I
It is late. The concert has already begun. The hall is bursting its buttons. The barmaids wear black waistcoats. They are incredibly polite. We wait outside for the first performance to finish. At the interval we are finally allowed to go in. The hall is too brightly lit and our eyes cannot concentrate on the performers. The piano on the stage seems too far away. The complex construction of the ceiling is a distraction. Underneath it feels like being in a carapace. The succession of beams are sharp, carved, polished, outlined by their own shadows. All the sequenced objects produce a sound. After the first uneven notes the blended scents of all the onlookers begin to bloom into a nebulous olfactory rosé mixed with the true smell of people. They are like two great odours at war. One is real, corporeal. The other covers it. It tries to surpass it but it is a sticking plaster. It does not have the same capacity as the truth. Bodies have a smell because the inside of bodies has a smell too, which desperately tries to stick out its head, pierce every fibre. It is like an internal heat that wants to get out just to cool down. While we smile, speak, listen, attentively observe, the body does things. The whole thing is always in motion. Until you feel something, the whole thing is always in motion.
II
You have to go up a little step to go into the main bedroom. The little step is on the verge of the invisible. The tricky relationship with the step is a measure of how little we yet know about the house. There are a series of frames with images of bullseyes inside the main bedroom. The series of frames give the room a tension because there is no logically acceptable reason for them to be in this place. The background of the targets is always black. The geometrical structure of the concentric lines is instead white, like a spider’s web. The first bullseye on the left has a nice series of holes. The harmonious excrescence of the little round holes is protected by a thin pane of glass that leaves a live reflection of the figure of the person who is looking. The series of bullseyes are reproduced in a much smaller size than reality and this process makes them adjectival, childish. Whatever aesthetic or abstract value the assembler/producer of these diddy images has surely given them, to the point of choosing to display them in their home, they preserve the soul of what they were: repeated explosions, repeatedly pierced surfaces. Who knows where they practised, who knows the distance they shot from.
III
The sunken garden at the back of the house looks like a mini valley. The wafer-thin, red twelve-seater table helps this illusion. From a distance, placed there in solitude, the table looks like a toy model. At night a robot gets on with cutting the grass. The landlady has requested us not to move anything in the garden because the robot has learnt where every object is by heart and manages to negotiate its way round well. So long as no one moves anything. You just have to stay outside for a few minutes to understand that the mountain bears down on everything. It is inevitable. It is impossible not to look. It is impossible not to think of the mountain. The wild vegetation comes right up to the perfectly preened lawn. The boundary is drastic, like the area shaved clean for an operation. It gets cold in the evening. The change is lightning-fast and everything turns blue. Icy water forms on the grass and lives until morning. Before lunch the sun moves around the house and ends up over the lawn. The green grass gets boiling hot. The sun burns. It is impossible to walk for a long time or stay in the sun without a hat. You risk fainting. Usually when things get to this point it is better to go back in and stay in the house. It is like being in a great mechanism of vessels communicating between different factors, dampness, cold, sun, which you have to mind out for. And so you start to scurry humiliatingly inside and out, a reminder of how much it is the landscape that decides. They are continual changes that put pressure on you. You feel encircled by events, not by things. It is a fragile idyll. A far-off cry is all it takes to make everything ghost-like.
IV
It took hours to get here on foot. Walking in the sun for such a long time, eyes to the ground, the noise of steps becomes a mantra. At the centre of the gorge, the lake looks like a cold zone haloed by light. You get there from above. The road wraps around it like a snake. All around there are various floating platforms where you can lie down to rest. The rectangles of grey wood are bleached, aged, burnt by the sun. They bob up and down on the dense surface, a watery skin more tense than what it contains. The white bodies dive in. They seem to disappear into the void but then they re-emerge. The bodies come together in groups. They climb up the sloping trees that almost weep into the lake. They run in line along the paths and then they group back up and dive in again, then regroup and dive back in again, like a human escalator, as if they were all linked by a string leading and pulling them along. There is a platform in the centre of the lake. You can get to it if you are a good swimmer. Not everyone makes it. Not even halfway there and already some turn back. So from the lake shores some point to the platform, think about it, deliberate, weigh up whether to tackle the crossing or not. Everything wavers between the euphoria of a possible victory and strategic calculations to avoid failure in front of everyone. Things do not only work like that at the lake.
V
There is a photo of a girl in the bedroom corridor. The girl has a burst bubble of bubble gum on her lips. The girl looks into the bedroom with her eyes open as if she were looking at someone she wanted to study. She has the look of someone who knows she will be looked at. The girl is wearing a white T-shirt. She has two necklace lines engraved into the crook of her neck. Blonde hair slips down the sides of her face. Beautiful hair, straight, shining, lots of it. Thick hair, hair that will stay there to the last of her days. Well, it might change, get a bit dry, but it will all stay where it is. No issues with it thinning or weakening. The image of the girl is vaguely underexposed. She is burdened by the oppressing presence of the flash which does not generate a true white point, so the range of colours is reduced, suffocating. There is nothing to look at yet it is a tour de force. You go round and round the photo trying to understand. Because the mise-en-scène, the role play they have cobbled together, goodness knows who with, is not convincing. Instead it invades the psyche, because the girl is completely immersed in a state of recital. The subject is used, like a toy. The scene is broken. It gives off the purest energy like poisonous waste. All in all the photo looks like a warning, but who it is warning, no one knows, because it has all happened already. Because we cannot defend ourselves from what happened. Things can be pushed away, repressed, but they cannot be killed off. There is no killing a surprise. There is no killing a wound.
VI
Seen from the outside the house looks like it is on fire. The wooden scales that cover its outside walls are blackened. It is tensed. It is solid but it suffers. It hides. It is a house without any openings. Windows yes, but ways out, none. All wood, like all the other houses: sadistic architecture one hundred percent wood. Wooden walls, wooden beams, wooden floors, wooden worked ceilings, staircases, doors, doorframes and double windows. All wood. All the same shiny, reddish, perfect colour. They do not rest on the ground. Here the houses seem to come out of the earth, like the vertical axis of a pointed cross missing the horizontal piece to finish it off. From the outside they have eyes. Skylights. Pairs of them. If you are inside, they do not protect you. If you are outside, they observe you. There is a woodstore next to every house. It is all perfect and since it is part of something bigger here, every action is a piece in a total and at the same time intimate mechanism. Everything is something unstoppable due to the great plan or a great submerged desire. The pieces of wood are cut into triangles to burn more quickly in the stoves. They are so perfectly lined up in the new form that they create that they look like a great façade of wood, broken up and then put back together. They are so well cut that they cut. Nothing more than existence here. Nothing more than existing. Planned, done, dusted existing like a music stave, like a complete body. Nothing more than this offering that does not look into itself but offers itself naked in its violence. Heaven.