Thursday 31 October
There is a phrase that often comes to my head, especially these days when I only rarely leave my room. It’s a phrase I nearly invented myself through successive translations. I then read the original and found it insufficient.
I only rarely leave my room, and when I do, it is in order to find other rooms, other confined places, where silence is natural and movement unnecessary.
I had been dwelling in a place I could not come to imagine. So I always say after I come back.
I don’t know how I decided to take that walk.
I was looking for other rooms.
It came as a surprise: I was crossing rooms with 18th C. miniatures, getting closer to them until the lights went on and I could stare at the details. It was absorbing.
The space opened.
Was it just one room? Just this room?
I kept walking, in a state of trance.
Every space was defined by its own set of colours. Each one was a setting, and I was alone and the setting was ready for me. I was there as a walker, I was there to stare, I was their stranger and they were mine. I stared at details ten times bigger than the ones in the miniatures, yet they were details so obscure, so personal, I was ashamed to ask.
I had been dwelling in a place I could not come to imagine not because it was unimaginable, but because it was too close to my dreams. My dreams of glory and decadence, my dreams from other times, dreams I did not care to share through words. Rooms like the faces of a Rubik’s cube, swiped into place by a movement of the hand, immobile and hyperreal. A tour of the monuments of […].
Installation images courtesy the artists and Victoria Miro, London
© Elmgreen & Dragset / photography Anders Sune Berg