Traces and Marks
…of still-warm territories.
The factory.
The air still reeks of human presence. Floors and walls are tattooed with human hands.
So many imprints that rekindle the still-warm embers of a collective memory. Trajectories and their flow have left layers of passage, deposited like the remnants of a ritual.
On the floor, paint and stains, scratches and cracks intertwine, still dancing this tireless ballet, choreographed like a mechanical waltz. The music still seems to sit behind the walls.
Everywhere, the traces left by men and their stains mark the place like so many wrinkles and scars.
The factory’s eloquent silence still resonates with the sounds of tools, hurried footsteps, crossing paths, and the screech of wheels, like so many scratched records.
Do a few steps still glide, cross, and move away? No. Just the illusion, like a cold mirage, of a few lost souls vanishing toward the exit.
Outside, a few faint glimmers await them like new mirages.
Here and there, our senses search for a fleeting shadow that might still haunt the void.
Only a reflection offers its breathless echo to the silence. Even the corridors no longer intersect. They are gone too.
Note
This series evokes those many adventures abruptly halted, their doors closed forever. The adventures of shared life between humankind and the anthills that outlive them. These places where humanity and matter circulated on the same plane, sharing landmarks, roles, and purposes.
Humanity, whose footsteps I so love to listen to, with all my eyes, to read its environments, those it forges to adapt, to respond to the evolution of its needs, its desires. It leaves its mark, everywhere, relentlessly. Layer upon layer, he imprints the unfolding of his ways and their codes. In a frantic, hand-in-hand race, from modus vivendi to modus operandi, he tirelessly combines the two.
How many hives… How he lives there and what he makes of it, then what remains when the modus… has run dry.
The imprint on his environment, but also those of his own strides. And then those of the steps that stop, turn around, leave, and vanish.
These sunken paths he suddenly leaves become dry ruts.
As everywhere and always, what remains of our citadels and their teeming life questions us? All our cements and their shared wear…
But already Ariadne is elsewhere, pulling on the thread, her hand outstretched.
At the other end, a broken thread still trails on the ground like a lost witness to this shared time, to tell of what remains…
