once upon a time there was an immortal traveler named kala. one day, kala was walking the busy streets of a very old city. kala asked the people when their city was founded, and they replied: "we don't know how long the city has been here for. "
500 years later, kala came back, only to find that the city had vanished. there was only fields, and when asked where the city had gone, the farmer who lived there, said: "this land’s always looked like that".
500 years later, kala came back, only to find that the sea had flooded the land. kala asked the fishermen whether they know when the sea had flooded the land. they replied: "the coast has always been this way"
transkript from video @ Biennale Uzbekistan Pavilion 2023
the building site was once a sea, the earthen walls are the remains of living organisms, and we erect them only to tear them back down
Ironically, that
which is fleeting and
discardable can pave the road to immortality.
Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste
there’s a place of no time,
a time of no place.
at any point in so called
time
and so called
space.
a place
that is right here and now
but forever,
since ever.
If felt as if the stage was empty,
but the scene was set.(2)
But there was no play to watch,
no concert to listen to.
It was more like all the plays
and all the concerts had been shown.
It was as if all our individual plots were unnecessary and rather futile.(3)
This scene has been set for her and indeed for anyone lucky enough to see it. But there’s no one to tell. She rose and sat down again, but was unable to contain herself for impatience, and her eyes ran over with tears.(4)
Elza slowly wakes.
By now she’s used to the glitches in her perception when this particular dream fades.
She forces herself to put a halt to the turning gears of her mind, shutting down the Laptop that’s been heating her lap and finally storing it in the backseat. Her back feels stiff and she has an ache in her wrist from operating the mouse pad before she fell asleep.
A full time faculty member’s workload is 100 points, with a margin of error of 10 percent plus or minus.(5) Who would have thought that one day she would pursue a regular job and even work overtime.
She used to sit in the subway at 7am coming from god knows where and not going home.
23 year old Elza was watching the commuters from behind her sunglasses while contemplating their normality that saddened her so deeply back then. “It is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. [...] Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”(6)
Just recently Elza read these lines in an old diary of hers, finding herself transported back in time. She remembers vividly how, at least in her self-perception, she inhabited a bright region inaccessible to the eyes of ordinary men unaccustomed to gaze on the radiance of the divine.(7) Her expression of the circumstances were rich, fed by frustration and fueled by lust for adventure, rooted perhaps in naivety and a distorted perception, but directed, certainly, towards the right cause. Her only sin was taking herself to seriously.
After all, she did have the magic, the all but dispensable mediating words, the “poetic experience,” the “poetic intent.”(8), as someone who was very fond of her once wrote.
Essentially, back then she was enjoying one culture and, [at the same time], observing and participating in its disappearance.(9)
When alone, [her] thoughts sometimes escaped from beneath [her] firm control (10) and at the moment, they definitely tend to wander back in time.
She was grateful when Pepe returned to the car.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
"Have you been thinking about the others again? You seem worried."
She looked through him.
“I am worried that I might have lost something that might have been the most precious thing I had.”
“That is?” asked Pepe, sighing silently as he braces for more than one answer.
“Ease. See, we had two things in common: We saw a problematic transition to the modern world, and [were] correspondingly dislocated and disoriented.(11) And in our disorientation, we were united. We celebrated this time mainly because we loved how the transience of everything became apparent, especially the transience of man-made systems, and I still think that’s beautiful.”
“What have you guys spent your time with when no system was falling apart?”
“Together we explored phenomena occurring in the twilight zone between visible and supravisible experience.”(12)
“Supravisible?”
Elza takes a moment to kindly remind herself to have some patience. Pepe thought about the same and knew her well enough to not say it. He unpacks the chocolate he brought from the store and takes off his coat.
“Ok ok. But What happened to the cult at the end?”, he chuckles.
“What’s left of it today is the Robin Hood project which operates as a cooperative.(13) It’s doctrine directly derived from the manifest I wrote together with the other early members: > Put your thoughts and your expressive gifts in the service of the days and the facts which distinguish them, subject yourself to the existence of things, if you are not what they lack, you are nothing. <“(14)
Pepe raises an eyebrow, Elza nods.
“Sure, we were absolute hypocrites. But with good intentions. And I honestly don’t know what kind of emptiness I prefer. I mean - I was happy back then.”
“Is it better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied?”(15) He asks.
A Socrates that allows himself to be a fool every once in a while, her 23 year old self answers back.
“I Don’t know”, her present self aswers back. “What about you? Any advices?”
“Live a day at a time, anxious about nothing, acting with only this in mind: that [it] at [its] coming may find you ready.(16)
Oh - and do anything it takes to forget about time.”
“What would that be for instance?”
“Well, obviously meditation.”
“I didn’t know you meditate.”
“I go silent because time has become interior to language.”(17) We are infected with time, Elza."
Elza looked at him, smirking.
She loves when he's fooling around like that, halfway kidding, halfway sincere.
Pepe adds: “Should I show you where it works best? It’s nearby. The place is magic, the earthen structure is grounding, submission to the authority of presence.(18) And we haven’t done a roadtrip in some time, anyways.”
the bed where the dreamer lies is a dreamt bed
1 Buehlmann Hovestadt, Symbolizing Existence
2 de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
3 Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology
4 The Book of the Thousand and One Nights
5 Bohnet, What Works
6 de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
7 Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Volume 5 The Later Plato and the Academy
8 Langer, Feeling and Form
9 Anzaldua, This Bridge We Call Home
10 Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology
11 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium
12 Fuller, Synergetics
13 Burrows, Fictioning
14 Robbe Grillet, For A New Novel
15 Sedlacek, Economics of Good and Evil
16 Erasmus, Paraphrases on the Epistles to the Corinthians Ephesians Philippans Colossians and Thessalonians
17 Foucault, The Order of Things
18 Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ13GkRZ_u0
"I know how that sounds. That’s why I am so caught up in this stuff at the moment. I am trying to pull apart what to treasure and what’s to be discarded. We might have been, first and foremost, experts in escapism.
But, no matter if I never see them again: Of course I treasure the memories with contemporaries of this vital chapter. They had been fellow campaigners rather than friends, as if these times had been too busy for extensive friendship, or too spoiled with attractions. We mostly lost sight of each other. And our ideals."
(1)
A FUSION OF PREVIOUS DESIGNS:
roof - 6 parts - 2% inclination
wall covering - stone slabs
embedded beams (wood)
tapered walls - rammed earth
rainwater draining barriers
wooden floor - 20.0 cm elevated above ground
concrete floor - 2% inclination
concrete foundation