Get all 6 Die Wolke art group releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.
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1. |
Shells
08:46
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We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Shells, offer countless examples of spiral surfaces, on which, the joining lines of the successive whorls, are spiral helices. The geometry of a peacock’s tail is more aerial: “The eyes in a peacock’s spread tail are situated at the intersecting point of a double cluster of spirals, that are apparently Archimedean”
We might say that the inside of a man’s body is an assemblage of shells. Each organ has its own causality, that has already been tried out during the long centuries when nature was teaching herself to make man, with one shell or another. The function constructs its form from old models, and life, although only partial, constructs its abode the way the shellfish constructs its shell.
Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvellously insidious, subtle image of life, a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams, the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!
Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses. […] One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping. Thus, the spiralled being who, from outside, appears to be a well-invested center, will never reach his center.
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2. |
Verticality
07:58
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A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticality.
The function of inhabiting is an imaginary response to the function of constructing. The dreamer constructs and reconstructs the upper stories and the attic until they are well constructed. When we dream of the heights, we are in the rational zone of intellectualized projects. But for the cellar, the impassioned inhabitant digs and re-digs, making its very depth active. The fact is not enough, the dream is at work. We always go up the attic stairs, which are steeper and more primitive. For they bear the mark of ascension to a more tranquil solitude. When I return to dream in the attics of yester-year, I never go down again.
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3. |
Waiting
07:18
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A lamp is waiting in the window, and through it, the house, too, is waiting. The lamp is the symbol of prolonged waiting. By means of the light in that far-off house, the house sees, keeps vigil, vigilantly waits. When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out […] through the keyhole.
And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams.
A nest-house is never young. Indeed, we might say that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting. For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, through the dream, combats all absence.
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4. |
The Nest
08:03
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A house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically. The form of the nest is commanded by the inside. “On the inside, the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle.” Everything is a matter of inner pressure, physically dominant intimacy. The nest is a swelling fruit, pressing against its limits. From the depths of what daydreams do such images arise?
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5. |
Immensity
10:22
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Sight says too many things at one time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself. It does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding it solid, when one approaches a center of being. And if we want to determine man’s being, we are never sure of being closer to ourselves if we “withdraw” into ourselves, if we move toward the center of the spiral;
Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it.
Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man.
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6. |
The Daydream
06:11
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Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house.
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Die Wolke art group Thessaloniki, Greece
Die Wolke Art Group is a non-profit research and development organisation dedicated to the performing arts, contemporary dance, video art, mixed media and associated technologies. Based in Thessaloniki, Greece, its chief aim is the research and development of outside-the-box multidisciplinary art, as well as its implications in the urban social context. ... more
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