NONUMENTS
I realised I was living in a ceaseless movement when, travelling at the speed of a train car, I recognised myself as one of the passengers trusting in the fastest way of moving from point A to B. An unfamiliar feeling of clarity revealed slowly before my disbelieving eyes – beyond the window and the line of trees – the clear image of a body walking along, mine, treading that soil long since watched over those years, ignored and consigned to the background of mine and others’ performances.
And so I got off the train. My footsteps sketched out of the indicated path, where my gaze had fallen, distracted, thousands of times. My body regained its volume through the footsteps and signs created along the way; the perceived reality suddenly seemed to coincide with the described reality, in the silence of the countryside, in the places abandoned. I came across silence to find myself contemplating its sound. I was drawing the world while the relationship between me and reality was one-to-one.
Around here, nobody seems willing to tell stories any more. The old cities, founded on equally ancient legends, have stretched out their modern-day layers like tentacles, and the once-told stories seem to have become something else: flickering messages, an unconnected multitude of new icons, silent when confronted by the observer’s enquiries.
Multitudes of new buildings are already doomed to the oblivion of the ‘non-story’. Concrete laid on a base of speculation and chaotic din. The speculation has replaced the foundation, the sense has been sacrificed on the altar of utility. These soulless structures appear to my eyes like nothing more than things whose only purpose is in their function (actual or potential).
If the landscape is the expression of human activity, I wonder: what is the meaning of this contemporary archaeology? What do these objects mount on the soil means? Are they just symbols without messages? Is there nothing to interpret? Nothing else to relate to except their immediate utility? Nothing else to suggest if not their imminent fall into obsolescence?
