the Estado Novo, and a stiffer Lisbon than the world of today, remind me of some lines in Beckett. I am waiting. For what are you waiting? For it to all blow over. For what to all blow over? Life, I am waiting for life to blow over. Like White, the people of Lisbon are waiting in space: hunting for objects that, if they can be recognised, will signal the arrival of the right time. * I keep seeing it – that sense of loss, of uncertainty, that encounters me everywhere. In Lisbon, it crept up on me when I least expected it. In mute arcades, on side streets, down passages that suggest nothing but bare walls and struggling businesses, worlds congregate. Just as sleep, in conditions of oppression, can be a liberation, so concealed spaces in cities can act as a dream, in which one is liberated from a disjunctive present into an impossible past. In these empty spaces, neglected by the Portuguese, time is trapped in a bottle, and left to ferment. I found myself wandering down one of these side streets, one day in Lisbon, and entering a mall. As I climb up the stairs, there is floor after floor of food shops: plantains, ripe and brown, compete for space with fiery-red Scotch Bonnet chillies and dried fish. There are no warehouses for these shopkeepers, and the produce spills out of brown cardboard boxes, just as the cardboard boxes in turn poke out of doorways, onto the course-ways, turning the mall floors into a long extended market, in which the boundaries between the shops are no longer clear. I stopped to speak to one of the shopkeepers; I no longer recall her name. She said she was building a house in Angola, a three- storey dream house. Every cent she made in Portugal went back to Angola, to her family, and into her house. Life in Portugal is a suspended life, which consists simply of building a life elsewhere. At least here, she said, in this mall, I am reminded of home. The mall is a dreamed world, a world that is a function of another, more concrete dream. In the mall, Portugal and Angola enter into uneasy co-existence, with the Angolan shopkeeper depending on the former colonial master for her future independence. She is waiting to live again. She spoke dismissively of the bar downstairs. Every cent must go home (and every cent spent in Portugal, is a cent wasted). The bar is in the basement, and you can hear the shouts and the music as you enter the mall. It is to here that everything flows. The lost, the forgotten, and those that want to forget, congregate here. I drink with two Liberians, who wait on the curb like the Angolans, but not for possibility; they wait for the appointed hour, and they walk to the bar. The stronger you are, the longer it takes you to get there; the bigger the foundations of the dream-home, back home, the longer it takes for you to succumb to its memory. Only it is not home. This bar resembles no bar in Liberia or Angola. It is a bar in Lisbon. And it is not. It is a bar made by a community that is in Lisbon, but it is only uncertainly a part of it. It is there. It is not from there. A lost space, grown ripe and drunk on fermented time, unmoving. * So the old men look, in their small circles in the parks of Lisbon, for a space that will close the gap between the world they know and the world Lisbon is becoming; and so the Angolans, in their shops, on street curbs, search for the concrete possibilities that will mean they are no longer living a life suspended, and can rejoin a now-liveable life in Angola. So White looks, in tiles, for a sense of time that will ground her in the city, and so I look, amongst them all, for a sense of what it is I am hunting for. We people of Lisbon are a type of us all. We keep looking for the answer to time in space, and the answer to space, in time. Joshua Craze Cairo Collective Monuments I was both intrigued and puzzled by Liam Brown’s piece, ‘Ashes: The Urban Dispersal of Earthly Remains’ (26:DIRT). I think of death as extra-ordinarily personal – funerary architecture represents the individuality of the deceased and accommodates the privacy of those left to mourn. Death’s monuments are often built from stone, connoting the solemn if illusory sentiment that the living will not forget the dead. Brown flipped this notion on its head by designing a collective grave where the individual is marked by the slats of a wooden fence, an object that connotes exclusion and will quickly age. It is a public and perhaps harshly real way of commemorating an individual’s life in the urban landscape. Corey Schnobrich Berkeley
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portraits. Still, nothing had prepared me to the flickering images quickly passing through the frame of the car window and how much I had to adapt
my way of drawing in order to capture what seemed like confrontational snapshots between the land, abandoned structures, field machines, and weather conditions.
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