Pierre Alferi, p.5
Third room. An empty pocket that opens
creates a vacuum where simulacra are sucked up.
Host replaces host, it thus welcomes thoughts of
all things. A friend bequeathed his room to me as a friend
bequeathed it to him, without giving it up entirely. You seek
a common ground in impossible places.
A barracks in Morocco, a Roman house, a studio
that does not belong to you, with no shower, with a screen
in front of the sink. At the time of the first the material
was painted. He stacked up to five or six canvases against each wall
with a nail gun. At the time of the other the material
was written. The arrangement of the chapels, the reliquaries
and altars formed a pompous and funny miniature
of the community of his friends. It exists only in memory.
We hardly met there. We mostly gathered news
about those absent. Monstrances for fine paper editions,
an ashtray shaped like an urn, piles in unstable balance,
a mute book, memorabilia placed on the furniture
in conscious disorder. His successor himself
added only trophies, people. You throw nothing away,
ever? The image or, better, the two images,
overlapping, of two people at a table
looking straight ahead, one perhaps dreamt by the other,
surrounded by tools they would use to measure,
scrape, trace, coat, glue or see from a distance,
but who for the moment do nothing and hardly contemplate,
merely awake—this fictive image pleases me,
you tell me why. For you community remains
a type of hallucination. Yet your friendships from that time,
undoubtedly because too abstract, have lasted.
The third act is to establish a common place. An inadequate
occupant, discreet, sees the profile of all his visitors
inscribed into the room as into himself, as himself.
In the end I didn’t take it, but I kept the key.
creates a vacuum where simulacra are sucked up.
Host replaces host, it thus welcomes thoughts of
all things. A friend bequeathed his room to me as a friend
bequeathed it to him, without giving it up entirely. You seek
a common ground in impossible places.
A barracks in Morocco, a Roman house, a studio
that does not belong to you, with no shower, with a screen
in front of the sink. At the time of the first the material
was painted. He stacked up to five or six canvases against each wall
with a nail gun. At the time of the other the material
was written. The arrangement of the chapels, the reliquaries
and altars formed a pompous and funny miniature
of the community of his friends. It exists only in memory.
We hardly met there. We mostly gathered news
about those absent. Monstrances for fine paper editions,
an ashtray shaped like an urn, piles in unstable balance,
a mute book, memorabilia placed on the furniture
in conscious disorder. His successor himself
added only trophies, people. You throw nothing away,
ever? The image or, better, the two images,
overlapping, of two people at a table
looking straight ahead, one perhaps dreamt by the other,
surrounded by tools they would use to measure,
scrape, trace, coat, glue or see from a distance,
but who for the moment do nothing and hardly contemplate,
merely awake—this fictive image pleases me,
you tell me why. For you community remains
a type of hallucination. Yet your friendships from that time,
undoubtedly because too abstract, have lasted.
The third act is to establish a common place. An inadequate
occupant, discreet, sees the profile of all his visitors
inscribed into the room as into himself, as himself.
In the end I didn’t take it, but I kept the key.