The City
Eduardo Marques da Costa
How far can the mind wonder back into the past without feeling detached, lost in the movement between then and now? Space, made memory, exists in us in a state of flux, dressed in the emotional coat of remembrance. While forgetfulness grabs ever deeper, still small details are kept within the mind, reviving the spirit’s connection with that space, with the city and its streets, its people and atmosphere.
Such attempt is like a leap through space and time in a desire to retrieve what once was. Such is an arduous task for a city is not unlike a living being, it breeds and develops, it mutates and ages; and, like us, it lives in constant tension with its past. Its character is the result of all its encounters and relations, of all its dreams and losses. And like us, and like the poet, it too is constantly attempting to revisit its past.
While Lali Tsipi Michaeli’s words slowly lead us, the audience, through this emotional connection between the absence of the present and the intrinsic whispers of the past, Gil Zablodovsky offers us the ripples of remembrance. The recovered past is murmured in the city’s present, in its light and walls. Neither the poet nor the city, have remained motionless in time, and yet both exist in each other somehow. The interconnection of word, image and sound seems to work here to highlight such tremor between these two figures. Each image seems to hover in a dreamlike state while the city’s noise rattles in our senses as a metallic buzz forbidding clarity. It is the poet’s voice, and its compassed motion, that slowly appear to open a path through this mellow state, this timelessness. Suddenly each word grows, becomes dense, and attempts to raise a bridge in the mind between time, space and the two figures.