The Undercurrents

Prelude  
 
A large pool of water had appeared overnight on our kitchen floor, so silent and unexpected it seemed to be a mirage. Tap water had been dribbling from a loose pipe beneath the sink and leaking noiselessly down through the two stories below us. This scene, which we woke up to on the morning of our son s ninth birthday, was the most dramatic but not the only incident of water damage. For several months before and after, a collection of plastic buckets and basins had become a semi- permanent, wandering feature, brought out to catch leaks in different parts of our home. One evening, a few months after the kitchen flood, our elder son noticed water dripping from the plasterwork rosette in the center of the living-room ceiling. Looking up, we saw an ominous spreading patch of brown as water leaking from upstairs traversed the terrain above our heads. Water always finds its way. My sons and I fetched the buckets and basins once more and laid out towels to soak it up. It was as if our new apartment was trying to tell us something.
The apartment we had lived in before on the east side of the city, with an Edenic plasterwork of vines, fruits and flowers twisting around the columns of its façade, exerted no such influence. We were there for ten years husband and wife, two sons, two cats and throughout this time, regardless of our difficulties, that apartment was consistently neutral. It did not make its presence felt or stir up any overt feelings. It was simply a container, benevolent if anything, in enabling the maintenance of the status quo. Our new apartment, closer to the boys school in the west, was awkward from day one. Aggravating and interfering, it kept producing warning signals that could not be ignored. It intervened and forced itself into the role of the protagonist.
 
There are things you can see and others you can only feel, that you sense in a different way, as a whisper in your mind, or a weight in your bones. A

Kirsty Bell is a British-American writer and art critic based in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was contributing editor of frieze from 2011 to 2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist’s House, and her essays have appeared in more than seventy exhibition catalogues for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Tate, UK.

[A] deeply absorbing highly original and atmospheric book [Bell] ably guide[s] us on a poetic exploration of the layers and depths in this troubled, thrilling, world capital. New York Times Book Review

An enthralling book about how finding the truth of a city s story means finding the truth of your own [Bell] skillfully weaves the narrative threads into an elegant tapestry remarkably absorbing. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

With sleuthing interest and novelistic flair, Kirsty Bell s The Undercurrents has ruptured familiar terrain an associative thesis on the dangers of repression, from gargantuan acts of genocide to the comparatively subtle shames of familial collapse An enchanting and sometimes disturbing symbolism runs through The Undercurrents, as Bell imaginatively weaves the city s hard factuality with the emotional and physical experience of living in it. frieze
 
With her extraordinary new book Bell brilliantly shows us that not only is history all around us, but it is also something that we actively live alongside Bell takes us on an enthralling tour of Berlin s recent history. Buzz Magazine

[Bell] mixes personal reflections with historical and literary research in her lively investigation of the city and its contemporary built environment. Exberliner

From the first moment I heard Kirsty Bell read from her writing, I have yearned for the book she was then working on. And now here it is, perfect and perfectly balanced, a clear-eyed and beautifully written account about place, about consciousness. I treasure The Undercurrents, and so will you. Hilton Als, author of White Girls

I read this watery, engrossing book in the bath, following along as Kirsty Bell s reflective curiosity leads her onward along the Landwehr canal, in and out of the archives, novels, memoirs, and stories of her building and her neighborhood. Evocative and fascinating, The Undercurrents is a liquid psychogeography of Berlin that had me mulling over the