This humble image will always be special to me. It marks a crucial turning point in the perceptual game that I've been playing for more than a decade now; an evolution of my relationship to place and to self.
When I began this project I was an immigrant trying to find myself in my new country, which at that point had already been my home for seven years. But even after all those years I still felt fractured and disjointed. And so I started walking, retracing my relatively short history here in hopes that I could walk myself from the past into the present and arrive home with a more coherent sense of self.
To my surprise, it worked. But I had wrought this magic with tools that ceased to serve me once their job was done. The existential, autobiograpical lens through which I had been filtering my walks grew cloudy and dull. I got bored.
And then, as will happen with boredom if you're able to sit with it long enough, something new emerged. As I wrote some time ago:
"Perhaps it was this very boredom that made my attention more available for other frequencies ... [which offered] an expression of something inexpressible; something that only this moment could convey, yet which seemed inextricable from so many other moments that might be ...
... I found that these frequencies often communicated through a language of composition. Not just this broken plate, but its particular pattern; the precise lines of its break. The two halves stacked together just slightly askew. An arcane geometry of shadow, light and texture that seemed to hint of things beyond itself."
More on this experience, including a meander into Georges Perec's theory of the endotic:
https://dissertation.the-parallaxis.com/part-four/bricks-concrete-glass/
Image: Brunswick, May 2015
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jexa verso
