back to an ecological perspective. Also living with a partner here who's very different from me, and how to engage with otherness on that one-to-one level, when I don't have a job to go to all day, I don't have important philosophical concerns to deal with and take my mind off it. We're here every day, being different from each other, and how to live that, how to give the other person or the other being space to be who they are.

You can't just turn away and say, let people do what they want to do, and it's all going to be fine. I have feelings about what should be done, and this is what everybody has feelings about, what should be done, and what the right way is to go about things. But you can't dictate that to others.

So for me, it's a case of how do you navigate that difference? How do you navigate those disagreements? Not in a way that you're completely buried by the other person or being’s point of view, but how do you have a symbiotic relationship with that being? And for me, that's all about experimentation.

I do not know the way forward. I'm very uncertain. Throughout my life, I've been uncertain about the next step, but I feel that's quite important, because being uncertain enables you to experiment a little with possibilities, and that experimentation can sometimes open possibilities you didn't think were possible.

So there's a philosopher I have in mind here, who I've drawn on a lot in my own work, Derrida, Jacques Derrida, and he had an expression which I really love. It's called “the experience and experiment with the possibility of the impossible”. And I love that, because the impossible isn't something that's not possible. It's something that's not yet possible, that we haven't foreseen as a possibility.

“So everything that I do here, everything I do in my life, is about trying to open up a new space of possibility, even when I think everything is impossible and lost.”

I wanted to open a new space of possibility, and I suppose moving to Portugal was that. I was feeling I didn't know which way to go. There wasn't a way forward. I had to do something radically different that I didn't know how it would work. would turn out. I had to open a new space of possibility for myself. That's why I ended up here, I think.

I think that's also why I ended up leaving South Africa and going to Britain. I didn't intend in my early life to be an educational philosopher. It wasn't not on my agenda of things to do. Living in Europe wasn't on my agenda. Leaving Africa wasn't on my agenda. I happened to be offered a PhD scholarship in Britain, which enabled me to pursue that, but I had no idea what I was doing. I became that person through stepping into that space. I'm becoming the person I am here now from stepping into this space, which is very different from any of the previous spaces I've been. There's a thread of continuity through it, which is uncertainty, opening possibilities, experimenting with possibilities, and then doing something creative with the possibilities that open. This has opened lots of possibilities for me here.


Adrian: How has that shift been? if you think about your very academic and intellectual experience in the UK compared to here in the Serra, which is a lot more physical and a lot more embodied in terms of your way of life? How has that process been?


Deborah: It's been amazing because, first of all, I came here with the land. We had so much work to do on the land. I never had a chance to think about anything but just physical activity every single day, which was very different.

Then as things started shaping around me and there was less physical labor to be done, I had to turn my attention to: “is this all it's going to be? Physical labor, for the rest of my life, or is there more to it?”

I'd always done art as a child and as a young adult. Right through my career, I've always done art. We were also really short of cash here as well, so there was a pressure to have another income stream. I started thinking that I need to engage more with art, which had always been sidelined. It wasn't seen as a real career. I started returning to it and engaging with artistic practice again every day. It's been two years since I've done that and almost two years to the day, actually, since I started engaging seriously with art. It's come such a long way. I've started earning a little bit of an income from it, which is amazing. I wanted to, but I didn't expect it could happen.

Here I am engaging with, I think, is an incredibly intellectual pursuit, which is art, while being out in the bush. I find making art so close to my practice of academic writing. The way I used to write philosophical papers was to sit down and think about things and write something on the paper and edit it and not know exactly what was coming. I don't have the idea formed in my head. It slowly exposes itself through many layers, many iterations, many drafts, and the idea then emerges and the paper completes itself.

That is exactly the situation that happens now with my artistic practice. I'm doing abstract art, which I'd never done before. I taught myself how to engage online with some abstract art courses and learned a whole lot of interesting things about abstract expressionism and artistic practice, which I'd never known, even though I'd practiced a lot.

“It opened up a different way, a different way of being. It engages me completely.”

When I'm doing art, I'm completely engaged and absorbed in what I'm doing, exactly the same way I was when I was a zoologist in the field doing my work, exactly the same way as it was when I was doing philosophy. I can now enter that space of artistic practice, and it's precisely the same deep intellectual engagement. I love that.

It forms a balance between being out here in this amazing space, but it's an intellectual space, which I think I've always required. My whole life, I've needed to engage intellectually with something else, a third thing. This place enables me to do that.

Adrian: What are the elements that you explore through your art? For someone who has no idea about what they would be looking at if they looked at your pieces, what are these elements that you incorporate, and why?


Deborah: The artwork that I do draws very heavily on my entire life. I use a lot of organic textures and colours and natural materials in the art because I'm very close to the land.

I'm also very close to intellectual ideas and philosophy and colonisation and power struggles. I also bring that tension into the work. I've got a huge stack of academic journals, which I tear up and stick onto the canvases. A lot of the words are really meaningful to me. Sometimes I want to censor the words. Sometimes I want to expose them a bit more. In any case, what happens is that they get painted over. They get scratched through. They get rearranged in ways I could never do with an academic paper.

Part of the process is to bring together our biological-ness of being with our intellectualness and our political-ness of being. I try to bring all those aspects together. It's how I feel when I'm painting. It's not just painting because I put all sorts of materials on the canvas.

“I use paint as well, but I use paper and glue and soil and charcoal. I bring all of these elements together because they have to be brought together, because this is our life.”

Learn more about Deborah and her art by following her on Instagram. Part two is coming soon. Thanks for reading.