Edith

Part 1: Les yeux plus gros que le vent (September–October)

For the last month, Edith has been making kites — collected here as a mobile, a suspended simulation of flight in the fictional sky of the gallery. A mobile is assembled from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, its balance found only through negotiation between constructors mediated by gravity. Stranded in this bardo, some of the kites may soon take flight.

Part 2: The wind in your hands (November–December)

The question now was: to be a kite, does it need to fly?

Definitions matter: how far can something as elementary as the kite be stretched, and what, for our purposes, is flight beyond not immediately falling?

Rather than directly confront the question, we diverged in our methods for testing these definitions.

There were cerfs-volants shaped by the wind. They became more straightforward, informed by precedent, until they could fly as well as anything at the park on a given Sunday.

Meanwhile a multitude of cerfs-non-volants embraced their emergent new status, shaped by other specific criteria beyond aerodynamics — how patterns emerge, how light travels, how fantasies materialize — how forms contaminate each other.

We found that each flying machine worked in one of the following ways:

• Flight
• • Flight in stationary air
  • Moving the air
  • • With machines
    • With bodies
    • • Fanning
      • Blowing
      • Walking
  • Moving the thing through the air
  • • Pulling through stationary air
    • • Arm movement, standing still
      • Body movement, through space
    • Throwing
    • • Gliding
      • Falling, reorienting
      • Billowing (plastic bag)
  • Imitation
  • • Hanging/suspension
    • Mobile (balanced cantilever)
    • Representation (drawing)
• • Flight in moving air
  • Pulling thing against wind (kite)

Sometimes the things we did mattered less than the fact that we did them. In order to tie everything together and maybe assemble a narrative, we were always filming. This gave us a constant reason to do things. It also pushed to say things that wouldn’t necessarily happen, because their inclusion in the movie would still allow them to be part of the whole.

Would time spent making kites be better spent flying them? Is Edith safely back on the ground, tangled in a tree, or still floating around up there?

Angeli’s the Light

Four years of attempts to find a good life in industrial Eindhoven, the city of light: the exotic in the ultralocal, the entanglement of house and factory, the intimate and the rational. Energy spent avoiding isolation.

After school we moved together to Brussels, in a house on avenue Montjoie owned by minor Flemish nobility. Across from a small park and down the street from a large one. Solidly built in the first half of the twentieth century without us in mind.

We adapt it to our purposes as we search and work, balancing between burn-out and bore-out, figuring out what to do in a world of infinite urgencies where individual happiness seems always to lean on the exhaustion of countless others.

We bring with us through the Brenner Pass fragments of stories of friendship, dinners, bricolage, 400 coups; from Eindhoven to Brussels and from Brussels to Milan. Temporary solutions that have become permanent and specific findings that could be useful elsewhere.

We’re equipped with enough to build, cook, and publish. We hope to reach the promised hotel room, soon to be nested, cluttered, made soft and porous to the industrial and domestic legacy of the town.

Melancholia, sprezzatura haunting the streets, vodka and bitterness after lunch, Mastroianni fixing a lamp, the 24/7 Carrefour midnight worker, isolated 1 euro cafes, banana boxes and flea markets, the city’s answer to the question of how to live a good life.