15.06 - 05.09

“Ciudades diferentes se suceden sobre el mismo suelo y bajo

el mismo nombre, nacen y mueren sin haberse conocido,

incomunicables entre sí. […] Las viejas postales no representan a

Maurilia como era, sino a otra ciudad que por casualidad se llamaba

Maurilia como ésta”

— Italo Calvino, Las ciudades invisibles

Exactly 7.5 minutes, which takes time to harden. At that time a certain state of permanence is inscribed that will never allow us to remember ourselves equal. And that memory, which was already tarnished, will try to guess in the place that resists inside the bucket. I think I perceive there the fragility that surrounds so much hardness, as that which covers with precious flexible fabrics perfectly fitted, breaks cruelly into everything that you and I had imagined. Perhaps we had never spoken the same language, or used the same words to refer to very different things. I was scared to hear your screams: Get Picasso tickets, Picasso tickets! you insisted, I never thought you would be so alien to what was happening to us. I think the biggest fear was when your stories, your memories, began to take shape through hard costumes, reinforced concrete costumes, plaster costumes. The trompe-l’oeil became your most common operation without realizing the violence you were exerting.

I get stories of how you swallowed skins without discretion. I was still blinded by that sense of belonging that you promised me; with every new costume that you put on, your skins got redder, your caresses were harder, hotter. I fancied thinking that the sweat you produced when you touched me lubricated the movements, which were increasingly interrupted by your new clothing. In the midst of all this, I am guided by a new star that is visible watching from all your corners.

It took little less than 2 hours to collapse: Montserrat A. died in her house after the turn ended, all your control and sanitization mechanisms ended up revealing their authentic nature, filling themselves with exhausted bodies holding among all those fictions that you had made us believe. I know that this was the point of no return, the point where the friction was such that it did not allow us to think otherwise, our already exhausted looks crossed fleetingly once again, and I, with all my strength, insisted on perforating that hardness, and to hold me under your skin.

“Home is a whole society, fulminating with voices from the Dead,

the familiar voices blending into birdsongs on your windowsill at

dawn. Comforted by the tracks of those who have gone ahead of

you, your limits extend after them. You are alive but part of you is

underground already. When whom you love or have loved dies, part

of you goes too, and you are picked apart, gradually, piece by piece,

until oblivion is as natural as sleep”

—Fanny Howe, Holy Smoke

So here I sit, in the only corners you left me—on those steps scarred with the traces of everyone who has paused here. On that hard, shadeless concrete, where sitting forces me to disrupt the paths of passersby moving with their own agendas, I try to reconstruct from memory all the possibilities that remained inside the cube; and as it dawns on me, I realize that there—and only there—it took exactly 7.5 minutes to harden.

Text by Ignasi Ayats Soler

15.06 - 05.09

“Ciudades diferentes se suceden sobre el mismo suelo y bajo

el mismo nombre, nacen y mueren sin haberse conocido,

incomunicables entre sí. […] Las viejas postales no representan a

Maurilia como era, sino a otra ciudad que por casualidad se llamaba

Maurilia como ésta”

— Italo Calvino, Las ciudades invisibles

Exactly 7.5 minutes, which takes time to harden. At that time a certain state of permanence is inscribed that will never allow us to remember ourselves equal. And that memory, which was already tarnished, will try to guess in the place that resists inside the bucket. I think I perceive there the fragility that surrounds so much hardness, as that which covers with precious flexible fabrics perfectly fitted, breaks cruelly into everything that you and I had imagined. Perhaps we had never spoken the same language, or used the same words to refer to very different things. I was scared to hear your screams: Get Picasso tickets, Picasso tickets! you insisted, I never thought you would be so alien to what was happening to us. I think the biggest fear was when your stories, your memories, began to take shape through hard costumes, reinforced concrete costumes, plaster costumes. The trompe-l’oeil became your most common operation without realizing the violence you were exerting.

I get stories of how you swallowed skins without discretion. I was still blinded by that sense of belonging that you promised me; with every new costume that you put on, your skins got redder, your caresses were harder, hotter. I fancied thinking that the sweat you produced when you touched me lubricated the movements, which were increasingly interrupted by your new clothing. In the midst of all this, I am guided by a new star that is visible watching from all your corners.

It took little less than 2 hours to collapse: Montserrat A. died in her house after the turn ended, all your control and sanitization mechanisms ended up revealing their authentic nature, filling themselves with exhausted bodies holding among all those fictions that you had made us believe. I know that this was the point of no return, the point where the friction was such that it did not allow us to think otherwise, our already exhausted looks crossed fleetingly once again, and I, with all my strength, insisted on perforating that hardness, and to hold me under your skin.

“Home is a whole society, fulminating with voices from the Dead,

the familiar voices blending into birdsongs on your windowsill at

dawn. Comforted by the tracks of those who have gone ahead of

you, your limits extend after them. You are alive but part of you is

underground already. When whom you love or have loved dies, part

of you goes too, and you are picked apart, gradually, piece by piece,

until oblivion is as natural as sleep”

—Fanny Howe, Holy Smoke

So here I sit, in the only corners you left me—on those steps scarred with the traces of everyone who has paused here. On that hard, shadeless concrete, where sitting forces me to disrupt the paths of passersby moving with their own agendas, I try to reconstruct from memory all the possibilities that remained inside the cube; and as it dawns on me, I realize that there—and only there—it took exactly 7.5 minutes to harden.

Text by Ignasi Ayats Soler