ft ground

Roma, Firenze, (Pisa), Manarola, Venezia, Milano
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a brief slow-down in composition will be noted throughout this month of january for a wrk.grp ordeal. th.wrk.grp will be constructing 31 houses in a collaboration as forced and binding as those of their earliest days. no more parallel play, this is a mess.

ho! bon annee!

The light moves in the rippled patterns of blown liquid refracting. Sinuous, clear, electric nets oscillate across the wall, spreading out from particular spots at some moments and shivering in decreasing frenzy out toward the alley. Soft filtered color traces through some of the lines, transforming as they twist upon themselves, idle yellow to lukewarm grey spueth across the wall, disappearing, impoverished, arising charitably and truthfully clear again, the green hopes of the regenerated creature precede its old rose anguish, and truthfully clear again before the void where the strand of light wastes its gift and recedes further. In its absence the black seal of death, the orange end.

Through the night you shiver back through the day. The tendrils of light that swirl around you do not harbour memory. You do not remember. The places still are and the objects still where your hands aligned them. Things touch places forever. The end is in orange pressed into your eyes in sleep, the tiny daily suicide. In it is the empty afternoon apartment, yellow with self scrutiny, leave the city, leave the long rays through blinds that ignite the grey dust of your breath, leave the must palazzo, wake up to a green sky through the alley window in your empty bedroom at dusk across the hollow sky dome, the ubiquitously hollow apartment swollen static from the pressure of your grog and on the street is black prenight emptiness, black puddles, black churches, solid places not carved open by memories. When night fell the light arose again filled with violet, forcefully evacuating the city, leaving you sealed, moony, with your sleepless self accusation.
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The ruined surfaces of ruinous things swim in various shades and hues of night light bouncing pale green to deep opaque sea and dried grass to gaseous orange and back on breezes. Fingerprints, strands of hair, dried fluid stains, surface deformations and deposits ride the passage of tone. They remain when the effects of the light alter or disappear. In darkness these blemishes recede to point outward to whence the shining light arrived. The periodic evacuation of the light seals your dark chasm. Beyond the mouth of the alcove passing bodies project shadows, blinds or baffles are engaged, your eyes shut.

Before the light returns, out of the dim emerge the edges of objects and imperfections drawin in rising moonlight, pulling with them the high waters over your cheek in the sand, flowing in from tidal canals to submerge you where you settle, until the buoyant objects you clutch wrestle you through the depths. Where you had struggled not to sink you now cast away bits of the world you reached to only to sit for a moment more in the dark beyond yourself and you rise faster on the tide until you sink deposited on a bed of silt. Sleep across the causal chains. Their geometric simplicity is crushing. Moments make other moments. Moments and moments and moments make things. Moments are made of things affecting things. The chain is indelible and explicit. In the courtyard, around the corner, your breath falls and awakens a chain that leads back to your face.
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The walls spanning out on her sides, mirrored be seas balmy flat and those that rise to be mirrors splitting the sky reflect articulately straight into a point. Walls close down upon the horizon placing you in their disorienting circuitous maze. The streets and the paths may be straight or convoluted, chambered, but they do not encumber her movement, distinctions about geometry are the musings of the lost. She merely continues. The walls, assuming the ambiguity of dusk, are liquid and featureless. They form a second horizon, a shade brighter, beneath the sky.

Her reflections carry the streets, narrow high-walled slits opened into the spaces between buildings, where buildings fear to press shivering close but breathing against one another. The narrow streets trail her heels after the unfurling canvas threads and frayed rubber strips, reflecting one after another blinking together into the mightily still wash of silt on which you stand with boundless freedom, yet sinking. All points from which walls turn away, eventually, flow on in the moments at your desk, at the moments just at bleak predusk, your eyes and feet fill the continuous outdoors. You are walking at the edge of the wide boulevard at dusk. For you the clouds are still. There are no clouds, more reflections of beige streaked across the sky and to the horizon where it meets the floor, dissolved in dim. The undifferentiated street environment slows around you. You seek to move through it and further from the desk, toward open doors or ajar doors.
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Wade into the slowly moving rio, pressed tight between walls, from upon the streets where expanses are all occluded, everything has a relationship drawn in fragments. She cannot clutch the city whilst getting caught drifting into reeds around corners. Yet, lost down within, a relationship impossible through racing straightness is cultivated, she is subject to the invisible eddies, the deep currents, the stagnant dead ends, the life cast into the reeds, shes sees why, for self preservation, the streets redirect themselves, why they hide covered places the sun cannot touch, standing water connects continuously with the great network she believes she is refused from but which she cannot leave without drifting throughout. On all sides are walls. Afternoon sun flows through southfacing gaps and falls upon her neck and shoulders. Long spells and days spent watching the shadows drift across the opposite wall, and shadows of clouds drift through those pale frames of light at conflicting speeds, bring her the protection of familiarity, the familiar everchanging skies. She is claimed by this space, identified by its coordinates, its stillness, its address, its name, all of which she adopts. Sheltered in these times, although the road extends far out to the horizon, she can maintain focus. The noise of the city falls away, the repeated blocks, the names, and the mysteries. She stalls here and there not from personal interest, or any sense of fit or acquiescence in the rigour of gridded walls, but out of a necessity that these things prompt, to claim the blank, the mutable, by merely occupying it for as long as the tides allow.
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Parallel to the hills roads run ever distant in furrowed ruts converging into later afternoons in a segmented band of colours refracted from the sun into the asphalt. Whether they reach forever, always converging to a point as she gains ground, is irrelevant, their closure at every moment is a claim to infinity, she perceives continuous distance that as it creeps further away from her, claims her future with its pointless exploration, at some points the road closes down, the perspective grows lopsided and she follows through serpentine high walled corridors that claim space not through distance and division but by coverage, claiming every spot in a surface by wrapping into a continuous mess of fluid turns where the uncertainty of direction and extent rivals the ubiquitous straight line. She pauses intermittently.

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The shifting and swaying of the calli, arteriole throb as throngs pulse and swell, straight legged fitted waist, the softest tissue of midmorning Venetian red, shifting and swaying, the milky mint shadows of lapping froth, the forgotten soft rio, delicately filling finger pressed pits in stone, the curve in the center of the lip top, pursed and holding a silvery sphere, a droplet of glistening seduction, an invitation for retreat of swaying liquidly shifting to the shadows.

You will find the guidebook of FtG Italian Postcards below. These were all drawn ‘in situ’, and like the writings that appear in the daily updates, are unedited after the initial burst of production. Therefore, some fall shorter than others in their conveyance of the imagery and emotion at hand. Enjoy!

_roma_05.21.01_10:28
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Please add the following to the below list, purchased in Italia: The Castle Kafka, Traumnovelle Schnitzler, La Symphonie Pastoral / Isabelle Gide, The Cambridge Quintet Casti, The Mezzanine Baker, Tropic of Capricorn Miller, and about 5 packs of 4 AA batteries that were sucked each within an hour by my Nomad (vampire).

Brief list of formative experiences: basement of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Bernini’s baldichino in San Pietro, cats at the coliseum, Piazza and church of Santa Croce, lantern climb at the Duomo in Florence, sitting on the triangles of Ponte S. Trinita over the Arno, meal at Pizzeria belle Artes, Jeff Koons teacups, getting shat on at San Marco in Venezia, the Castelvecchio in Verona, Passwords Libreria, Casa del Fascio, Como central cemetery…