If I am time then you are space. Whenever we write This story of us There is a place For you and I.

poem I wrote on the back of the Le Cirio receipt on the evening of Monday May 15th 2012

Dear Carlotta, This is a report on my own personal experience of your walks which were presented at Soundlab:Auratory on May 16th 2012 and tried out the day before on May 15th 2012 in Brussels. Your contribution was described as follows in the schedule: Do I know how a gaze will follow the next? How a step follows the next? We walk in the context of previous journeys as we talk in the context of previous discussions we had in other places perhaps the walker knows as he goes Shall we walk? The walk is part of a research that explores different formats of guiding and wayfinding within the environment, playing with different components. In this context, where do we locate sound and how do we move around it? Where do I allow myself to move under covered destinations?

I write this report as a participant, documentarist, researcher and friend, having witnessed and experienced the walks during their initial tryout and at the moment of their final presented outcome. The reason I feel particularly compelled to put together this report is because I have been profoundly moved by the experience of it all.

In an effort to broaden the perspective on the walks you presented and to attribute them with the deeper qualities they richly deserve I will be making references here to that recently published book by Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion. My suggestion is to dare to interpret your walks as being possibly religious experiences or, at the very least, charged with religious concepts and undertones. Such a thought exercise may in fact prove to be not quite so difficult as expected.

One could start for instance by paying attention to your choice of music for WALK 1: Arvo Prts Spiegel im Spiegel.

Arvo Prt, the Estonian composer, happens to be one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. (Wikipedia) The title of his piece Spiegel im Spiegel refers to the infinity of images produced by parallel mirrors, while the musical patterns in the piece are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth. (again Wikipedia) To me the music evokes a slight feeling of sadness and a sense of loss, but it also helps me discover a touching, understated celebration of the multitude of forms and shapes repeating around us as we go about our lives, or as we walk down big city streets. I felt that this music tended to emphasize my own small position and that of the person I was following in the crowd of the city while the endlessly repeating musical motif kept accompanying the sight of passers-by stepping in and out of my line of vision before me.

Spiegel im Spiegel is also featured on the score of Gus Van Sants extraordinary film Gerry, where two characters (played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) set out for a quick walk in the desert only to get lost and find themselves walking together on and on in a place of no end, degraded to the size of two specks of dust in an infinite sea of sand.

The microscopic perspective the written instruction demands to focus on one person in particular (aside from yourself) is in my feeling therefore counterbalanced by the grand scope of the music, which manages to establish a connection to that vast expanse of the capital city around you. The top of the stairs at La Bourse help to provide you with an ideal vista for that setup.

Perspective is exactly one of those key concepts de Botton aims to revive or recuperate from the abandoned and largely dismissed field of organized religion.

To be made to feel small is, to be sure, a painful daily reality of the human playground. But to be made to feel small by something mighty, noble, accomplished and intelligent is to have wisdom presented to us along with a measure of delight. (p. 260-261)

In his book Alain de Botton claims that we in todays Western society find ourselves too often preoccupied with our personal humiliations and misfortunes. For him we seem to be lacking those rituals and/or practises that used to put us gently into place, making us become aware of our essential nothingness. He references Spinoza at one point, saying:

During moments of frustration and disaster, the philosopher recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective, or a re-envisioning of the situation, in his famous and lyrical coinage, under the aspect of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. Fascinated by the new technology of his age and most of all by telescopes and the knowledge they yielded of other planets Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to step outside ourselves and practise submitting our will to the laws of the universe, however contrary these might seem to our intentions. (p. 199)

In other words, the proposed idea would be to witness and look at ourselves from the imagined perspective of a place far away somewhere in the universe. Like he does at the end of each chapter of the book, de Botton himself then proceeds to envision a concrete secular, non-religious project to implement and install in our current-day reality:

We should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who havent called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart. (p. 202-203)

Piccadilly Circus: the Messier 101 galaxy, via the Hubble telescope (p. 204-205)

What you present us with at the end of WALK 1, Carlotta, the moment we open the box, is precisely not the universe at large. We are introduced to a microcosm instead, not the macro version. Still I wonder whether in some paradoxical way both these perspectives might be pointing towards the same thing; the very small approaching the very large There is a faint sweet smell emanating from inside of the box produced by the unlit stick of incense. The box contains wrinkly scraps of paper, tiny photographs torn by the sides, a dried-up flower, a small page from a notebook with the number 33 printed on it and what looks like a damaged pink birthday candle in the shape of the number 3. After being shortly engulfed in the huge energy of the centre of the city while walking I suddenly feel slammed into the intimate sphere of someones personal memorabilia of a journey, of a relationship or of an individual experience. On second thought, these objects and artefacts do not necessarily point to any one person specifically or to any person at all. On some basic level I feel confronted with the delicate materiality of frail things as they are. Similar to trying to imagine myself within the totality of the enormous universe, carefully holding these traces of human activity at the end of WALK 1 makes me softly but brutally aware of the world existing around us, the stuff that can be found there, the people populating it, my own little place in that, yours also and the time and space all of those things can come together.