Re: Peter Mathius Wessel 1851 Denmark/Chile
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In reply to:
Re: Peter Mathius Wessel 1851 Denmark/Chile
11/14/00
Hi Stephen,
I'm your Danish cousin, son of Barbara Wessel (1915-1984), one of Tito Wessel's three daughters. The other two were Freddie (I suppose her real name was Frederika), my godmother, who died in 2001, and Nina, who died in England, where she had remarried, last year.
I'm a poet, teacher and journalist and I've lived in Spain since 1981. I worked in Mallorca, where I met and married Margarita (from the distinguished wine district of La Rioja), and after three years in Segovia, we came to Madrid in 1993. Beside my teaching jobs I also work as the Cultural Advisor to the Danish Embassy here.
My main interests, however, is painting, music and poetry. Last year I started working on a project of multilingual poetic texts in which my subconscious intertwines Spanish, English, French and Danish. I call the project "Polyphonies" and the first 9 are due to be published in "RevistAtlántica", a very good Spanish literary review. My interest in improvised music has led me to form a group in which i recite my poetry on equal footing with percussion, guitar and bass. (I play the clarinet and the 5-string banjo privately.)
I was named after your grandfather Pedro and naturally I'm interested to know about the Wessel family's ties to Chile and about their activities there (curiously, I've just been granted a one-month stay at the Valparaiso Foundation in Mojacar, Spain, founded by the Danish painter Paul Beckett, who lived for many years in Valparaiso. At the foundation I'm going to be working on poetic improvisation with a Danish-Argentinian avant-garde guitarist).
Was Pedro born in Valparaiso like his sister Alice (who also happened to be my Godmother)? I have two very interesting photo albums that I inherited from my mother with pictures of a Grand Tour that Tito and his brother William did through Europe and Africa. Unfortunately I can only identify very few of the people in the pictures, and now that Freddie is dead, I don´t know anybody who can help me do it.
Please write to my e-mail address [email protected]
Best regards,
Peter