The facades are silent

[…] That’s how it is. A picture that doesn’t answer your look, wants to remain unknown. Like this grey street in Paris with the wetness of the last downpour still on the cobbles: a tired, dull mirror for the sky, which has long since closed over. The façades, impersonal and cold: Enough of that, it’s nothing to do with you. There’s nothing behind things. Why can’t you just acept that?

But the names! Rue Labat. Hotel Mayflower. Via dell‘ Idroscalo. Bois de Vincennes, Campo dei Fiori. Names you could sing, every one of them a song. What attracts you, though, is not so much their melody as the stories associated with them. Places where something has reached its ending. Here Giordano Bruno burned to death. Here Marguerite Gertrude Zelle, known as Mata Hari, looked into the barrels of rifles. Here Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered. Here Ernst Toller hanged himself. Here Sarah Kofman wrote the last chapter of her autobiography. […]