Birmingham workshop
(output from Joao’s exercise)
A significant text on an insignificant medium
Ok. It’s just a wall. I am aware of that. What do we do with walls? Do we use them? They’re just there, like immobile, unchangeable obstacles in our life-world. But they are not. They are media. They carry meanings and force them on is with the stone-hearted willpower they possess.                                                                                                                                                        Lit on this wall is an apple, the symbol of ultimate temptation, the greatest marketing tool – now that I think of it: the snake laid the foundations for the business school. The word next to it is ‘Adam’s’. But the apple is not his. It was Eve’s. The clothes in the store are for him, to cover up the original sin. So, this text is made out of envy? For Eve?                                      Let’s all shop and forget about original meanings, cover them up and change who we are – never mind the motivation.
1 Gigantic Detail
The boys trousers are down. Here he stands, unknowing what he resembles. Is there someone with a sick mind in this store? Selling sick jokes out of boredom? Or is the precise neatness falling apart? The elastic waistband giving way to gravity, pieces of decency falling to the floor. And I stand and wonder: is this the state of all of us here, following the rules of flow, following eachother, following our paths home into someone’s arms, never sure. Even in the purest space there is sin, on the most proper shining glass an improper speck of dust will gather by invisible forces of static electricity. Or by the elasticity of our morals giving way – to what?
Fascilitating Architecture
Busses go aroung and around in a neverending race to get to a place and transport everyone to nowhere as everything begins again the next morning. Through the night the taxis take over the bustle of people goes around and around the buildings they go. Buildings that wait restlessly in the coloured lights blue and red, no moonlight but horns honking, stoplights switching around. And around they go.
Unfascilitating Architecture
The walls are of glass but you can hardly see through them. Steel rods make up the skeleton but the inside of the construction is empty. Light exudes our of nothingness from the outside of the glass, inside there remains darkness. I could go around it. Without my scrupules I would rather crash into it and shatter the glass, break it’s steelen bones and thrust through it to be free of the chains of building.