The outskirts of memory
Semi-illuminated buildings that warn us about an unreachable city. Continuous and discontinuous lines, possible highways. Distant lights that suggest to us a possible harbor area, a possible industrial complex, an impossible approach. Pavement and concrete without a misplaced atom. It is always night and everything is frozen and fragmented.
What they are trying to tell us?
The outskirts are indifference, but nevertheless we try to retain them because we associate them to an emotion. The outskirts endure, and sometimes they are the only reminiscence, the only heartbeat from a reality lived tentatively. We don’t have another remembering but the outskirts, foreshortened outskirts, fragmented outskirts. But, what are they trying to tell us?
Not a soul. We arrive or leave at a late hour. Or perhaps we don´t arrive or leave: we just stay there, staring at the outskirts. Suspended in the future, trying to decipher the intricate mystery of the outskirts. No people, no cars (empty parking lots, lonely highways) there is no other life there but ghostly buildings, points of reference or benchmarks to nothing, partitions, pavement, geometry, and morbid perspectives.
We hear something. No, we read it. But when we read it, we hear it simultaneously because they are lines from songs that sound like echoes. And if they are not songs, they could be so. “Oh yeah, been´ there before…”, “Searching for the main line”. There are no people, no tracks from other movement but the one provided by the memory and the lines of songs sounding, also fragmented, like a reminiscence of a voice that suddenly becomes a song, a reference of a song, or something that could be it, but never meaningful. The memory is artificial, yes, because all memories are artificial, but the outskirts of an instant, the outskirts of the lines that we capture from a song lost forever, are the outskirts of the memory. But, even so: What are they trying to tell us?
I think that this is the act of capturing an evocation of thousands of late arrivals and departures, the conquest of a memory, removing the superfluous, as a frozen sensibility (frozen, not lethargic) would do. Finally, a moral position about one own´s life, a recount and a restart.
Because I´m afraid that these pieces that BPS shows us, are not a reconstruction of a memory, they are memories a short biography, an impossible artificial memory.
Neither the killer nor the artist works to be judged. They work with passion for his own profit. And it is up to us, to complete the story.
Francisco Casavella