the geographer

The Plot from OGINO KNAUSS on Vimeo.

I belong to where my shadow falls.

To where I’me exposed to the light, and where I can retreat in the darkness.

The  man looked like a clochard, but he told me he collected iron. He spoke gently,  politely. He knew the building very well. He is from Congo, but knows Brussels better that the Brussellois.

It can be dangerous, he said me,  because of the holes; if you fall down there will be troubles for everyone.

He showed me where to look for. Many people sleeping inside the building, and he knows almost everyone inside; it has a letter for someone, a bag to give to someone else. Even the young stoned punks with dogs like him, they listen to his hints for a warmer room.

He told me that there is someone corresponding to the person I am looking for. He showed me the place he is used to sleep. Some cardboard as a a bed, signs of a fire, and empty plastic bottle.

I waited the whole night.

I got asleep, I dreamt of people dancing and feeling as a whole. I was part of it.

Once you take notice of being haunted, you can’t free yourself of that feeling.
It’s a tentative consciousness.
It is a syncopated pulsation concealing in the ambient noise.
It is an indistinct pawing of the ground.

It is disguised in your own breath.

In the beat of your heart.In the reverb of the empty road behind you.

In the rain drumming on the pavement.
In the creaking of the leaves under your soles.
In the sticky reaction of the asphalt softened by the sun.
It creeps behind your shadow.

It insinuates between action and reaction…

You can’t distinguish it.

The more you concentrate on capturing it,

the more it will escape you,

it will deride you.

You don’t have a clue  how to find someone named Vassilij in a metropolis of 15 millions inhabitants .

That Vassilij, who you first met in the Alps, who once said you to make your mind on repetitions, that the key of the whole thing were repetitions…

You were not sure at that time what he meant, but everything has become clearer after that…

He said you to talk with an artist working on magnetism,  he was living in an shanty old constructivist building  in the centre of Moscow, almost abandoned but still inhabited by few household…

I must find that place, is the only connection…

I have to go to Moscow. It’s the only left… have to find Vassilij. I don’t believe his lost. Maybe hidden. No idea how to get him. The taxi from Sheremetyevo slides slovly in the traffic towards Moscow. I look at the faces in the cars beside me, trough layers of dusty windovs.
Once he said to me “when you’ll need me, you’ll find me”. I want to believe him.

Something appears in the background noise. Something forms at the margins of your perception…