All images courtesy of the artist & Galeria Wschód.

 

The words keep on pacing. Prodding right past themselves, they orbit the block with elbows taut. From down here their movements appear synchronistic, but from the sixth floor it’s clear that each body arbitrarily swivels in coil-like formation. Preordained routes entwine, and through squinting eyes, their contours look something like the cloverleaf curls of highway exits. One splits from the pack and wheels out into traffic.

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Where this tower ends, another begins – just membranes of crumbling grout bridging one century to the next. As a patchwork of extruded junctions and timelines, they all turn inwards – creating a chamber for echoes and hums. With the help of windows, slabs and tiles, their declarations sound back with varying emphasis. Mantras bounce on the hour, the half, the quarter and so on. As the pulse dampens, clatter slips undetected past eardrums– nesting in the minds of unwitting neighbours.

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I’m standing at ground level, watching sounds ricochet back and fourth between the encircling walls and passing wagons. Pale noise ambles up stairwells, down halls and in all eventualities – envelopes the realms of sleepers. Even the resting hours, from which the clutter of daily life is cleaned and compartmentalized, are they themselves contaminated by the debris that comes in with the draught. Like ventilation systems made from skin and bone, unconscious bodies help to keep the air in motion.

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Spanning the fissure between two properties, a swathe of knitted steel demarks the infill. It’s lacquered arms reach wide in attempts to grasp – but the trellis, and all of its holes, fail to capture a single utterance. Filtered into indistinct phonetic specks, they sift through the framework and towards the skyline like a swarm of insects. The entire cloud abuzz, they take their voices elsewhere.

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Only wasteland trickles beyond the grate – a dumping ground of sorts. Antiquated things and opinions, that at one point harnessed meaning, lay strewn all around. A hardcover journal has gone soft; it’s sodden partitions all bent up and bloated. It’s difficult to sound out the words, as the ink from individual letters has haemorrhaged into one amorphous stain.

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Children from the neighbouring buildings like to rummage here, cobbling together fragments of civil refuse. Modelling totems and shelters, they dream up structures that better characterize their concerns than those from which they’ve ambled. The vibrating cloud hovers amidst their camps, but the new society builders hardly take notice as they’re too entrenched in their own projections.

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Like a dissolute train of thought, the big blur continues to chug along through the working hours. Overtime on weekends. Again and again, the same bends are stumbled upon until the ties that bind grow shaky and signal for their repair. In time, trampled sprouts have the tendency to grow tired also – surrendering themselves to newfound pathways.

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links:

Wschód

Contemporary Art Library

Art Viewer