The colonnade blends into background, not really wanting to be known, once you discover and enter the space it beckons you in.   A resting spot, eerie, secretive, it transports me to another time of monuments, ancient cities. It is grandiose, yet has a human scale, intimate with proportions that soothe and at once mystify. Satisfying feeling to stop here, and gaze along the perspective and repetition of open and closed wall, and its casted shadows, … the eyes pull up and up, a slight vertigo overcomes me, it is so narrow yet spacious at once, a simple thrill. To step into this organized, contained, rhythmic order satiates some part of me after the openness, chaos, traffic, noise and brightness of the open plaza. A spell is cast.

 

Reminds of the theory that as humans evolved from forest to the open plains, they became upright.  And another is that the edge between the forest and the plain was the safest and threshold spaces resembling this remains so in our unconscious. From the periphery we can observe prey grazing in the plain, but stay safe in the forest and have a full view of what is coming towards us. This fringe area between density and safety and openness and exposure …Edge between two ecosystems, moods, senses of the world.

 

Each space between the pillars is a window framing the outside into a slice of a view, and it is also an open-door, many choices to exit,  or fall back in.. into thoughts, reflections, longings then to go back out , puts one’s body on show after this respite…not yet.

I wonder what the cameras have seen over the years, if they are recorded, what strange, illegal of simply mundane moments have taken place. No matter what has gone on it feels like it would be interesting to watch.. be a voyeur into this concealed elongated niche.. if I was a bird I would build a nest here.

 

Strong, straight and protective yet fragile crumbling ruin quality.. knowing that the museum is abandoned, maybe forsaken to an unknown future.  Makes this space even more tantalizing. The concrete panels cracking, corners with large chunks missing, bandaged up, it is already a ruin.

 

Was this narrow space deliberately created, was there any intent for it, or was it a folly, an afterthought, a cover up.

if you whisper or shout who hears you? I want to run from one end to the other..

The large high wall is scrubbed clean, there are few imprints, or hints of who has been there. The cool concrete panel stays cool to touch.. on the other side of the wall was a museum.

 

The desire to travel overcomes me again, keeps coming back.. as if I want to walk out of the colonnade into the plaza and be somewhere else in time and space…Then there are the doors in the wall tall blank I want to knock on one to enter into the unknown… the space is stern yet fuels playful fantasies.. why?