I
always wondered how it would be if all the humans disappear; structures / utilities,
abandoned houses, everything human to be abandoned. There are some people who
speak, foresee that in ten years the vegetation will spread all over and I imagine
blocks and auto roads, everything destroyed, no, I mean some kind of weird architecture,
geographic or biologic maybe. I dreamt one night a dream that I was walking
on some metal stairs painted in English red and it was a courtyard (I thought
later it was the courtyard of the place where I live) with vegetation, a lot
of vegetation that I thought it was Brazil
and I walked upstairs where I saw a woman, android, robot from gold I think,
or I don't know maybe I just believed it was gold because I don't like gold
but in that moment I did. Anyway, in the left corner it was something more.
And it was also an elevator next to that thing. And when I imagine how it would
look like without people I remember a sensation in my childhood when my parents
and me, after returning from the seaside where we had spent two weeks have entered
the empty house where nobody had been meantime and only a little window had
been open for having some fresh air, in that moment something very interesting
was happening. In that moment some traces were disappearing from the house,
and it was the feeling that the traces and all the personal histories were erased
from the house's space, everything becoming smooth. Obviously after one day
of living there the traces reappeared. But it was cool that at least the first
day, the first hours the floating sensation has kept, but its intensity was
fading with each hour. People drop/release traces behind them. Traces where
they walk, as millions of them are left behind them when walking (as they leave
behind them when walking, millions of them) but many like them; I can't even
think about how many traces and how many I-s where dropped when I walk. And
I think it's awful . Now I think that in time the traces grow down in intensity,
or I don't know. When you take pictures by night to the cars there are some
luminous traces, but if you take pictures by day you see the cars only, by night
only the traces . Maybe with the people happens the same. I believe that all
this story with the traces is more visible in the cars case by night, because
when people constructed them they didn't think to cover the cars traces except
by day, but who constructed the humans thought to covet them better.
The humans also started to construct
and to produce and to use technology, that is normal. But the objects, the technologies
and some other traces left behind them are not so well covered as the humans
are. The objects, the technologies loose their cover and drop traces behind
them that can be studied, analyzed, photographed and connections and speculations
could be made - this the project I'm working on. I use technology and objects
in order to study the technology and the objects (their traces to be more precisely).
I think, I look carefully to everyday common things and I observe they have
different meanings - I study them and I make connections. You can discover links,
sensations, allusions; for example Space Odissey high-tech design and a restroom
in Brera gallery or sexual hints in things you don't expect to find them; or
the death into a half cut lemon, or you find out/discover a connection between
the Mussolini's railway station's cupolas and two sport shoes I wear and I take
them pictures suggesting an sexual organ. That's right. I
think to the wholes that people made in the ground for constructing subways
and to the train circulation through those wholes; it could be a sexual
act.
Anyway that idea with Zen has nothing in common with Zen or perhaps it has.
This connection came to me one night in the subway while returning home, and
next to us , on some red chairs in the left were two stoned persons (two people
stoned with golden varnish, or some other adequate solvents). It as a woman
I think and in front of her there
were two other guys. I don't know but it looked like she asked them for something
from time to time. And I was strike about the expression on her face . She was
content/happy I mean she didn't need
anything. She was Zen. And next to her was another
stoned guy who was sleeping and I think not far from them was a dog who
stayed just like that. Or maybe it was a dog I did see some other day and I
made the connection. Anyway, about the traces, the objects, the technologies
I observed something. Even if the animals seem to have lost this battle. The
animals, the dogs, do care one each other. I saw in a crossroad a pair of dogs
who stayed there, they ham to the cars from time to time and I think they do
care each other. And there is another dog with them, a yellow one. And I met
a man who takes care of them and I think he is the chief of the shop on the
Boulevard; and if tha mayor try to kill the dogs, he'll not succeed because
the dogs are already Zen. About the dogs, this is not quite a problem for us
but I have seen a documentary on the Discovery channel and the dogs gave their
paws frightened and those guys made experiments for human's medicines. In the
end some people, different people have saved them..
About how the dogs appeared on the streets of my city.
They appeared because the humans have demolished the other people's houses for
making blocks - in a postmodernist, in fact modernist euphoria. So that the
dogs had no place to stay because people didn't take them in the blocs. And
Gil told me (the violonist from Café Florian) how a dog whose house had
been demolished didn't understand a thing. It stayed on a debris cluster in
the same place where the house had been situated. The idea is all these dogs
are already architecture together with the houses of 200 - 300 years old with
mouldings and Cupids that had been destroyed for building modern, pseudo-cubist
blocks.
notes
About architecture it could be said as I saw a couple of years ago, in Geneva,
on a river that had a small island some swans that have been making a nest for
swanlings and for constructing it they used everything, even a plane toy, quite
big.
ZEN by Floe Tudor