Sliding Doors | 2011
The places of consumption receive and shape the first users of a new enlarged logic, which provides for the loss of roles and clear boundaries, where consumers and consumed wear the same face of those who sell their short term dreams. It makes no sense to dredge up nostalgia for village shop when now life and market have the same value, when of the threshold you have to exceed in entering or leaving not even a trace remains, but the chatter of a cash register or air conditioning kept at bay by sliding doors. All that exists is in the shop window or on the shelf, and what we are can and should be seized as a bar code, because there is no time to learn about, much less talk about, or at least there is not enough time, no more. The belief is made real, and this, perhaps, is the biggest lie, an induced truth that shapes the present time up to deform it. There are places that wear this lie generously and accept it, releasing powerful yet fake contradictions, eternal if caught in the illusion of a present that has not and is not time any longer, but fragile if the gaze recognizes that they cling upon an unscratched surface. Something about us is as durable and crosses the centuries and beyond, becomes present and tells in whole about us even under the shell that we buy as cheap as such, when it is nothing but a bundle of paper that will not go beyond the first rain or a gust of wind. It remains as what an instantaneous look can capture, impressed in light and laying motionless for a moment, as a single merciless frame stolen from the perpetual and delusive flowing of appearances, so that the present can be back to being time, and we can return to tell about ourselves, and to forgive even a self-told lie.
Text by Andrea Filippin