LIFE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
After the text about the earthquake and the ruins from yesterday, I was thinking about the things that are under us when we walk on downtown streets. Then about what surrounds us, who’s next to me. A city is for me a playground of multiple dimensions. Different times and spaces condensed in a single place. I feel that on the buildings, the structures, the textures, the faces. When I walk around I have the feeling of entering many different levels, layers, nuances and I ask myself how do I absorb this changing reality. Architecture is not just stone and stable forms; it is a perceptual network portal for other things… When I walk on the streets I feel that consciousness gap, not unconscious at all, it is more like to enter a multi-track mentality. Sometimes, things are not exactly there but they appear on my way, my mind, by associative, disruptive, disseminated processes. I am writing this on my laptop in a downtown coffee shop (casa do alentejo) which already has so many different dimensions in it, popular culture from the south, a Moorish patio, a decadent ball room with signs on the couches ‘please not seat’, but what I am thinking about right now is something totally different. There's this intriguing woman I see almost everyday on a street corner. When I saw her the first time she was there with 3 or 4 travel suitcases like waiting for the taxi to take her to the airport or something. 2 days later I saw the luggage but she was not there. She’s blond and young, I couldn’t see her face well because she uses a hat, but she looks beautiful. Yesterday she was there again, standing up, waiting. It seems someone forgotten her. She’s there for 2 weeks already, in the same corner. Today, I saw her in the other side of the road, seating on the floor, hanging a written hand paper but I couldn’t see what was saying. That made me thinks about a man who used to be in certain places in Lisbon. He would choose a spot, sometimes a bus stop, and everyday he would be there waiving goodbye to people passing by. Usually he had a woman's coat in his arm as he was waiting for a woman. He was probably around 60 years old. He looked like an artist or some kind of noble intellectual and he smiled. I saw him the first time in Campolide, late at night, when I was going back home. After that I saw him there many times and also in some other places doing the same gesture. He was friendly and there were times I waved back at him and his smile was even happier in response. I think about this city figures with tenderness. It is like time has stopped for them and they are in a loop, performing the same moment over and over. I could think about this as a conceptual art performance, truly the art of the quotidian. Of course I wonder about their lives, who are they, what happened? In the last centuries space projection on time gave time properties that only space owns naturally, it gave it a direction, um trajecto, an itinerary, a structured and solid line having an ascendant direction, based on causality. One thing leads to the other, then something happens, which is to say: linearity. But nowadays we already live in a non-linear flexible time-space. Our lives are always under construction. The rules of the game are made while we are playing, objects loose their value very fast, human relationships are based on non-compromise, they are not ‘for life’ as before, love is confluent, a derivative satisfaction, eventually intermittent, independently of its value and feelings, just a mutant piece of a connected multi-dimension.
Everything compels to movement.
To be still is to be desadequated. In that sense I see a parallel between tourists, emigrants and homeless people as metaphors of our contemporary culture. They are probably more visible in downtown streets exactly because they are on the streets, not inside some office building or so. Actually, we are all in movement, even in the same city, between home and work, but using different time tracks. Anyway these transitory lives have their peculiarities. A tourist doesn’t belong to the place that he’s visiting. A tourist in a new place just sees what he already expects to see, he always creates a security zone, it doesn’t matter to be on the way, it matters to arrive, take the picture and leave again to the next monument. The tourist is anxious for adventures, new landscapes, emotions, more space, who knows, so he wants to be moving around all the time. He has a map, so he doesn’t loose himself. With Google Earth you have the configuration of the space from above. But even tough, it feels something is out of pace, out of place. Displaced? How to connect the dots? In the opposite social hierarchy, the homeless. He doesn’t move around by choice, he simply doesn’t have a place. He’s impelled to move for necessity, but what he would like to do is to go home and have some rest.
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