Espace Chargé
Aix-en-Provence, FR

[2022]


He lay sprawled on the mosaic floor as patterned light split the room. I caught a glimpse of myself within the mirror-scene held in his eye. An aged face cast back at me. Window shutters delicately clapped as they swung in the breeze, the reflected image flickering in response. In brief repetitious moments I saw myself lost to shadow, its profile indistinct from our disorderly interior.

He broke from daydream and turned to me. Eyes wrinkled then, suspended in clay skin.

‘Tell again,’ he exhaled, mixing dust and light in breath, ‘of those long days following our flight from the city?’

‘We were all stretched thin. There was an attitude,’ I professed, ‘towards assembling a dwellingplace in our own manner, to resolve our relationship to the city. I was down in the markets when I caught wind of an old hospital wing, a hollow pavilion open to the sky. Astounded by this artefact, we planned to conceal ourselves within, at Montperrin: the city in the city.

‘We exercise inhabitation as a form of poetry. We spent ourselves, wearing off the contours of our fingertips, working dull cavities to a new material order. We colonized crevices, formed interstices, attached ourselves to apertures, squeezed into slots, framed ourselves in stone.

‘Charged Space;

‘That is to say, we challenged the nature of the object, to channel the nature of ourselves.’

~

Curated by Diane Pigeau
With thanks to Régis Moustier, Yoav Yaron.

Made possible with the support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

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