We desperately need a moment of pause. Our life in the city is full of distractions and spectacles that cloud our minds. We are constantly doing something, always going somewhere, and unnoticeably positioning ourselves in the chaos.
So, despite the chaos, we need to pause.
The Start: Epiphany of a Cup in Athens.
Athens, after a decade, was filled with warmth and beauty everywhere. I left Athens with an obsession for a cup that I came across at a corner street café. It was such an ordinary object, but not so in its experience – the cup made a beautiful sound. The beauty of this object became the starting point of my thesis journey. Soon to realize, my obsession for this cup, was in fact an obsession for the moments that I was having at that cafe. The cup was just a wax block where the ecstatic moment in Athens got inscribed. I was in a heightened state. My outlook on the world was different. Athens, the city, made me feel and see the world in a way that I have never done before.
Decoding of the Ecstatic Moment
This ecstatic moment was not experienced out of blue. It can be decoded into two combinations of unique factors.
The Café : the space that surrounded me
Athens : my position at the city
The ecstatic moment can be attributed to the way I was occupying Athens – my relationship with the city.
A Pause
I was in Athens, away from Toronto, away from my mundane. Toronto was a city of remembered routine. Days were on repeat. I was consuming Toronto with productivity and speed. Then, I went to Athens; and I paused. Rather than living the city by being swept away in the chaos, in the speed, and with the spectacles, we need to allocate a moment in our life to pause and just be immersed in the city.
A Seated Flaneur
The absence of chaos made me slow down. It put me in a pause. The absence of urgency to do something made me notice. I started to notice the things about the city, about the space that I am in, and about me. Walking is an effective way to explore the city as a large urban fabric and to build a mental map of a city. Seated pause, on the other hand, richens one’s mental image of an urban fabric. City is explored in little moments and details at the scale of the infra-ordinaries. Seated pause allows one to immerse into the space and into the time. You become present in the space.
Exhibition
“The city is a toy to be utilized at one’s pleasure, a space for collective living, for the experience of alternative behaviors, a place in which to waste useful time so as to transform into playful constructive time.”
– Careri, Francesco. Walkscape: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, pg 108.
The exhibition translates the elements found at the pause spaces into an assemblage of artefacts that evokes the atmosphere of the pause spaces. The experience once made from sitting at a bench – reached by walking around the city – is now brought into a stage. The elements are in assemblage to each other but do not have a site. The solitary existence of the exhibition allows one to purely experience the atmosphere each elements create with one another. The exhibition is a cinematic experience of our city – it is a photomontage.
