In a fiction of Istanbul, constructed inside an artificial Palazzo, in the gardens of the most serene theatre ever constructed by mankind, apparently floating on the grey Adriatic, I gathered dust.
Inside the labyrinth, my feet like all the others, scraped up motes that hovered briefly in the cloistered air before falling back to earth. And in a quiet corner I swept them into twists of paper and slipped them into my pocket.
Labyrinthine dust, Byzantine dust. The scurf of a million sandalled feet ground from the concrete floors of countless battered shops, strung out along endless narrow alleys that only lead you back to where you started. Builder’s dust, cement and earth and a fine sand apparently imported from the east. Grey like the dead. Soft and warm like the touch of skin. Dust that floats in the air like the call to prayer.
Unintentional dust.
When it began the corridors were clean, the floors swept, the benches littered with tools and work only just abandoned, apparently moments before. It was a place of echoes and reflections but of a purpose; a living space from which only the occupants were missing.
But then the visitors arrived and wandered from room to room and wondered, and left their marks. And the decay set in, the feet scratched and the dust rose, and began to settle. And now it is as if the passage of thousands of feet have accelerated time and deposited the dust of generations in only a matter of months. What was once a moment frozen in time has become Time itself – the medium in which History is enacted and all our cultures bloom like mould.
What we see is what we are. This is the house we make believe, whose windows all face inwards. This is the house of control and construction where secret rules prompt private fantasies and all appears exactly as it might be. This world is merely a fragile shell suspended, like our disbelief, inside another fragile shell, inside another fragile shell.
Detail from Whisper in the Midst of Silence at The Other Art Fair, next weekend...
