Dwelling in Uncertain

Abstract

We spent hours sitting in silence, until he turned his eyes away from the window and spoke: ‘I would like to tell you one last story, It has been decided, there will be no more travels beyond the edge for me.’ In the following days I heard, not one but five, stories of people M encountered – inhabitants of the land he traveled to. Truth be told, it did not seem like any of the earlier destinations. This place seemed somewhat deteriorating, lacking internal cohesion, subjected to pressure coming from the ‘core’. In the years to come it will inevitably become part of it, devoured by its insisting territory. Inhabitants of the land were gradually pushed to the edges, while the ‘core’ kept on indulgently swallowing their homes, imposing its own logic onto progressively flattened space. Some left, others opposed, finally there were those who decided to inhabit what was left of it - the place they once called home, now hostile environment they had to learn how to dwell in anew. In the midst of dust, rubble and tumbling buildings they found ‘the void’, squeezed between some remaining edifices. Those were largely industrious spaces, destined to provide for and fuel the becoming extension of the core. It seemed almost as if those people, like an anguished animal, were pushed into a lair, one that was not fit to receive them. They were forced to inhabit the toxic ground, polluted by the years of industrial activity, to use and reuse the existing material, scraps, debris and so on. Building their new home from the remains of the recent past, invoked rebuilding of a shattered mind, or fragmented memory. Indeed, their lives reflected in this peculiar architecture they were destined to soon call home.