chaker ayadi: ideas in cities

furniture

2006-09-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

he visits furniture stores on his day-off. the things he buys are taken from public view and become saturated with personal memories. the same pieces of furniture could have been infused with other memories if that person bought them before he did.

in the city, exchange between the private and the public spaces is in constant flux: a stream of objects are brought in and others are thrown out.

he is always weary of throwing things out; maybe one day that object in his hand will become handy.

and so the space he lives in accumulates more stuff that finds its own private corner.

one day, when time comes to finally take on a new exile, all these collected objects will suddenly lose value except for the books.

the books and written material will go on to live on new shelves and the clothes on new hangers.

bodies on display

2006-09-10T12:08:00.001-07:00

what else can he do with his own body except to display it?

taking care of his body before he goes out; but for what reason?

what does he want when he takes care of his appearence: to fit in or to stand out?

in the city, he drifts among strangers savoring the furtive eye contacts. nothing could be more satisfying than that ephemeral attention; to be looked at.

the worst punishment in the city: to be completely transparent or totally opaque. transparent when passers-by see through him as if he's not really there filling that space (his body); opaque when he is seen as a bulk of a body like an obstruction, a nuisance, a corporeal noise that needs to be filtered out.

he wonders if there is such a thing as a neutral eye contact.

missed encounters

2006-09-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

in the city streets he sees complete strangers whom he may never see again. this causes him relief and sadness about how fugitive the human body could be.

he may never encounter that person (totally erased from the city), yet the memory remains vivid with the image (like the flame that causes a burn and disappears).

so often he sees someone he would like to meet but finds no pretext for his urge.

he wonders how life would be if he could openly stop someone he encounters in the street and speak to without the fear of being misunderstood.

and so there has been so many missed encounters.

that's why baudelaire's poem 'to a passer by' fills him with fascination.

notes on cleaning

2006-09-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

high rises go up in a city with such ease, but we forget that someone has to clean them up at some point.

as he cleans the balcony of his apartment, he sees someone sliding down in a scaffold cleaning his building. the worker has already undone what he spent two hours doing. he has to clean up again.

he wonders how all this dust has seeped through the cracks inside my apartment. dust is so fine like water and it gets in through the tiniest space.

dust is so resilient, persevering and hard working.

he never thinks of cleaning his space until he has to (a visitor, a guest). yet cleaning one's own space has been a major chunk of human's history. for thousands of years humans hunted, ate and cleaned.

in the cinemas, he notices how nobody notices the cleaners.

he saw somebody throwing a crumpled up piece of paper on the ground in the mall and he thought how the mall does not clean itself up the way people do.

notes on cities

2006-05-24T04:25:00.000-07:00

a walk in the streets of a big city is like the random walk through his own thoughts. a physical walk counter weighted by a mental (immaterial) walk

he experiences the city outwardly by looking around and letting all these visuals and sounds seep through him. inwardly are limitless driftworks.

everytime he's out in the streets it is like running a new experiment with surprising new outcomes.

he sees the slightest gesture from a stranger as the culmination of a long history (cultural, religious, linguistic). a gesture is not simply born; it is in the making for such a long time,he thinks to himself, .