Offscapes - Beyond the Limits of Urban Landscape

60 Beyond the limits of urban landscape

ZUBENELGENUBI

There are really days like this under bland equinox sky pink in glowing sunset ash; days like these when the color of the city sometimes changes, days discovered only in the evening, suspend the prose of life There are days like these, when the line of the horizon is set ablaze, youcannot find theharmonies, but the resonances, a rough vibration of metal heard on the rope of the vertebrae, atmospheric pressure on the eardrum, ghost-like humming of the white noise that counterpoints the bass of breath. «Dry, red and sweet is the wold’s skeletal landscape», the hard never-ending ground of all ended tales of the bodies of the men made stone a sea of voices confused by time, what you have thrown with both hands in the holes of days, the hollow of years in the resentful mixture of the past, trusting in the project, in the mould, believing in the building, in the structure: but there was nothing written and each building grows without pillars, without wisdom, with the intellect of the last moment on this inconsistent foundations

This is why I like the deserts in the midst of the undone suburbs of abandoned industrial zones. Under the skies of motionless mists, western skies abandoned by history, alone in the solitude of a new day while remaining locked in cars still on the edge of the city in streets wider and wider and emptier of traffic, you do not have to wait for a cinemascope, the roundup back in a long reverse shot that takes all and says it all: our steps will tell the plot of the eyes and the looks, to build each time the climate without listening to the requirements our hard lot, and of the humble place (not even those of bitter wars) of all sad or happy fairy tales. This sense of solitude enters the eye through a hundred corners and different faces, in the insect glance of a thousand windows of council homes the immense expanse of the sodium-vapour.

Here you can find new pleasures: the screech of neon among cicadas, artificial light in sunrise, the smell of diesel oil, of tar: so far we have never talked about it at the edge of grass, we thought they were only a small load to take away and return to the real truth, instead they are made to last and become hard stone, earth, soil, story, meaning, history, in short, this is the layer of another generation. You feel thoughts in the spinal plexuses, along the veins and through the bone forming in proteins and tendons, tensions, loosening up and in rhythm and breath play pebbles, dust, bricks, clear splendour of sky and cement. At the bottom of the roads of the plain at an unusual angle to the universe summer clouds sit idle.

It is a log of other cities, a live view on journeys, points of departure and return is the calculation of steps and fatigue; all smallest cities collected under the plural skies of the evening,