The street lays bare estrangement. Public space belongs to everyone, yet to no one. The gaze carves its path through countless stimuli, distractedly alert. The visible world is the receptacle of all projections: we see what we know, and as we know it. We follow the thread of direction necessary to move from point A to point B, yet the trajectory is far from linear. It catches, slips, and wanders through detours, shortcuts, distractions — an overwhelming volume of information to process in order to preserve our relative place in the world.
Joana Lucas and José del Palo reposition us within the experience of the passerby, precisely on the street now most familiar to them: Oranienstraße, one of Berlin’s central arteries. Yet they do not invite us to step into their place or follow their footsteps. Any familiarity or strangeness we encounter will arise within our own experience of being on the street, where the wandering of the mind keeps pace with the movement of the legs. And we will not arrive at a destination. We will remain along the way, for as long as possible losing ourselves in its details, its obstacles.
As we enter this massive landscape, our view of the whole gradually fades. Its surface, however, becomes increasingly like our skin, more human: constructed, composite, reflective, transitory, fleeting, fragmentary. Therefore, its fragmentation is not at all fortuitous. Each fragment denies the panoramic view, without denying its amplitude. Each fragment is a shrapnel ready to shatter even more or even dynamite the others.
At a certain point, the space-time axis may lose its geometry, and what we know of reality will be only what we borrow from its appearance. We will be closer to walking in a dream, where every glimpse seems to summon archetypes. Yet without losing sight of the fact that, on the street, we are usually only passing through, in that moment we gain an advantage — that of being passengers. Or visitors, held at the safe distance that brings us nearer to sublimation.
The sublime acceleration is after all its own delay — an indefinite prolongation of how long we can bear it, and walk it, without a map.
Nuno Viegas
Berlin, September 2014