Lieven De Boeck

*. LaB /Concept and drawings

Jannah Loontjens / Short stories

Ralph Bauer / Book design

johnny golding / Interventions

h o u s i n g

Lieven De Boeck







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programme:During 5 years I lived in different friends’ houses for shortperiods of time, mostly in the same city. The only thing I missed was a fixed storage space for my personal belongings.Meanwhile I learned to give away objects…

perception:During this period I could act different identities. Living in a certain type of house in a certain type of neighbourhoodwith a certain type of interior gives you an identity. In the end it was always a game; if the identity didn’t fit me in a particular situation I could always say: ‘It’s not my house.’At the same time nobody could completely imagine my identity because I had no house of my own.

law:Since the legal authorities require you to be domiciled, the address of my parental home remained my domicile.

This was my housing experience for five years.

Lieven De Boeck

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| a d r e s s | b e l o n g i n g s| b r i g h t | b y e | c l e a n



| h u g h | i n | i n t e r v e n t i o n s| l e t s | m a r c | m o d e l| m y | o d y s s e y | 1 2 7



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I N T E RVENTIONs ( i t’s a wonderful life) 1)

johnny golding

1) Part of this text rehearses in a

different guise, several fragments

from Games of Truth: A Blood

Poetic in seven part harmony

(this is me speaking to you) ,

(London: University of Greenwitch,

2003).

lying (on the carpet).

Shall we say for the sake of brevity, utopia and truth that ‘home’ is a place

where one can be bored without having to give account; and (for the sake

of brevity, utopia and truth) ‘housing’, it’s encasement? Shall we say it

is a place to relax; a place to share a joke; a place steeped in promised-

fulfilled comfort zones or rough-riding nights (with willing players to hand);

a place to be perfectly and completely ill; to read a book (or write one);

a place to wander; a place to fuck; a place to hide, re-group, bathe, play

drums; remember the ‘I’ of me or the you of they without penalty of death,

unwanted humiliation or shame (perhaps this kind of home exists only in

bathrooms with doors firmly shut).

In any case: let us dream it as a kind of sumptuous, generous portable

fire! this home, this banquet! And when necessary, let it leap from our

brains, and desires, and pleasures and wants so as to become some kind of

permanent structure, some kind of perimeter, ready and able to hide, contain, reframe that fire, that ice, that wind, that drought, that crazy kind

of nourishment! (Perhaps this is what Lyotard meant when he so quietly

wrote: “Who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love.”)

Housing-as-hiding-as-home: mutant knowledge, shape-shifting to fit theneeds of its inhabitants.

1≠

2) Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Grammar,

125, (Basil Blackwell:

London, 1974), p.174.

word of warning.

“Anyone who does not who understand why

we must speak of these things, must feel what

we say to be mere trifling. ”2)

2 ≠ vicious circle (part I).

Our doubts form systems, and systems form

our horizons. Horizons form our paths, and

paths, our goals. Goals form our experiences

and experiences, our doubts. Doubts form

our systems, and systems form our horizons...Stuck in that vicious circle? Don’t go blaming

your tools (or other logics of instrumental

reason).

3 ≠

covering a multiplicity of sins (perhaps).

How did you begin your journey? With eyesaglow and tail a-wagging – or were you

forced by great gulfs of war, famine, gangland

terror? Perhaps it was a family life not quite

up to scratch? Or maybe you were a wolf,

running hungry with the pack? Perhaps youwere a freedom fighter (or an artist or

deserter or all three)? Perhaps your braver y/

cowardice/complicity makes you think

you are: Invisible. Then again, perhaps you

were just terribly frightened (or better yet,perhaps, you were not frightened enough).

Hindsight is not just 20– 20 vision; and

romanticism is not just for fools and horses.

4 ≠

on the dark side (of the moon); sense-certainty as vicious circle (part II).

Perhaps what propels your every move is

a certain sense of discipline, a certain sense of lust, a certain sense of ambition (one

rooted in neither love nor money). A certain

kind of (bureaucratic) intelligence, this

certain sense of discipline and order:

a certain kind of fear, a certain kind of cruelty. A certain kind of paranoia, we so

nonchalantly call: Management.

5 ≠

in between engagements.

Access to washing machines can be a luxury

for some, especially for those who find

themselves walking the streets with no cover

against all that pigeon shit.

6 ≠







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|12

3

Studio 127

Gam Bodenhausen

Things to be done. The lists I make of how to live and what to do hang on the

wall. I call them Hanging Headaches. I like to look at them and think of how

different I would feel if I had done all of the things that are written on these lists

and that look so attractive and positive. But I prefer to sit on a chair, bite my

nails and enjoy myself in silence.

Kneadable Thoughts. I am changing into an enormous heap of dough. I move

stealthily through space and long for those who want to knead me endlessly.

Endless here, I am always the observer. The door of this room has a round

window. This town is an ocean, and I am drowning while the boat sinks to the

ocean floor.

The rock in my stomach keeps me underwater for a while. This space isn’t mine

anymore. I make some changes to this place, close the door and forget about

them. I prefer to sit on the stairs, hang around in the hallway and work in the

garden at home, cutting grass with my scissors.

( A 2 ) 3 3 0 , 4 8 0 , 1 7 0

( B1 ) 1 0 0 , 4 8 0 , 2 5

( A 3 ) 1 9 5 , 4 8 0 , 3 4 0

( C1 ) 1 0 0 , 2 5 0 , 0

Map of traces found in studio 127: Traces left by GamBodenhausen

( A 1 ) t ex t o n a l i t t l e p i e c e o f pa p e r t ap e d to th e en t ra n c e d o o r

( A 2 ) p ie c e o f t a p e l e f t o n th e w al l

( A 3 ) d rop o f g l ue

( B1 ) fo o tp r in t o n th e wa l l

( B2 ) b lu e c r os s o n p a p er ta p ed t o t h e w al l

( B3 ) p ai n t in g o n th e w a l l

( C 1 ) t ra c es o f p a in t b o t t l e s o n th e f l oo r

( C 2 ) c ra c k in th e wa l l m ad e b y a s h ar p k ni fe

( C 3 ) f o ot p r i n t o n th e w a l l

Tracing map







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kitchen. There are three small steps in the corridor where it descendsinto a part of our apartment that is slightly sunken. How many timeshad I almost stumbled on these steps in the night on my way to the bathroom? You had installed a line of small spotlights in the ceiling,which produced a row of shadows and made the floor look like it consisted only of small steps. Yes, the trip to the kitchen was always a little disorientating for me, but you smiled. You were amused when I tried to describe the effect of the dotted line of shadow, which some-times made me lift my feet higher than I needed to.

You had silently followed me and now you held my hips while I walked. We moved through the corridor like a small train. In thekitchen you still held on to me, kissing my neck, while you took thingsdown from the cupboard with your spare hand. But I bent, slipped awayfrom under your arm and walked back through the corridor into ourliving room to get a bottle of wine. On the lowest shelf of the book-case we kept several bottles of red wine and some hard liquor. I chose a Spanish bottle, which I put on the small, round table in front of the sofa. I heard you walk into the spare room where you had started a collection of odds and ends. You were moving in the direction of ourbedroom. I wondered what you were looking for and I followed yourmovements with curiosity, by carefully listening and trying to guesswhat you were bringing. With our big comforter draped over yourshoulders and your arms filled with books on top of which you carriedsnacks – chips and dips and bowls filled with nuts and raisins – youreturned and said, ‘Oh good, this will warm us up on this rainy autumnday.’ And you repeated that you were in such a good mood, such a good, good mood, as if we had something special to celebrate. I remember it all very well. We didn’t talk much that night, but thethings you did and said I remember as if they were lines from a poem. I remember even the most insignificant remarks, as if I already knew thatlater they would mean more to me than the words seemed to suggest.

The bottle opened with a dim, deep sound and I filled our big wine-glasses. ‘Let me put on some music,’ I suggested and walked to thestudy, where our music collection is stacked. The street lamp had justflicked on and drowned the objects in the room in a friendly orange

That particular night started early. Actually it was still afternoon, butthe autumn gloom made it look like night outside. You and I stood infront of the window staring at the rain that poured down in a fierce andsteady rhythm. The sky was completely grey. The autumn leaves werethe only spots of bright colour; they flew about frantically, as thoughthey just had lost their love and life and could not believe it yet.Desperately they handed themselves over to the strong draft of fate,which led them – as much as it led us – to their end.

We stood there staring outside and did not want to leave. Theanthracitic, moist air was so thick that it almost looked warm, like a huge woolly quilt comforting the city. You put your arm around mywaste and said, ‘Let’s not go to that cocktail party. Let’s just stay in.’ I remember it well – you called it a cocktail party. I don’t know why,because we were supposed to go for dinner with our friends Laura and Ben. Sometimes I wonder if you really had planned on going to a cocktail party and had forgotten about the dinner, since your voicesounded so absent-minded. Or if you just mockingly called the dinner a cocktail party since Laura and Ben had recently quit drinking. Whileholding me close, you whispered again, ‘Let’s stay in,’ and these three,almost four words kept echoing in my mind like the refrain of a song,led by the rhythm of the rain hammering against the windowpane. I exhaled a long, whispering ‘Yeah’ and we stared outside, where all bigobjects seemed to lose their three-dimensionality behind the filter of theneutral, grey rain. There wasn’t a living soul outside. Only a windowunexpectedly lit up across the street reassured us that we were not thelast beings left alive in the city.

You turned around and let yourself fall backwards onto our sofa,from which you still stared at our big, wet window. Knowing that wewere not expecting anyone and knowing that we had no plans made mefeel sleepy in a pleasant way. I thought we could take some food anddrinks into the living room, to our sofa, so we would have everythingthat we needed within reach. I walked into the corridor leading to the

L e t’s Stay In

Jannah Loontjens

To escape from this optical prison I closed my eyes and floated intothe liquid darkness behind my eyelids. A thick red darkness welled upand covered me. I sank deeper and deeper until the red turned intoheavy purple. The colours enclosed me and floated around me, while I lost the sense of up and down, right and left. While I stared into theabysmal depth of my eyelids, the rich purple gained such strong gravitythat it became hard to feel my own body weight leaning to the cornerof the walls. All by themselves my limbs began making swimming movements in the fluid heaviness. Floating through the reddish darkness the sounds of your movements seemed even louder. I could hear yourmuffled steps on our carpet, knowing that you were moving towards thewindow again. The minute motions of my limbs caused a strong currentin the darkness, which pushed my floating body, heaving smoothly inthe direction of the living room, closer and closer to where you werestanding, staring outside, in front of the window. Now, not only couldI hear you hum, I could also hear your regular heartbeat. You bent overmy horizontal body and kissed my ear. Your breath formed a dome inwhich I felt safe. Your tongue was so wet that I wanted to drink it. Ourarms held our bodies when we lost balance and landed in a supplemovement onto the carpeted floor. Lying on our backs we laughed without sound, gasping air in long inhalations. Your stomach trembledunder your brown shirt, and our bodies contracted spasmodically,happily. We lay breathing deeply for a long time. Now I sometimesthink that that night both our senses were sharpened in some kind ofnatural anticipation, just like those fish that light up just before theybreathe their last breath: a final gathering of energies before releasingthem in uncontrolled directions.

‘Look,’ you got up and pointed to the middle of the room, where ourbig comforter hung over the back of two cushy chairs, which wereturned to face each other. The other end of the comforter hung over theback of the sofa. ‘I built us a new home,’ you said. I crawled towardsthe hut and lay in front of it, looking at it. To keep the roof in place,you had placed piles of books at the corners of the comforter. You satdown on top of my hips which were turned sideways and observed thehut attentively. We didn’t go in yet. You bent forward to look at me and

light, through which I looked at the spines of the CDs: lines of dark,light, black and white, pink, green on green and small letters which I couldn’t read. I might have turned on a lamp to see the titles better, butI preferred the pleasant dusk. It would somehow have been an act of brutal insensitivity to break the fragile balance between light anddarkness. And perhaps the intensification of senses and feelings whichcharacterised that night and stretched time by engraving every singlesecond on my mind started at that moment, with the decision not toturn on the light.

Randomly I pulled out a CD. It was Chris Isaac. Enveloped by hismusic I left the study on the other side, leading through the spare room,the kitchen and back into our long corridor. ‘Baby come here,’ I heardyou call from the sofa, while Chris Isaac’s lamenting voice sang a slowrhythm: What a wicked game to play. Again you called me, just theword ‘baby’ – Oh I wanna fall in love, with you – and you: ‘Baby comehere.’ But I wanted to hear you again like that, from this distance. I waswith you, but still felt the desire to be even closer to you. To stretch thismoment of pleasant longing, I sat down on one of the steps. How couldthe rain on the window be louder than Chris, and louder than yourvoice? On my hands and knees I crawled back towards the middle of the corridor, where it takes a right around the obtuse corner. Perhaps I should have gone to you because you were calling me. But I promise, I only moved back because I knew you were close andbecause I knew I would feel your body’s warmth within a minute. Onlybecause I knew this, I let myself to sit down and lean against the wallusing the corner as a straight, vertical line against my back. Now thedistance between your voice and Isaac’s voice would be more or lessequal. Still, the rustling of the fabric of your sleeves and your contentedhum were so much louder that it made me smile, as though you hadtouched my ear and tickled me with your breath and dry lips, which hadsmall bursts in them of the sudden autumn chill. While staring at the triangle where the walls meet the floor, I listened carefully and followedyour movements in the slow waves of air that you produced. The anglein front of me, which connected the corridor walls, gave me a feelingslightly like being locked in a closet.

further away compared to when I listened to it from the corridor orfrom the kitchen. Now everything outside of our hut was from anotherremote world, like the cosmos far away beyond the ozone layer.

‘Wait,’ you whispered and crawled over me, reaching your arm out ofour hut into the living room. You handed me the wineglasses, a bowlwith cashew nuts and our little chessboard. Then you pulled anotherchair closer by one of its legs and draped the towel over it, which wasstill wet from my morning shower. The other end rested on top of thecomforter, so it was connected to the main part of the hut. As you satcross-legged under the lighter roof of the towel, you declared that thiswas our veranda, where we could play chess, each seated on a rockingchair. I laughed and crawled onto your crossed legs, rocking the two ofus, while I opened the little chessboard and said, ‘It is not time to sleepyet, we have an entire night ahead of us.’ ‘I know, I know,’ you said and kissed me while you helped me set up the chess pieces on the littlefolded out board.

‘What about the music?’ We decided to venture out of our shelter onelast time and to take the trip to the study together. This time I sat onyour back, while you crawled on your hands and knees. We didn’t talkabout it, but we agreed we had to stay low, close to the floor. Today I don’t know why, but then I knew. Then I knew exactly why becausethere was nothing else to know, there was no other possibility. It was the best of all possibilities. It felt like a necessity, but not a suffocating necessity – one that leaves no room for choice – but one that is beautiful because it coincides perfectly with your choice. It was the kindof necessity that made us want to believe in destiny.

Sitting on your back, I moved onto my stomach, letting my arms and legs hang next to yours. I studied the lines of our furniture. From this low perspective I could clearly see that the carpet had a different,woollier structure under the cupboard, the small table and wardrobe,than at places that had been subjected to footsteps and other forms ofcontact with people and light. If we ever moved out of this apartment,we would leave a map of our things and the way we had lived on thecarpet. And also on our walls. We would leave traces in forms of yellowsquares where certain objects had hung as ornaments, or the small

said, ‘Did you know I used to feel totally desperate when I listened tothis song when I was in love with you in the beginning?’ I smiled but I didn’t say anything because I knew you would talk on if I kept silent.‘Boy, was I in love... And you with your cool, calm eyes. Your coolnessmade me want you even more.’

Now it was really dark in our living room and I tried to guess theexpression on your face, which consisted only of black and less blackrounded shadows. I knew you were smiling with your eyes, in the waythat produced halos of wrinkles from the outer corners, spreading likesunrays. ‘Now it’s so funny to think back to those days, now that I know how sweet you are and how your coolness is just a shield againstthe outside world.’ You were so loving. Today it feels like you took yourchance to say these things, which you actually did not need to saybecause they were so evident. But sometimes it’s precisely the obviousthings that need saying the most. Only afterwards you realise this. Longafterwards. Because the present moment is not just a thing that is alwaysalready past. No, sometimes the present is still in development long afterit is gone, long after it has seemingly disappeared.

That night you were so caring in a very particular way. You proposedthat we lie down in our hut – not with words, but slowly you crawleddown on your knees and took my hand, as if we were walking and youwanted to show me something. I got up on my knees and moved closerto you, under the low roof of our downy blanket. Next to one anotherwe lay supine and stared at the dark ceiling of our hut, which showedminuscule light spots like stars in a vast, velvety sky. ‘This is our house,and our apartment is the city and the city is the universe,’ you said. ‘No,the blanket,’ I whispered, because I wanted the blanket to be our skyand our universe. Still you continued happily, ‘If we don’t want to, wedon’t need to ever leave our house.’ I agreed and nodded silently, whichyou could feel, because my face was pressed against your upper arm.‘Our hut is on the east side of the city, close to the suburbs, but still partof the centre. A, nice, quiet neighbourhood, with lots of young familiesand a big Turkish community.’ ‘Why Turkish?’ I asked. ‘Because Turkishshops are nice and they’re open at odd times.’ ‘Okay.’ The rain was stillbeating violently against the window, but it seemed far away, much

with you, wishing this moment could be endless, and never to live anyother way than in this horizontal position, close to you with our homeyspace hovering around us. I fell asleep again.

When I woke up for the second time the light had become yellowish.My arm was asleep. I smiled because I remembered how as a child I usedto believe that my leg or arm just took a nap when I felt that tinglingfeeling creeping up under my skin – a nice comforting siesta for one ofmy limbs which I did not want to disturb. I tried to pull my arm outfrom under your body. I also wanted to wake you because I wanted usto enjoy this moment together, lying in this unusual spot. You clearly didnot want to wake up. So I pushed your body and you rolled on yourside, but turned back as soon as I let go of your shoulder. With my headresting on your breast I looked right into the corridor, which ended in its dark corner, where it took a right towards the kitchen. Perhaps I could make us breakfast which we could eat here, sitting on the floor.I kissed your quiet face, your eyebrows and eyelids, your cheeks, thecurve where your cheek bends up to your nose, your chin, your lips,your lips, your cold, breathless lips.

No, I did not want to believe it. I did not want to believe it. I did notwant to check anything. I lay back and suddenly wished I could sleepagain and postpone the moment of waking up, postponing it as long aspossible. While hugging you and trying to fall asleep again, I mumbledto myself, ‘This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream.’ My hope that it would really be a dream was so strong that I briefly believed I was sleeping, a sleep out of which I would awakeanew, having dreamt that I woke up not wanting to believe I had wokenup. But I did not fall asleep. I lay close to you, hugging you and talkingto you for how long, maybe hours, I don’t know. I remembered howsomebody one time had told me that your sense of hearing is the lastform of consciousness that disappears when you die. I wanted you tohear my voice, just my voice, it didn’t matter what I said, because anyword, whatever it meant, expressed that intense mixture of feelings forwhich I couldn’t find any words. But I did tell you things. I told you thatit was the most beautiful night of my life and I recalled every small detailof the few hours just passed, of your caresses, of our conversations, of

irregular dots of lists of things not to forget, which we always let hangthere, forgetting to take them down. Having arrived at the CD player,you pushed the repeat button, turned around and crawled back. It wasfunny to see how different the map of our carpet looked when movingin the other direction. I should be able to turn it around keeping in mindwhich side was north, in order to be able to recognise our home. Perh a p sI would loose my way following the traces of dust and furn i t u re.

‘Okay, we’re home,’ you said reaching the hut.‘But I’m not getting off your back, it is so nice and safe up here.’‘No, no, no, come here.’ You pulled my arm and turned me around

your trunk until I was sitting in your lap again. My head touched theroof of our hut, and I told you that whatever we did that night, I didnot want to let go of your body. I wanted to hold onto you, even if I suddenly had to pee, or if I was warm and wanted to take off mysweater, or if... it didn’t matter what. While playing chess seated at yourlap, moving the pieces towards myself – because I was white and blackcould play from its own direction – I told you about the map of our carpet and that we should keep our hut just the way it was. That waywe could retrace it later on our carpet. ‘Of course honey,’ you said.‘How could we live without our hut? That would be like living outsidein the cold street, like homeless people.’ We played chess, and finishedwhen I gave up, because it was clear you were going to win and I didn’twant anything else than to make love to you. We undressed caressing,taking care not to ruin our hut, staying under the warm roof of ourcomforter. And I remember every single movement you made, every tinymovement, until the very last second before we fell asleep. And I willnever forget. I swear I will never forget.

Hours later, when I woke up, the room was filled with thin whitelight. We lay with our arms around one another, our legs half under thesofa. We had pushed one chair away, which now stood against the wall.The room looked white and spacious. I had never seen our room fromthis position and I thought we should throw out the coffee table to beable to lie like this more often. It always takes a while to discover thetrue character of a place and to be able to bring out the best sides of a home. I lay there. And the only thing I wanted was to be lying there

our hut, and the en-passant move you made in our game of chess, as iftalking about the most recent little things would somehow prolong thesemoments, which were still so fresh and still present in and around us.Moments like autumn leafs that have lost contact with the branch, butstill live through their memory of belonging to the tree.

It was, it really was the most beautiful night of my life. But can thisnight also be the most beautiful night of your life if you can’t rememberit? What bothers me the most is that I cannot localise when exactly youdied. Sometimes it seems that you were already dead when you proposed that we stay in. To not go to the ‘cocktail party’ is to stay in,because a dead person can’t go out. Or was it during the moment whenI sat in the corridor, hiding from reality? But I know that this is only myfear. I know we laughed together, I know you were in a good mood, I know you built a hut, I know you said you still loved me as much aswhen we first met, I know you carried me on your back, I know youwere happy following me through the corridor. I know baby, I know.But it can only be the most beautiful night of my life, if it was also yourmost beautiful night. And can a truly beautiful night be followed by themost terrifying morning?







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0 1 2 3 m

My parental home: Plan

0 1 2 3 m

My parental home layer I: Walls

0 1 2 3 m

My parental home layer II: Furniture

0 1 2 3 m

My parental home layer III: Free floor space

0 1 2 3 m

My parental home layer IV:Storage space

level +0,40 m level +0,80 m

storage space

free floor space

furniture

65%

30%

5%



Storage space on different horizontal sections

The ratio between furniture/free floor space/storage space







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She let go and sat down without uttering a word. The bartender still stood next to Marc, who had closed his eyes. I couldn’t help butthinking of the expensive suit Marc was wearing. It was a favourite ofmine. Several times I had asked him if I could borrow it, but he hadanswered that I did not know how to wear a good suit like that. I gotup and kneeled on the floor next to Marc, whispering that we shouldget out of that bar. There was a hostile atmosphere. I said that they didn’t like us being around. Marc nodded and answered: ‘Nobody really likes us Phillip, nobody really likes us.’

‘So let’s go.’‘Okay.’Marc got up on his elbows and slowly raised himself onto his feet. His

back was covered with brown dirt but he managed, while standing still,to pick some dust particles off of his sleeves. Then he looked up, turnedto the woman and with an earnest voice told her that he would be backto drag her around on the filthy floor. As she didn’t answer, he spit ather feet and got his wallet to pay for the whiskeys he drank and my stillfull, lukewarm beer.

Outside the temperature was perfect. It must have been about 21

degrees, as if attuned to the skin’s own native warmth. It was just aftereight o’clock and the bright summer sky slowly turned a darker blue, asthough someone was gradually pouring dark ink into the air. The twohues blended as liquids of the same sort blend by incorporating eachother. I love this time of the day when the street lamps are just lit andthe sky is deep blue. The intensity of colours at such a moment cannever be possessed or translated into thought. And at that moment itseemed to me that the perception of the fluid colours surrounding us,assured me that I was right in following my feelings instead of myrational thoughts. If I had followed my reason I would have left Marc.I would have told him that he was a pathetic, egocentric maniac andthat he didn’t know what it meant to love someone. I would have takenmy stuff from Gerald’s place, moved out of Amsterdam and started a new and decent life somewhere else. I know that I would have beenable to do so. I am sure of this. But these were my rational thoughts,which always wanted to conform to general expectations.

My beer was lukewarm. It had been standing in front of me for almosttwo hours. I had been sitting there in that sleazy bar for almost twohours. And I didn’t know why. Meanwhile Marc was lying on his backon the dirty café floor. He had slipped from his chair when he tried to grab an acquaintance of his, but the guy had walked on withoutnoticing him. For Marc the sight alone of this passing movement wasenough to send him tumbling from his chair. He was so drunk that it all looked very supple, like in a modern dance performance. Yes, Marcwas always elegant, even when he was drunk, lying on the filthy floorof a bar laughing while looking at the sleeves of his expensive suit jacket. I don’t know why I didn’t drink my beer. It was standing there between my elbows, waiting to be touched by my lips and becomepart of my body.

Now a woman took Marc by his feet and started pulling his supinebody through the small space between the bar and the tables. Glidingon his back over the floor, Marc searched in his pocket and found a pack of cigarettes. The woman turned around and dragged him backin the other direction, wildly laughing at her own entertaining act.When Marc horizontally passed by the legs of the stool on which I wasseated, he smiled at me and pretended to lift an invisible hat. Thewoman got tired and fell into a chair but Marc remained lying on thefloor and lit a cigarette.

The bartender shook his head. ‘Listen mister, this is a decent bar,please get up and behave yourself.’ Marc opened his eyes and lookedcheerfully into the face of the bartender who was bending over him.

‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ ‘Yes, you’re Marc.’ ‘Look, I am a well-known man! He knows who I am! You are

Marc, he says!’ Marc proudly announced while still lying on the floor.The woman got up, laughing, and again she took hold of his feet andstarted dragging him around. This time however, Marc yelled, ‘Don’ttouch me!’

Bye Marc

Jannah Loontjens

is any), or about the weather. But sometimes it’s also an odd question,as for example why people still hold onto the system of north, south,east and west, even when they know the earth is round. I know that the answers to such questions can be very short. You could say forexample: because maps are still flat. But at the moment I am asked sucha question, I always need to think for a while and then I often come upwith a fairly long answers in which I present different perspectives onthe same issue.

That night when we came back from the sleazy bar, we arrived earlyat Gerald’s. We shared one key and usually Marc carried it with him, butthis time he couldn’t find it. He accused me of having the key. I didn’t .I was sure Marc had it. Probably he had lost it while he was beingdragged over the café floor like a dead animal. I started banging on thedoor. I was sure Komein was in. He never left the place. But Komein was also hardheaded and always liked being a pain in the ass. The funny thing about him was that he always tried to do this with a kindof philosophical air, as though he wanted you to know that there wasstill something going on inside his skull.

‘Are you out of your mind? You’re ruining the fucking door!’ ‘A door is to enter through and we didn’t seem to be succeeding,’

Marc replied teasingly, imitating Komein’s demeanour. But Komein didnot agree and declared that ‘doors where there to be closed, otherwiseone would not need any doors at all.’

I knew he was right, but still I supported Marc, mumbling: ‘It dependswhat you want to keep out. The cold can stay outside, while we step in.’

‘It is summer, God damn it,’ and again he was right. Komein was not easy to fool. Even if he never looked out the window, he knew thetemperature.

Pony lay in front of the TV with her elbows under her chin and herback curved gently, which made her look young and fresh. I couldn’thelp feeling sad to think of her skin, which always looked grey and shinyas if she was about to choke as a result of some kind of poisoning.

‘Pony, can’t you leave that television alone for once and give lifeanother chance?’ I said almost whispering, still hesitating as to whetheror not I should make a remark like that at all.

Marc and I walked without speaking through the orange and blue ofcity lights and evening sky, in the direction of Gerald’s house. Geraldhad an apartment in the centre of the city. It was not a particularly big apartment, but it looked big because it was just one space: a hugerectangular room with the kitchen on one side and a king-sized bed onthe other. In the middle of the space was a big fluffy white rug withcushions and a TV. Gerald had given us a key because he liked to havepeople around. He was fond of saying that his friends were his family.He had the habit of saying this a couple of times every night, and themore people there were around, the more he repeated it. Sometimes, it’strue, it did feel like a family, but it never felt like we were friends.Everyone that used to visit Gerald, most often visited him because theyhad no real friends to see, no money or no other place to go. Often I thought disdainfully of those people. In my opinion they abusedGerald and his hospitality. And I wondered why Gerald never attractedany ‘normal’ people. This question usually brought me back to the issueof ‘general expectations’, which always seems to lead my thoughts.

Continually I ask myself: what is normal? Rationally perhaps, I wouldsay that it is ‘normal’ to be worried about your reputation, to long for a higher salary, to get your haircut regularly at the barber, to dream of having a big car... in short, those things that form the grid of normality, as well as the best guarded prison ever. So Gerald’s guestswere part of that small group of people who in some way succeed in escaping this prison, either by being very smart; by being stubbornand finding eccentric solutions to everyday worries; or by being too weird, too scary or too sick to be acceptable in the normal world.In fact I was probably the most unremarkable of all of these people. I was the spy, the intruder... But maybe many others felt the same way.I cannot tell. I don’t know. I never talked much to any of them, exceptto Marc.

Because I don’t talk much, everyone thinks that I’m the intellectual of the circle and perhaps I am. Perhaps I am the intellectual. Whensomeone asks a question and Gerald, Komein or Pony are too lazy tothink, they usually answer, ‘Ask the smart guy.’ And the smart guy is me.These questions could be about anything: about the sugar (if there still

become ‘normal’ to sit there next to the kitchen sink and watch Marccooking.

One time I stayed with Gerald for five days without leaving the build-ing for a single second. In an odd way this made me feel exhausted.Perhaps I had pretended to be ill, staying in bed all day, but in fact it made me ill to lie there for days on end, watching TV and listening to Komein’s lamenting. At one point it drove me crazy and I startedwalking around the room, stumbling over Pony and her lover who layin the middle of the rug watching TV, endlessly zapping from channel tochannel. I just walked up and down, nervously, until I couldn’t hide mytears any longer. I felt exhausted. Tears rolled down over my cheeks,down in my ears and neck. I wasn’t crying in sobs or anything. I wascrying silently while I walked. I had never seen Pony and Marc soshocked before. Marc was the first to discover my wet cheeks. He stoodup from the sofa and walked over to me. He took my face between hishands and tried to look into my eyes. He whispered close to my nose:‘Now stop thinking, you stop thinking, stop thinking.’ He was verysweet. The only thing was, I wasn’t thinking. There was nothing on my mind. Nothing. Maybe I even wished I could think something, butthere was nothing. My brain was numb. Marc kissed the tears on mycheeks and urged me to sit next to him on the sofa. This was the firsttime Marc had ever kissed me. Now of course, Marc and I are seen as a couple and inseparable. We always arrive together and we alwaysleave together.

While reading I had dozed off. That often happened to me. Marc wokeme up by trying to open my lips with his fingers. I didn’t want to openmy eyes. ‘Open your mouth,’ Marc repeated. I obeyed and he put a spoon full of hot food between my lips. When you can’t see the foodyou are eating, taste becomes a totally diff e rent sensation – one that isrisky to trust and I was not able to tell if the food was sweet, salty ors p i c y. I did know that I didn’t like it. No, I didn’t like it. Still I told Marcit was good because I didn’t want to spoil his cheerful mood. He was,h o w e v e r, clearly too drunk to cook. I even told him that it smelled fantastic. This last remark gave him an idea. He turned around and I heard a clear click, followed by an uncomfortable vacuum. He had

‘It is none of your business and don’t try to make it yours, becausethen you’ll be the one ruining my life.’

I didn’t respond and walked to the kitchen to see what was in thefridge. But Pony didn’t want to leave me alone after my comment.

‘Don’t you realise that even if it ever occurred to me that turning offthe TV and going out might make a change, I would always hear yourpedantic voice and so, just to annoy you, I would change my mind againand stay in front of the TV.’

‘Well, then, why don’t you just go and kill yourself right away?’‘I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.’Marc had opened the fridge and started drunkenly singing the names

of the products that he saw in the cold white interior. He sung not only the normal names like cheese and milk and ham and tomatoes, buthe also sang entire product names like Sofine Bio-Tu, Becel Creme,Minarina, Casa Cassis, Tropicana All Seasoning, Parana Pure PremiumBrand and Kikkoman Corporation. This made me realise how poor myattention to my surroundings must be because many of the descriptionshe sang sounded strangely new to me. I took the products from hishands to see if those names were really written on them. Yes, BalbeyHoney. I had never realised that it was called that. Balbey?

‘This shouldn’t be sitting in the fridge,’ I said.Marc loved to cook. I did too, but I liked watching Marc even more.

He never wanted anybody to help him. That would just slow down theprocess and bring him out of his concentration. I wandered around in the room to see if there was something interesting to read. Gerald didn’t have many books and the ones he had, I had read a couple oftimes. The best was Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A great book, which always gave me a feeling of hope, and trust thatmy life could still turn into the life of a writer. Even though I neverwrote a single line, I was convinced that I had the talent to do it. I tookthe book and walked back to the kitchen area and sat down on a comfychair that I had placed there earlier to keep Marc company while hecooked. It had already become a habit to sit there while he clinked potsand pans. When I was invited to stay over at Gerald’s for the first time,I really thought that it was just for one night. But now it had already

‘Okay, I will. In fact, I was just thinking about it. Maybe I think aboutit everyday, but there was something that made me think more serious-ly when we walked home from that bar.’

‘It’s remarkable how well you always think when you’re drunk.’‘Oh Phillip, you can mock me and call me a drunk as often as you

like. I know what I was thinking during our walk up here. I don’t knowwhy I’ve become so serious all of a sudden, but I have been thinking,perhaps it was because I ruined my last nice suit, I don’t know.’

‘So are you gonna tell me what it was you were thinking about?’‘ Yes, I thought: To m o rrow I’ll call Batt and tell her. Tell her where

I am, what I am doing, what I have been doing and what I will be doing.’‘What will you be doing?’‘I’ll go home, get my address book and start working. I know who

I have to call.’‘Good. Go, do it, go. I won’t miss you. Bye Marc.’Marc looked at me sadly. Annoyed by his passive gaze, I continued:

‘For you it’s easy. For you this is just a short holiday, a nice exotic pausein you fashionable nouveau riche life. But if you ask me how I couldstart again it’s a totally different question.’

‘But you’re smarter than all of us.’‘But I fucked up. I fucked up. I don’t have well to do acquaintances

and colleagues waiting. I don’t have anyone waiting. There isn’t evenanyone who will have noticed that I’ve been gone for a while now.’

‘Come on.’‘What, come on?’‘Ooooooh, poor Phillip!’ Pony suddenly yelled from the kitchen.‘And you mind your own business bitch!’ Marc yelled back.‘Of course I could change, but for me Gerald’s is not a hideout. For

me it’s a conscious choice. I choose to be here. I am not a victim as youare. I want it. It’s not an escape. And when Gerald kicks me out, I’ll findanother way to survive. Even if I have to sleep under bridges, or at theSalvation Army I don’t care. The sky is my roof, and I’ll never yield,never...’

Marc looked frightened and disappointed. Probably because he hadhoped that I would approve of his sudden decision and would answer

t u rned off the fan over the stove, probably to pre s e rve the smell of thefood. It was only when he turned it off that I realised it had been on. AndI realised that I had taken the buzzing sound of the fan to be the murm u rof silence.

‘Could you leave that on?’ I asked him. ‘But why? I turned off the gas and the food won’t give off much

vapour.’‘I know, but I kind of liked the buzzing sound of it.’‘What?’ Marc asked me honestly surprised. ‘What?’ And he laughed

while shoving me defiantly.‘Don’t try to push me off my chair Marc. Sorry, I am not the kind

of person who likes to be dragged around on the floor.’Marc was insulted and now he really tried to push me onto the floor,

but managed only to unbalance himself. With one hand I grabbed hisshirt. Instead of reacting quickly, he stood there bent over me, one kneeon the ground, an elbow on the chair, neither sitting nor standing. Againhe tried to push me onto the floor, but with every movement he made,my hand moved closer to his throat. Then he started pulling my hair.Painfully my head followed the movements of his strong hands, but I didn’t let go of his shirt. When he finally stopped, he showed me the amount of hair he had pulled out of my scalp, but I didn’t care.Suddenly he let himself fall with his entire weight, right on top of me. Together we rolled onto the floor and pretended to be wrestling, but Marc had too much alcohol in his blood to use his muscles effectively and I didn’t care. Pony stepped over us and asked us if wecould move a couple of inches, so she could at least open the fridge. I think we were both relieved with this excuse to give up our fight. Wegot up. I followed Marc towards the bed, where we sat down facingeach other.

‘Phillip, you just asked Pony to give her life a chance. What do youthink of your own life?’ Marc asked slowly, without looking at me.

‘What do you mean?’‘What do you mean what do I mean. You know perfectly well what

I mean.’‘Yes, but you could ask yourself the same question.’

among the grey morning clouds; grey as his silver shining feathers. I looked at him and I was with him. I looked at him and I became him.I looked at him and I flew. I was free. At my back I felt the warmth ofMarc’s body. I turned on my side and watched his sleeping profile withhis bristly eyebrows and his straight yet soft nose.

him with kind encouragement, but I didn’t grant him that pleasure. He would have to be strong enough to do it all by himself.

Marc lay back, with his hands folded under his head. I sat there think-ing and I thought we were both thinking, but when I turned towardshim, hesitating as to whether I should tell him that my thoughts hadbeen almost the opposite while we were walking home from that bar,I saw that he had fallen asleep.

‘You’re a drunk,’ I told him, and stretched out next tom him. When I woke up, it was still dark. Only the singing of some birds

indicated that daylight was on its way. I felt my stomach. We had totally forgotten to eat. I got up and walked through the silent roomtowards the kitchen. The food from the previous night was still on thestove. Somebody had clearly eaten from it, probably Gerald, who hadjust come home and joined us in bed on Marc’s side. I took the lid offof one of the pans and tasted the orange-coloured paste with the spoonthat lay next to it on the kitchen sink. It didn’t taste of anything. Notgood, not bad. Nothing. Standing in front of the stove, I ate the food in small bites. I wondered if Marc would really leave us. I breathed, ate and breathed. I had only one desire: to eat what Marc had cookedfor us. With every bite I made a wish. In the end the wishes became onesingle wish: that Marc would stay, if only just a bit longer. I wished andate with such concentrated dedication that it almost felt religious.

After having eaten all that was left, I went back to bed. Only Geraldhad undressed and lay under the blanket. He looked so decent next toMarc, who still wore his dirty but precious suit and lay on top of theblanket. I moved close to Marc’s warm, sleeping body. Marc andGerald’s breathing rose and sank in a wavy rhythm.

I was not tired and lay looking at the clouds, which sped by as ifcatching up with lost time. Only a big seagull seemed untouched by thestrong wind. With spread wings he calmly wrote his big circle over theroofs of the houses. He was strong and indifferent to the restlessness ofthe world beneath him. I looked at him, at how he calmly completedanother circle and I followed him for several seconds of immeasurabletime and weightlessness. My thoughts were close to the gull, transform-ing the violent gusts of wind into calm energy, which allowed us float







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0 1 2 3 m

My home: Plan

0 1 2 3 m

My home: List of storage spaces

gea cf

ih jb d

abcdefghij

wardrobebook-casecupboard in the kitchen 1cupboard in the kitchen 2storage roompress in the entrance hallfridgecupboard in the bathroomcupboard in the kitchen 3cabinet in the bathroom

1 55 m2 apartment2 12 m2 storage

The amount of floor space dedicated to storage amounts to 22% of the totalfloor space.

1 2

0 1 2 3 m

1 2

1 138,0 m3 apartment2 23,7 m3 storage

The amount of volume dedicated tostorage amounts to 17% of the totalamount of volume.

My home:The ratio between the total volume of the space of the apartment and the volume occupied by storage.

0 1 2 3 m

My home:The ratio between the total volume of materials constitutingthe space of the apartment andthe total volume of the space ofthe apartment itself.

1 3,710 m3 wood2 1,280 m3 tiles3 0,955 m3 stuco4 0,500 m3 glas5 0,200 m3 alu6 19,850 m3 brick7 30,000 m3 concrete

56,495 m3

The amount of volume taken up bymaterials amounts to 41% of the totalvolume.

761 2 3 4 5







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Lieven De Boeck[ Residence ]

Tour Kennedy 15 CQuai van Hoegaerden 2

4000 LiegeBelgium

J U D I C I A L C O D E .

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

Article 36. For the purpose of this code, the following terms shall have the following meanings: Place of residence: the place the population registers of which state that the person concerned has his principal residence insuch place; Domicile: any other location, suchas the place in which the person concerned hashis office or conducts a trading or industrialbusiness.

C I V I L C O D E .

TITLE III. PLACE OF RESIDENCEArticle 102. The place of residence of anyBelgian, for the purpose of exercising his civilrights, is the place in which his principal placeof residence is located.

Article 103. A change in the place of residenceis effected when a person actually moves to live in another place with the intention ofestablishing his principal place of residencethere.

Article 104. An explicit statement, made bothat the municipal administration of the placewhich is left, and that of the place to whichone’s place of residence has been transferred,evidences such intention.

Article 105. If such explicit statement is lack-ing, the evidence for the intention is derivedfrom the circumstances.

Article 106. A citizen who is appointed to at e m p o r a ry or revocable public office shallretain the place of residence, which he hadbeforehand, if he has not indicated to have theopposite intention.

Article 107. Acceptance of an office for lifemeans that the place of residence of a civil servant will immediately be transferred to theplace where he is to carry out his office.

I I I

Article 108. [The place of residence of a minorwho has not been removed from guardianshipis at the joint domicile of his parents or, if theydo not live together, at the domicile of one ofthem. The place of residence of a person whohas been placed under guardianship is with hisguardian.]

Article 109. An adult who normally serves, orworks for, someone else has the same place ofresidence as the person whom he serves or forwhom he works if he lives in the same house.

Article 110. The place of residence determinesthe place where the devolution of an estatetakes place.

Article 111. If the parties or one of them, in adeed, chooses domicile in another place thanthe actual place of residence to perform suchdeed, any services, claims and prosecutionsrelating to such deed can be made to the agreeddomicile and before the court of such domicile.

Lieven De Boeck[ Domicile ]

Lange Molenstraat 229280 LebbekeBelgium







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cleaning woman is very nice and takes care to wipe out all my traces and hers. She has her own key and comes in at irregular times. I never exactly know when and where she is, because the house is so huge andshe must need a lot of time to clean the entire place. Sometimes I suspect she never leaves but she looks too happy to make me reallybelieve this.

When we bump into each other we always nod and smile and I thinkshe likes me better than her employers, even if we are not able to speak– she is Chinese and doesn’t speak English or French. It feels like we a re in a secret pact together, mocking the real owners of this house.They want both of us to be here, yet our presence must be imperc e p-tible. They have the money to suggest this silently, without seemingrude or irrationally demanding. Sometimes I’m worried that I’ll bre a ksomething; some new electronic gadget, an exotic vase or some otherexpensive object. I don’t know what the consequences would be.P e rhaps they would immediately ask me to leave, as though I weref i red. In fact, it’s safest when I lie on the floor, but that is not why I amlying here. I am lying here because I like the empty ceiling and the spaceit contains.

When I lie here on my back and stare up at the ceiling long enough,it even begins to look like it encompasses tremendous depth. SometimesI get the feeling that I am flying, as if it is me who is hovering high upand the room is hanging under me like an empty swimming pool. It is a slightly frightening sensation. I could fall down and smash into pieceson the cold solid surface, leaving red dots of blood on the white plaster.Although this feeling of losing my gravity can become very strong, theceiling has never really frightened me. In fact, it is the only part of thisimmense villa that seems to have become mine. When I enter this houseI usually look up first, as if to say ‘hello, I am back’ and the ceiling looksdown on me, calm and reassuring as always, covering me like a loyalprotector.

The ceiling is not just white and bare. Sure it is at first sight, but notwhen you take a closer look. It has small, small irregularities, which casttiny shadows. They are difficult to detect, almost impossible because itis so high up. But if you stare long enough and let your eyes adjust to

I have been lying here on my back for a couple of hours already. Atleast, that’s what I think because I don’t have a clock within view. Sohypothetically, it could be only half an hour, which feels like five hours.That is, of course, the phenomenon about which one always talks inwonderment. About those strange experiences of time, like when youfall or have another kind of accident, which not only lets memoriesunroll in a split second, but also makes you see present time in slowmotion. In fact, the memories of the times I have hurt myself by fallingdown are the clearest memories I have. Perhaps this is partly due to myidiosyncratic mind, which prefers the self-pitying memories. But I thinkit mainly has to do with the speed of the heart. Anyhow, I have beenlying here for a couple of hours, I am sure of this. I have watched thetiny shadows on the ceiling changing, and have not fallen or been proneto some other kind of nervousness. I myself chose to gently lie down onthis white tiled floor, which looks cold, but is actually nice and warm.That’s the way this entire house is heated; the heating is just beneath thefloor. A pleasant and seemingly logical way to heat a house, seeing ashow the earth is burning from the inside while the air around it getscolder the further you move away from it.

I have been living here for three years now. Three years. And still it isnot really my ‘home’. When I came here I was only supposed to stay fora month, but somehow this one month kept being prolonged by another month, or two months, or three, until now. And it was not untiltoday that I realised that I have been feeling homeless during the entirethree years. Homeless while living in a remarkably luxurious house,where it would be possible to continue living forever, without it everbecoming my ‘home’. I would be like some kind of butler living in hisemployer’s house, always at work at home. No, I am not at work – theydon’t expect much from me. Actually the only thing they expect fromme is that it look as if I haven’t been here. They even pay the cleaningwoman to clean up after me and dust all the rooms with a kind of magnetic cloth, which attracts dust particles to it on contact. The

Huge Empty White

Jannah Loontjens

your heart is sped up, which makes you feel time as though in slowmotion because you are able to follow every little detail of movementsaround you. Still, in relation to the world you use up more time thanothers living through the same moment with a slower heartbeat. But no, I never stay in that sound isolated room. I only move through it,infecting it with the sound of my steps.

But the other room, where I ended up after training myself to followthe ceiling’s directions, was a room with a door that exits outside. Thiswas not even the most interesting aspect. More surprising is that when I looked through the curved glass of the exit, I saw some kind ofhorizontal elevator on the outside of the house. It looked like I was highup – at least ten floors high. This is impossible however, because thehouse only has three stories. It must have been the curve of the glass, but it gave me the feeling of having entered another building withoutnoticing it and having climbed a significant height. The grass in the garden was just a small square of green, encircled by other houses. Andthe city, which I couldn’t really identify either, looked like a labyrinthinepattern of lines, squares and triangles without recognisable details. But I shall not go into this deceptive view any further. I know howimpossible it is to translate such moments of delusion. It’s like listeningto someone tell an endless dream in which one after another farremoved relatives appear whom you don’t know.

However, the illusion was set up only by the glass window of the elevator and not by the thing or the room itself. I have visited that roomsince. I know where it is, even if I occasionally take the wrong hallway,because it is not always easy to remember where hallways lead. They alllook the same and they’re all curved like half circles, so you never seewhich room a hallway leads to before you are half way there and thenI always prefer to continue and leave the room at the end throughanother corridor instead of going back. That’s one of my only super-stitions: when you have lost your way, never just turn around and walkback where you came from, but always continue, walking back along a different route. I strongly believe that the detour serves the purpose of intervention in the supposed chronology of expectations and is, therefore, not to be denied. Perhaps if I had told my landlords about this

the distance, shadows appear like lines drawn in with a pencil. One isin the shape of a short-legged dog, with his fragile tail straight up. I always search for this one first when lying on my back. To me the ceiling has the most outspoken character of all the objects in this house,probably because the owners don’t care much about the ceiling. It mustbe too high for them to be concerned about in a practical way. Onewould need stairs or a small elevator if one were really to care about it.

I have often tried to walk through the house while only looking up. I have even held my hands so they framed my eyes, to shut out everything but the ceiling, training myself to read the white plane surface like a map. It worked quite well because the doors all open by themselves when you approach and the sounds of this technologygives me a hand in orienting myself. I must admit that on a number of occasions when I finally looked down, I found that I had ended up in atotally different room than I thought I would have. But it happened onlyonce that I ended up in a room where I had never been before. In fact,I hadn’t even been aware that the room existed.

Usually when I walk through the house I pass several rooms intowhich the long hallways turn and which lie between the bedroom andthe kitchen, or between the bathroom and the living room, but I don’tuse these rooms. Still, even if I don’t use them, I know they are there andI know what I could do in them, like watch a film or work out, or geta sun tan, or relax in the sound isolated room. They say the totalabsence of sound calms down your nervous system but I am not sureabout that. It only makes me listen to my inner sounds more, like to myorgans, the buzzing in my ear and my heartbeat. When I listen to myheart and observe its rhythm I tend to become a bit nervous because itnever seems regular. I don’t know if it speeds up because I get nervousor if I get more nervous because I hear it speeding up in those irregularheaves. The only interesting thing is that when it happens my sense oftime gets mixed up again. This could also be compared to the experienceof falling. Nervous moments and falling cause the adrenaline to flowand similar processes of anguish speed your heart rate up to about 180

beats a minute. And thinking of the heartbeat as being the frequency ofyour time experience, you take in many more frames of perception when

the house grows and that the number of chambers grows in time, leaving behind the rest of the rooms like certain stages of its life with itsmemories to be kept or to be forgotten as necessary. Still, this is ofcourse my own fantasy. It isn’t really all that fancy here, no, not thatfancy...

Perhaps one of the reasons that I prefer lying on my back is because I have continuous contact with the solid floor, which not only gives mea feeling of having a concrete building resting under me, it also makesme more a part of objects which in many cases seem to be so muchstronger than me. I know the furnishings don’t have a conscious mindand I know that it doesn’t make sense to compare my psychological vulnerability with those objects – regardless of whether or not they havesome kind of organic or chemical life going on inside them. Sometimesthough, it is exactly the absence of conscience that makes them appearso solid and decisive, whereas I so often seem lost, even if I don’t admitit and never turn around when I notice that I have lost my way.Still, I often regret what I have done and remain insanely indecisive – especially when I’ve been walking around endlessly through these hallways, not sure if I am getting closer to my white room. Only when I have found my spot here on the floor do I succeed in feeling at home.Here I calm down while I float around, hovering over or under the heaviness of the huge, empty, white.

particular superstition they would not have let me stay in their house.On the other hand, perhaps they were looking for a person exactly likeme. Who knows?

Most of the space in this building is actually taken up by those hall-ways, which also replace stairs; some of them leading slightly up ordown – depending on which side you come from. So now and then I have to trace a couple of spiralling circles before I reach the room withthe fancy outdoor elevator again. I have been inspecting the elevatorand it looks like it could also be a vehicle – a small kind of helicopterwhich plugs into the house like an extension of the home base. Still, I am not sure. Perhaps it is just an emergency exit. I don’t know and I don’t dare to touch the red light that sometimes blinks and asks me totype in my personal code. For the rest the room is empty. Except for thesound isolated room it is the only totally empty room. The other roomsare all furnished in a certain style, be it neo-coco or 1990’s style, or withjust one dominate colour. I prefer the cream white room, where I amlying now because this is the most neutral room and it lets me stare atthe ceiling without being interrupted by other objects screaming at mefrom the corner of my eye.

The only time when I start to panic a bit is when I cannot find thisroom. Sometimes after looking for it a long time, it appears at the endof a corridor where I could swear there’s supposed to be a differentroom. This I don’t like. I have suspected that there are more of thesewhite rooms at different spots, but one thing they would never succeedin doing is reproducing the tiny little shadows at precisely the sameangles on the ceiling. This is also why the shadow of the dog with the straight tail has become so important to me. It assures me that I am at home in my milky, white room. The other explanation of theunreliability of the hallways could be that the entire structure of thehouse is part of a developing, moving organism, the rooms being likecircling planets in a small universe... I don’t know. I don’t dare to claimanything but it would definitely not be a reassuring thought. Also whenI return after having been outside, the entrance is always in the samecorner of the house and the corridor always looks the same, decoratedin the Parisian clemine-deca style. On occasion I have thought that







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Guide for a route of destinations follow-ing the projection of the orbit of the moononto the surface of the earth during onemonth. The trip starts in Africa the 29thof April 0.00 U.T.M. with new moon at 35° N.L. 8° E.L..Standing on this spot at that time one is in the exact axis of a line drawn from thecentre of the moon towards the centre ofthe earth. The trip continues for one month follow-ing a movement describing an open spiralline around earth and ending again inAfrica the 29th of May. For every dayduring one month the co-ordinates aregiven to be in the axis between the earthand the moon at 0.00 U.T.M.The one-month odyssey offers a platformwhere possibilities are encouraged, it generates its own autonomous culture, a new space and time consciousness andafter dreaming for one month, one can come home… again…

29.04 / 0.00 U.T.M. 008.5° N.L. 035.0° E.L.17.36 U.T.M. new moon

30.04 / 0.00 U.T.M. 009.0° N.L. 039.0° E.L.01.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 010.5° N.L. 050.0° E.L.02.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 012.0° N.L. 062.0° E.L.03.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 013.0° N.L. 075.0° E.L.04.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 012.0° N.L. 087.0° E.L.05.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 010.0° N.L. 099.0° E.L.06.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 008.0° N.L. 111.0° E.L.07.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 007.0° N.L. 122.0° E.L.21.44 U.T.M. first quarter

08.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 004.0° N.L. 133.0° E.L.09.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 002.0° N.L. 145.0° E.L.10.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 000.0° N.L. 158.0° E.L.11.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 000.0° N.L. 170.0° E.L.12.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 001.0° S.L. 180.0° E.L.13.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 002.0° S.L. 168.0° W.L.14.05 / 0.00 U.T.M 003.0° S.L. 154.0° W.L.20.48 U.T.M. full moon

15.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 005.0° S.L. 144.0° W.L.16.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 006.0° S.L. 130.0° W.L.17.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 008.0° S.L. 120.0° W.L.18.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 008.5° S.L. 108.0° W.L.19.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 008.0° S.L. 095.0° W.L.20.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 007.0° S.L. 082.0° W.L.21.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 004.0° S.L. 070.0° W.L.11.36 U.T.M. last quarter

22.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 003.0° S.L. 058.0° W.L.23.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 001.0° S.L. 046.0° W.L.24.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 000.0° S.L. 034.0° W.L.25.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 002.0° N.L. 022.0° W.L.26.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 004.0° N.L. 010.0° W.L.27.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 006.0° N.L. 002.0° E.L.28.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 008.0° N.L. 012.0° E.L.29.05 / 0.00 U.T.M. 010.0° N.L. 032.0° E.L.9.27 U.T.M. new moon

m.o.o.n.t.r.a.v.e.l. a one-month odyssey 29.04.95 *

*29.05.95

m.o.o.n.t.r.a.v.e.l.







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h o u s e

Till their sojourn in Egypt the Hebrews dwelt in tents. They then for thefirst time inhabited cities (Gen. 47:3; Ex. 12:7; Heb. 11:9) . From the earliest timesthe Assyrians and the Canaanites were builders of cities. The Hebrewsafter the Conquest took possession of the captured cities, and seem tohave followed the methods of building that had been pursued by theCanaanites. Reference is made to the stone (1 Kings 7:9; Isa. 9:10) and marble (1 Chr. 29:2) used in building, and to the internal wood-work of the houses (1 Kings 6:15; 7:2; 10:11, 12; 2 Chr. 3:5; Jer. 22:14). “Ceiled houses” were such as hadbeams inlaid in the walls to which wainscotting was fastened (Ezra 6:4;

Jer. 22:14; Hag. 1:4). “Ivory houses” had the upper parts of the walls adornedwith figures in stucco with gold and ivory (1 Kings 22:39; 2 Chr. 3:6; Ps. 45:8).The roofs of the dwelling-houses were flat, and are often alluded to inScripture (2 Sam. 11:2; Isa. 22:1; Matt. 24:17) . Sometimes tents or booths wereerected on them (2 Sam. 16:22). They were protected by parapets or low walls(Deut. 22:8). On the house-tops grass sometimes grew (Prov. 19:13; 27:15; Ps. 129:6,

7). They were used, not only as places of recreation in the evening, butalso sometimes as sleeping-places at night (1 Sam. 9:25, 26; 2 Sam. 11:2; 16:22;

Dan. 4:29; Job 27:18; Prov. 21:9), and as places of devotion (Jer. 32:29; 19:13).

Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary

h o u s e

[1] A structure intended or used as a habitation or shelter for animals of any kind; but especially, a building or edifice for the habitation ofman; a dwelling place, a mansion. Houses are built to live in; not to look on. – Bacon.

Bees with smoke and doves with noisome stench Are from their hives and houses driven away. – Shak.

[2] Household affairs; domestic concerns; particularly in the phrase tokeep house. [3] Those who dwell in the same house; a household. One that feared God with all his house. – Acts x.2. [4] A family of ancestors, descen-dants, and kindred; a race of persons from the same stock; a tribe; especially, a noble family or an illustrious race; as, the house of Austria;the house of Hanover; the house of Israel. The last remaining pillar of their house,

The one transmitter of their ancient name. – Tennyson. [5] One of the estates of a king-dom or other government assembled in parliament or legislature; a bodyof men united in a legislative capacity; as, the House of Lords; the Houseof Commons; the House of Representatives; also, a quorum of such abody. See Congress, and Parliament. [6] (Com.) A firm, or commercialestablishment. [7] A public house; an inn; a hotel. [8] (Astrol.) A twelfthpart of the heavens, as divided by six circles intersecting at the north andsouth points of the horizon, used by astrologers in noting the positions of the heavenly bodies, and casting horoscopes or nativities. The houseswere regarded as fixed in respect to the horizon, and numbered from theone at the eastern horizon, called the ascendant, first house, or house oflife, downward, or in the direction of the earth’s revolution, the stars and planets passing through them in the reverse order every twenty-fourhours. [9] A square on a chessboard, regarded as the proper place of apiece. [10] An audience; an assembly of hearers, as at a lecture, a theater,etc.; as, a thin or a full house. [11] The body, as the habitation of thesoul.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary

h o u s e

[1] a dwelling that serves as living quarters for one or more families; “he has a house on Cape Cod”; “she felt she had to get out of the house” [2] an official assembly having legislative powers; “the legislature has two houses” [3] a buildingin which something is sheltered or located; “they had a large carriage house”

[4] a social unit living together; “he moved his family to Virginia”; “it was a good Christian

household”; “I waited until the whole house was asleep”; “the teacher asked how many people made up

his home” (syn: family, household, home, menage) [5] a building where theatrical per-formances or motion-picture shows can be presented; “the house was full”

(syn: theater, theatre) [6] members of a business organization; “he worked for a broker-

age house” (syn: firm, business firm) [7] aristocratic family line; “the House of York”

[8] the members of a religious community living together [9] the audiencegathered together in a theatre or cinema; “the house applauded”; “he counted the

house” [10] play in which children take the roles of father or mother orchildren and pretend to interact like adults; “the children were playing house”

[11] one of 12 equal areas into which the zodiac is divided (syn: sign of the

zodiac, sign, mansion, planetary house) (a) contain or cover; “this box houses the gears”

(b) provide housing for (syn: put up)

WordNet ® 1.6

house, houses

[1] (a) A structure serving as a dwelling for one or more persons, especially for a family. (b) A household or family. [2] Something, such as a burrow or shell, that serves as a shelter or habitation for a wild animal.[3] A dwelling for a group of people, such as students or members of a religious community, who live together as a unit: a sorority house. [4] A building that functions as the primary shelter or location of some-thing: a carriage house; the lion house at the zoo. [5] (a) A facility, suchas a theater or restaurant, that provides entertainment or food for thepublic: a movie house; the specialty of the house. (b) The audience orpatrons of such an establishment: a full house. [6] (a) A commercial firm:a brokerage house. (b) A publishing company: a house that specializes in cookbooks. (c) A gambling casino. (d) Slang. A house of prostitution.[7] A residential college within a university. [8] (a) often House. A legislative or deliberative assembly. (b) The hall or chamber in whichsuch an assembly meets. (c) A quorum of such an assembly. [9] oftenHouse. A family line including ancestors and descendants, especially a royal or noble family: the House of Orange. [10] (a) One of the 12 parts into which the heavens are divided in astrology. (b) The sign of the zodiac indicating the seat or station of a planet in the heavens.Also called mansion. [11] House music.

The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English Language

h o u s i n g

[1] The act of putting or receiving under shelter; the state of dwelling in a habitation. [2] That which shelters or covers; houses, taken collectively.– Fabyan. [3] (Arch.) (a) The space taken out of one solid, to admit the insert i o nof part of another, as the end of one timber in the side of another.(b) A niche for a statue. [4] (Mach.) A frame or support for holding some-thing in place, as journal boxes, etc. [5] (Naut.) (a) That portion of a mast or bowsprit which is beneath the deck or within the vessel. (b) A coveringor protection, as an awning over the deck of a ship when laid up. (c) A houseline.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary

h o u s i n g

[1] (a) Buildings or other shelters in which people live: a shortage ofhousing in the city . (b) A place to live; a dwelling: She came to collegeearly to look for housing. [2] Provision of lodging or shelter: the housing of refugees; a contract that includes housing. [3] Something that covers, protects, or supports, especially: (a) A frame, bracket, or box for holding or protecting a mechanical part: a wheel housing. (b) An enclosing frame in which a shaft revolves. [4] A hole, groove, or slot in a piece of wood into which another piece is inserted. [5] A niche for a statue. [6] Nautical. (a) The part of a mast that is belowdeck. (b) The part of a bowsprit that is inside the hull.

The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English Language







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0 10 20 30 m

The model house:Domicile I (E 19)

This project is the design for my model house. It consists of an underground labyrinticstorage space situated in one of the most reachable spots inBelgium.

Lieven De Boeck[ House ]

E 19 n°11000 BrusselsBelgium

0 1 2 3 m

The model house:Domicile I (E 19)Level 0

On ground-floor level the house is almost invisible. Only a translucent roof coveringthe entrance is visible. It formsthe point of orientation for driving the car to the house atnight.

0 1 2 3 m

The model house:Domicile I (E 19)Level –2,5 m

The underground space is dividedinto rooms of different scales andatmospheres related to differentmanners of storage. Some patios let daylight in the house and some spaces havethe logistics for other functionssuch as shower/kitchen/toilet…

BA

D F

C E

The model house:Domicile I (E 19)Section AB

The site is currently used as a kind of park by the people living in the surrounding quarters as well as by theBelgian army, who do tankexercises there.

A B

The model house:Domicile I (E 19)Sections and façades

C

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South façade

East façade







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products he had ordered were there, crossing each item off of the listthat corresponded to the object he took out of the bag. Yes, it was allthere. Lars liked good, luxury food. The idea of a slice of bread forbreakfast, some lunch and a hot dinner repelled him. He approachedeach meal with the same precision and the same preferences, regardlessof the time of day. There were some combinations he especiallyfavoured: he adored escargots in a lemon and garlic dressing, or grilledaubergine with raw tuna, or avocado with new baby potatoes and walnuts, but also more conventional combinations such as caviar andchampagne or a poached duck’s egg with asparagus. He often askedhimself whether his enjoyment of a meal was influenced by the fame andreputation of it, but he had never succeeded in finding a satisfyinganswer. Although he didn’t plan his meals according to the conventionsof breakfast, lunch and dinner, he did take into account the light in his flat when planning his food. He preferred drinking champagne in the afternoon sunlight, which was reflected by the windows of the skyscrapers opposite his building. Fresh tuna, which he combined with a deep red wine, he preferred eating at dusk, when the streetlightsfloated through town like orange spots and the last blue daylight stillstuck to the concrete of the town.

Lars could spend hours staring at the town through his window.He would be leaning back in his plastic bucket seat, feet on the low windowsill and a glass of wine within reach. From that height the city always looked calm and unchangeable, as if the height did not just reduce things, but also slowed them down. Lars’ lips would moveslightly, as he remembered the street names. He would start at the back, following the layout of the architecture and from there systematicallyscan the city, murmuring the name of each street that came into view.

Lars knew many streets by name but he had seen only very few upclose. He restricted outings that forced him to leave the building, to anabsolute minimum. Apart from the time that his cat was dying and hehad to see the veterinarian, he’d only really been driven home in a cabfrom the airport. These rides had made an indelible impression on himand he would lovingly repeat the street names in the order that the cabhad driven through them. Especially the unexpected ride to the vet was

Lars had agreed that from now on he’d come down to pick up his groceries from the courier from the delicatessen. The courier alwaysrang three times, so that Lars knew who it was. Even if someone elsehad pressed the bell three times, no one would do it exactly the same asthe boy from the deli. Lars immediately recognised the dexterity withwhich the bell was pushed firmly but quickly and would jump up on hearing this tone, run down the hall and push the button for the elevator. Sometimes it would take more than a minute for the elevatorto reach his floor. The elevator was always faster going down than coming up, and Lars wondered if this was true for all things, not justphysical ups and downs, but also for instance falling into a depressionand climbing out of it again, or the temperature rising and falling orclimbing the social ladder and falling from it.

The elevator descended 113 floors down the shaft and Lars moved hisjaw backwards and forwards to relieve the pressure in his ears. ‘Ping.’Ground floor. The young courier held his moped in one hand and thelarge shopping bag in the other. He handed Lars the heavy bag stuffedwith groceries as soon as Lars revolved out into the open air through theglass doors.

‘This is much better, isn’t it? If I come down, you don’t have to lockup your moped and I get some fresh air.’

‘Fair enough Lars, but I don’t mind, really. I like to come up for a minute.’

‘Thanks anyway. Say hello to your boss?’‘Sure.’ The boy zoomed off and tossed a ‘Bye!’ off into the wind. Lars

wondered if he was the son of the shop owner, but he had never daredask the boy. He hadn’t ever seen the shop owner, but the boy was sucha loyal employee, working there from age thirteen to eighteen, it couldonly have been the son. Lars took a few more breaths of city air beforedragging the heavy paper bag in through the revolving doors and start-ing his trip back upstairs.

Shopping list in hand, he checked to make sure that all of the

Pa n o r a m a

Jannah Loontjens

hardest things Lars could think of and he preferred to skip that partaltogether. Luckily he didn’t have to say goodbye very often, as healmost never saw anyone, but sometimes his great-aunt would call, orhis former neighbour. And on every occasion it was a complete mysteryto Lars how one should end such a telephone conversation. He preferred just hanging up at some point, but his great-aunt had becomefurious about this once, so now he simply waited for the other person to give the signal to hang up. ‘Bye,’ Lars would then say, actuallywanting to ask when they would speak again, or if this would be thevery last time they spoke. He would have quite liked to stay on thephone for a bit longer and hear their voice, so he could remember thembetter.

When his great-aunt called, he often made up all kinds of events in order to prolong their conversations. He talked about meetings and cocktail parties he had attended and mentioned the street names of the route and the famous buildings he had passed on the way. Hisgreat-aunt, living in a small village and having only seen Lars as a smallboy, lapped it up and proudly passed all these fabrications on to herneighbours and anyone else who cared to listen. Thus, for the last fifteen years she had been living under the impression that Lars was a bank manager who also gave out scholarships to talented musiciansand writers. Lars was the one handing the prizes to the young geniusesand he always told the most fantastic stories about these events. He would describe how these extraordinary people dressed and moved,discussing their language and table manners. Once, an absent-mindedwriter had excused himself just before the award ceremony and disappeared into the toilet. When he re-immerged and hurried onto theplatform to receive his prize, it appeared that the unfortunate man hadnot just neatly tucked his shirt into his pants, but his baggy jacket too!

Lars’ former neighbour didn’t believe his stories, but would still bequite happy to listen to them. With longing in his voice he regularly toldLars: ‘Well, if I had your imagination, I wouldn’t leave my house either.’Lars thought this was a bit unfair of him. Whether he believed his stories or not, he shouldn’t just break the thread of the game. In doingso he gave Lars the feeling that he was nothing more than a big liar. In

a cherished pearl in his memory. He had sat in the backseat of the cab, with the cat in his arms, looking tensely out of the window. Thehouses, shops and offices slid by him as images from a dream. He knewthey had a symbolic message, which he sensed, but could not translateinto words. His left hand stroked the animal’s fur, while he lay pantingin Lars’ arms. Lars already knew the nineteen-year-old cat was dyingand didn’t really believe the vet could do anything about it.

He had picked it up one time in the hall, when its former owner, anold lady in a wheelchair, was wheeled out of her flat to be taken to a nursing home. The cat had looked at Lars bewildered, with big roundeyes that showed not so much despair as astonishment over the fact thatthe world went beyond the old woman’s front door. Even though the cathad just moved a few steps into the hallway, Lars thought he recogniseda kind of perplexity in his look, bordering on madness. He picked it upand carried it into his apartment. From that first moment they had got on well together. Lars had asked the deli what foods could be givento a cat and had put together a special menu for it, so that it got a different kind of meat or fish every day of the week.

That was seven years ago, and now he sat in a cab with his loyalfriend in his arms. Lars thought it a beautiful idea that they weremaking an outing together in the last hours of its life, going out into theworld, which for both of them was so removed, so strange and so fullof mystery. The animal lay in his lap with its eyes closed, in a sweat.Even though it could not see, Lars knew it was experiencing all of theseimpressions to the full. Just as Lars was taking in the colours, gestures,clothing, ads and city lights like so many 3D picture postcards, he knewthat the cat was absorbing the street smells and the sounds of the people and the traffic as a last intense hallucination. In the waiting roomat the vet’s the cat had breathed its last breath in Lars’ arms. With tearsrunning along his jaw down his impeccable silk collar, he had handedthe cat to the vet, not knowing what to do with the small dead body.

Lars still missed his furry little friend every day, but he didn’t want toget a new cat. He thought it was hard enough replacing things, let aloneanimals. Plus a new cat was going to die some day too and Lars wasalready dreading that day in advance. Saying goodbye was one of the

ago now that someone rang his doorbell, not downstairs, but on his actual floor. When he opened the door, a boy asked if he was Lars Anderson. He had nodded. It was about a survey on safety in theneighbourhood, and could he ask a few questions? Lars had no problemwith this. He answered the questions as well as he could, using his imagination. Several times the boy had burst out laughing and asked him if he was joking. Lars shook his head slowly and seriously,wondering if he had said something wrong.

Lars had never been afraid on the streets. It was just that he saw noparticular reason for venturing out into streets that he could see fromhis apartment. He loved the panoramic view, which was taken awayfrom him as soon as he was actually on the street, where he felt surrounded by walls and buildings. For him, architecture eliminated thebird’s-eye view of things, the patterns and the horizon of the city. Theresult wasn’t even fear, it was more like real suffocation. It was as if his brain couldn’t breathe without the view. This unusual kind of claustrophobia did not come in attacks, it was bigger than Lars, like theatmosphere in which he lived, or with which he literally coincided. Larsfelt most happy walking on the carpet in his socks and looking out ofhis enormous windows, which began 30 centimetres from the floor andreached to the ceiling. Due to the location of his apartment block he knew the south and east areas of city best, but he had been able tostudy the rest of city using his map. He was convinced that he wouldimmediately recognise these streets if he ever saw a view of the west sideof town.

Two weeks after the doorbell incident it rang again. This time it wasdownstairs. Although he could tell from the inane sort of ring that itwasn’t the courier, he still went into the hall and got into the elevator.The cabin hurtled down, only braking at the first floor and coming to a halt with a shock at the ground floor. It was a different boy now who– just like survey boy – asked if he was Lars Anderson. This time Larsshook his head. ‘No.’

‘I was really looking for Lars Anderson,’ the boy continued.‘Well.’‘Doesn’t he live in 1113?’

that respect he preferred talking to his great-aunt, who soaked up hisstories and always asked for new details about previously recountedevents, never objecting if earlier and later versions didn’t quite tally.

Even though Lars never left his house and he didn’t have a television,he was extremely well informed about politics, culture and fashion.Apart from staring out of the window and studying the foldout map ofthe city, Lars spent most of his time scrutinising advertising leaflets andcatalogues – from which he ordered clothes and gadgets – and readingnewspapers and free local papers. He made no distinction in terms of quality, but poured over each and every one of them from cover to cover. This had given him not only an amazing insight into con-temporary cultural and economic developments, but he also discerned links between the most divergent phenomena. Thus for instance, he had noticed that the language used by clairvoyants recommendingthemselves in small leaflets did not differ too much from the languageof the extreme right political party. He drew the conclusion that clairvoyants were as conservative as rightwing politicians, and that inmaking their predictions they mainly coughed up the past. This insightmade him distrustful of the rightwing party, of whom he thought asquacks.

People that kept turning up in the papers and magazines would beused in the stories he told his great-aunt, and featured many frequentlyphotographed politicians and super models. He talked about the poli-ticians using their real names and gave the models the brand names of the clothes they wore. Although Lars knew the difference betweenfashion and politics very well, the super models were assigned ever moreimportant roles in his running collection of fictitious events. In general,the models appeared to have more varied characters than the politicians,who always put on the same airs.

Apart from still missing his cat every day, Lars was reasonably happywith his life. He enjoyed the food he made and was proud of the fact that no one knew the pattern of streets, which spread out from hiswindow quite as well as he did. Yet, something had gone wrong, he’dput his foot in it somewhere because the peace and quiet he had knownfor years had momentarily been shaken. It had already been a few weeks

seen a man look so sad. Now that he’s dead himself, he’s reunited withhis cat.’

About a month later Lars looked at the magazine and saw a pictureof his apartment block printed on the front page. He thought it wasn’ta bad photograph. He carefully considered how his building lookedfrom the outside and tried to localise his own window in the latticeworkof windows in the picture. ‘Lars Anderson has lived in his luxury apart-ment for thirty years, without ever having stepped outside’, it said in small white print across the picture. He opened the magazine at theindicated page and read the title: ‘The skyscraper’s Don Quichote.’ The article not only quoted stories he had told the first boy with the survey, but they were described as fabrications of a dreamer, mirages ofa hermit or the ideas of an agoraphobe. It went on to feature remarksfrom neighbours and even from the owner of the delicatessen. In the endit was stated that it was unclear where he was, since another man hadopened the door and declared that Lars Anderson was dead. Since nodocuments corroborating this could be traced, the journalist suspectedthat he had moved to another furnished apartment. Lars couldn’t helpbut snigger about the gullibility of the journalist. The idea that someonecould actually tell people that he had died was apparently a thought toofar removed for him.

As for the rest, the article was full of lies. It said that he had beens c a red to go out on the streets, that he didn’t trust the world and had, forthe last thirty years, locked himself in his apartment in a state of nerv o u sfright. On the other hand, some questions were asked that Lars hadnever given any thought to before. One query concerned whether or notit was possible to experience a human form of ‘happiness’ if one wasalways locked up in a skyscraper, surrounded by walls, at an unnaturalheight? Also, the writer wondered if a man who stated that he was soundand happy in such circumstances should be believed, or if he should be pressed to seek psychiatric help. There was another question about whether he might be a danger to his environment, since he lived socompletely within his own fantasies that he might lose sight of re a l i t y.

The article didn’t make Lars sad because it told untruths about him,but because he suddenly realised how haphazard these magazines and

‘Lived.’‘How’s that? Has he moved?’ the boy asked, startled. ‘No, Lars Anderson is dead.’‘But that’s impossible, a friend of mine spoke to him two weeks ago.’‘Well, things can happen quickly. The grim reaper doesn’t always

come by pre-arranged visit.’‘Wow! I just wanted to interview the guy. I’m from NZG magazine,

New Zeitgeist, and we’re doing an issue on ‘outsiders’.’‘Lars Anderson hardly ever went outside.’‘Did you know him well?’‘No, I’m just the new tenant in his apartment, though I did meet him

a couple of times. I used to live a few floors down, and I always meantto move up as soon as possible. We sometimes met in the elevator whenhe went down to get his shopping.’

‘What kind of impression did he make on you?’‘What kind of impression? Well, I could describe that to you, but

I’m not sure it would do you any good. I don’t like people in general,I’m a misanthrope, so if you asked me what kind of impression you’remaking on me right now, you probably wouldn’t recognise yourself inmy gruesome description. I wouldn’t be of much help to you. However,just so your question doesn’t go totally unanswered, I can tell you thatI had the idea that Lars Anderson was a genius. A real genius. The kindof man who is too intelligent for our society.’

The boy didn’t seem to listen and pensively raised his eyebrows.‘My colleague, who asked him some questions for a surv e y, told me that

he gave the most outrageous answers and made up totally absurd storiesabout himself and his environment with a completely straight face.’

‘Yes, you get that with highly gifted people: they sometimes lose them-selves in details and then lose sight of the balance between imaginationand reality.’

‘Is there really nothing that caught your attention, or that you thinkis interesting enough to be mentioned in an article?’

Lars thought long and hard while looking up at the clouds, wheresunrays like tight clotheslines were threading cloud to cloud.

‘Actually, there is one thing. He once had a cat that died. I’ve never

papers were. Stuff he read everyday front to back. He wondered to whatextent everyone was making up stories about their own lives, just as he did. He stared outside. In the window he saw a vague reflection ofhimself, a well-groomed gentleman in an expensive silk shirt, leaningback in a futuristic plastic bucket seat. It was stormy outside andthrough his reflection he saw the city move to and fro in the hard gustsof wind. He looked at his transparent reflection on the swaying window,but wasn’t at all sure that he was the man about whom the article hadbeen written. He couldn’t understand why people were interested inhim, when he wasn’t interested in them. He sometimes imagined thatthe city was completely deserted, that there were only houses, walls andmaterials. This was a soothing idea. It was at such moments that the cityseemed like a living organism that breathed and kept itself alive. Heexamined how he lay back in his bucket seat and how the fusion of his reflection and the city gave the impression that he was a giant who had settled down on a bed of buildings. The gusts became increasinglyforceful. Lars felt how the swaying building was reaching its maximumpitch. The city moved slowly and massively beneath him and rocked hisbody in its lap.

private culture/public nature (Cheshire cat).

Have you noticed that privacy has gone all

post-modern? Slipping and sliding through

the public sphere(s) rather than opposed to i t :

secretly (though simultaneously and overtly)

adorned now in one outfit, now in another.Sometimes wearing the all too fashionable

axis-of-evil garments (truth and will and

God-is-on-our-side outfits); sometimes wearing

only the emperor’s-new-clothes. Diverse

cultural memories take flight and scatter intothe void! And in their sacred places: the

resurrection of a homogeneous memory,

a kind of singular-public memory, a unilateral

laugh. A funny kind of security, this inverse

resurrection of the age-old nature/culturedivide; an odd kind of historical clarity, this

peculiar kind of nationalism, this newborn

oxymoron ‘public nature’: simultaneously

itself, its Other, and its synthesized brand-

name naming(s), which in turn form thegroundless grounds and heightless heights

for both its lacks and its excesses.

7 ≠

dream home (house/hungry/harm).

Close your eyes and picture yourself in

the dream home of your dreams! Or perhapsyou are worried you will never get there!

Or perhaps you are already in it! Is your

household dream home a foreseeable ex -

pression of your own hard work and sweat,

a collective effort, or just a roll of the dice?Maybe it is all three. In a fit of depression,

I should like to say: only the roll of the dice.

In collective wolf mode, I should prefer to

say: the pack’s own doing. When I’m being

‘the bold and the beautiful’ I should like to say:a good architect.

8 ≠

acoustic curiosity.

May I have this next dance? Shall we swirl

‘round the room, intoxicated by the rhythmcodes of browns, blues and yellows, caught

only by our grinding hips and slick two-step

moves? Perhaps in this swirl we shall place

our trust (if we must trust at all), in the

hardly audible knowledge-sounds of voice and guts and laughter-sweats. Put on those

dancing shoes!

9 ≠

fluid dynamics:

It’s been a long, hard day at (a) work (b) play

(c) fill in the blank. Tiredness starts at theback of the neck (life being rather a grind,

repetitive, monotonous and a little bit grey).

As I enter my house, I realise I’m entering

the home of my youth: a kind of neo-suburban-

military, split-level affair, snug, uniformed,sometimes green and tucked away in a ticky-

tacky county as part of a ticky-tacky city,

surrounded by a series of ticky-tacky con-

federate states, just a few miles south of the

Mason-Dixon line. It is here where I learnwhat it means to be a Yankee and how not to

fit in. It is here where I learn how to skate-

board – my finest achievement being able to

go downhill at top speed . . . on my head. It

is here where I learn how to play ‘doctor’ andwhere I get my very first period. It is here

where I open the door to this house, all red

walled and blue carpeted, with my mother

sitting at a table or on the couch. I am always

shocked to see her (as she is dead), neverthe-less, we have the same conversation, time

after time, door after door: My God! You’re

alive! I shout in (a) joy (b) grief (c) horror.

I run to her hugging her, alternatively as a

grown adult, alternatively as a child, huggingher, hugging her! Hugging her! ‘It’s okay,

dear,’ she gently responds, running her

fingers through my hair, ‘when I realised

I was alive, I simply opened the casket and

came home.”

10≠

light switch (I).

First, the mathematical problem of certainty.

Did you know that the square root of any

positive number after zero is eventually,

I mean, after awhile (that is, after squarerooting on the calculator at least nine times

on the same digit, rounded up or down)

always, and without, fail equal to:1?

Peculiar, though not fascinating, except to

the very few. Indeed, probably only to thosewith calculators and extra time on their hands,

bored with some other administrative task

(say, figuring out the law of averages). But,

with the aid of light avoidance techniques –

blank stares, self-abuse, whimsy, for example– surprising things can be accomplished!

and even with the simplest of calculators!

Like pressing the magic √ [square root]

button enough times until a 1 emerges from

any (positive) anonymous chaos.

11≠

light switch (II).

Second, the mathematical problem of uncer -

tainty: that nagging little problem presentedby irrational numbers and their friends

(möebus strips, string theories, relativity,

fragmented infinities, surface structure

circuitries, quantum physics and other tidal

w a v e s - d o t s - w e b s -3D game boards and their ilk).Despite the age-old fact that Gödel shows,

unrelentingly, how uncertainty is neither void

nor ‘Other’ nor imaginary friend nor utopian

option of the Real, the consequences of his

theorem still elude our grasp. Scared? Notscared enough? Perhaps we should just run

back to our nice little calculators of certainty

and avoid trespassing these mathematically

peculiar swamplands of tension and delight.

I should like to say: No! (but without so muchcertainty).

12≠







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The typology house:This project is a design for a new typology for a house. The design starts from a structure based on an idealstorage system. Out of thislabyrinth of storage the different rooms of a house are cut.

Ideal structure for storing someone’s belongings

Some objects need light others need darkness

Division between storage space and acces space

Living spaces cut out in the labyrinth

0 1 2 3 m

The typology house

Section

Façade

Plan

The typology house:Storage space on different horizontal sections

+0,40 m +0,80 m

+1,20 m +1,60 m

+2,00 m +2,40 m







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over the floor. While he picked up some of the magazines he thought ofgiving the office a call to tell them that he would be out that day.Normally Fred never stayed home, he was never ill and he was one ofthe most disciplined bosses in the entire business. What would he say tohis secretary? He held his small cell phone in his hand and looked at it.Fred shook his head and let the phone slip back into the pocket of hisbathrobe.

He decided to not look through the magazines, but simply to restorethe piles. Good. That was easy and he had already moved more than a metre along the wall. Next to and between the piles of the magazineshe found crumpled up candy wrappings, cigarette packs and an oldpostcard with a picture of a beach in Spain. He had written the postcardhimself, but never posted it. It said: ‘Hi Mom! Although I’m quite sunburnt I’m enjoying the sun. The sunlight is the only souvenir I want to bring back with me. I hate all the souvenir shops so don’t expect a present from me.’ He smiled at his own rudeness and let the postcardfly into the room. It was a good thing he had never sent it. His handfolded around the cell phone in his pocket. What would he tell them atthe office? He didn’t want to say he was cleaning his apartment, nor thathe was ill. Fred was proud of his good health and enjoyed talking aboutthe details of his physical strength: how hard he could work and stay upfor days on end without sleeping, without getting sick or feeling weak.He stared at his little Nokia phone and walked to the kitchen to get anold plastic bag.

‘Here you go, old crumpled Marlboro pack! And away with you,dried up oranges!’ Plunk, plunk, they landed at the bottom of the bag,where they continued aging quietly. ‘Bye, bye, you sweet old postcard,bye, old news in the newspapers! There you go forever removed frommy present... Bye, empty wine bottle, bye, bye, bye, stinky beer cans,bye, pizza carton box with your mouldy leftovers and cigarette butts!You all rest in peace together in your colourful mass grave. Bye, foldersfrom my local drugstore, bye, Coca-Cola can, bye, paper napkin, bye,bye!’ Fred started enjoying it and saw clear results throughout his livingroom much sooner than he had expected. He decided to take a card-board box and also do away with objects that were not necessarily

Sitting on his sofa, Fred observed the chaos in his room. He decided not to leave the house, not that day, nor the next, before he had cleaned up. This time he was not going to escape from it. In his mind he made a plan. ‘It’s good to have a plan when cleaning up, otherwiseyou can easily get stuck on details and lose the overview of the whole business,’ he thought. It was still early. That was good. He took a cigarette from a pack, which lay on top of a pile of letters and contracts. Perhaps he should start cleaning the salon table, sorting out which papers he still needed and which had become obsolete. He would just throw away the old ones. But on the other hand, a tablefull of papers, books and junk was not the worst of it. ‘No,’ he thought,‘it would be better to start cleaning systematically, to really startfrom one corner of the room and to follow the walls as a means of structuring.’ He played with the unlit cigarette between his lips andscanned the room with his eyes, looking for a lighter. He bent his upperbody between his legs and looked under the sofa. In a soft bed of dustlay a small pink lighter. That was a nice surprise. He had not actuallyexpected to find one there and had bent forward mostly to initiate his search. He grabbed the slim lighter and smiled at it. It had been Marina’s.

He remembered very clearly how she had been sitting on his sofa andhad offered him a light. Beautiful Marina. He had good memories ofher. Fred was not easily impressed by women, but she was a special type,she was not easy to charm. She was a lady with style and temperament.‘Okay, which corner is best to start from?’ he asked himself aloud. ‘Thecorner where you want to end,’ he answered, grinning smartly. ‘Wheredo I want to end? I think right here, so I can sit down contentedly whenI have finished.’

Fred got up and walked to the left, where he faced the wall behind thesofa. There he only had to vacuum. So – somewhat to his annoyance –he started to the right of his sofa, in the middle of the wall. Piles of magazines and advertisement leaflets had started sliding and spreading

Bright Clean Fu t u r e

Jannah Loontjens

especially while his job forced him incessantly to warn his clients aboutunfavourable circumstances that the future might bring, and againstwhich it is better to be insured. That way a person could feel calm in thep resent without having to fear what may come. He looked around theroom and took his cell phone from his pocket. Now he really should callthe office.

‘KFK Insurance Company. Where can I direct your call?’‘ Yes, hello Caroline. I won’t be coming in today. If anyone asks for me,

tell them I am at a meeting and that it will be difficult to reach me all day. ’‘Oh, why? Is something wrong?’‘No, don’t worry, just some unexpected businesses. I’ll explain it to

you later. Right now I really have to get going.’‘Well, good luck then. See you tomorrow?’‘Yea, see you tomorrow.’His little plastic aeroplane lay on the windowsill. He had purchased

it at the airport once. He had loved it because of its minuscule details,but now he threw it away. He also threw away the empty tea can witha picture of the royal palace on it, and the old shoestring, which he hadkept in case one of his new laces broke. He threw away an old dried-updeodorant roller; an expensive porcelain fruit bowl that had broken intwo, but which he had always planned to glue back together; a can ofinsecticide spray, which was still quite full, but which he had never beenable to find when he needed it. And many other seemingly insignificantthings. He even threw away a clothes hanger, because it had been lyingin the living room for too long without serving any purpose, whereas itcould serve a purpose in his bedroom, where Fred’s clothes lay about asif there had been a series of wild striptease shows.

After two short hours of this kind of fanatic cleaning, his living roomalready looked much bigger than before. Fred took the three boxes filledwith magazines, papers and other junk one by one down the stairs andput them in front of his door on the sidewalk. If people wanted anythingthey had about twelve hours to look through his dump before thegarbage men would come and pick it up.

Fred contentedly looked around his empty living room. He took outthe vacuum cleaner. Following the walls and the shapes of the furniture,

garbage, but which he didn’t really need. For example all those maga-zines he had just piled up. Did he ever look through them? He fetchedtwo cardboard boxes that were roaming about in his hallway andheaved the magazines into one of the boxes. He pondered whether tothrow away his plants or to try to water them and see if they wouldcome around. No, what the hell, the plants were like that postcard tohis mother. They made him aware of his conscience, feeling guilty of notbeing truly social, of not taking care of his companions. The plantscould be thrown away in a plastic bag.

At his feet lay a used roll of film, yellow with black words on it. Hetook it between his thumb and index finger and held it up to his eye likean opera glass. He tried to remember when he had taken the pictures – they could only be from a vacation. Fred never took photos exceptwhen he was away from home. It was simply part of the vacation concept. Perhaps they were from his sojourn in Spain, when he hadwritten that postcard to his mother.

‘I know you are in there, wound up minuscule witnesses of my daysa b road. I wonder if I am in there myself, smiling my camera smile to myself. Me, as a two-dimensional confirmation of my own acts in the past. Yuck, what nonsense.’ Fred straightened his shoulders and then stepping on a chair, tightening the belt of his bathrobe, lifting his left arm high in the air – his fingers almost touching the low ceiling – he proclaimed theatrically: ‘I think, there f o re I am here and now, I thinkt h e re f o re I live in the present, there f o re I now throw away these silentwitnesses of my past self. They are nothing but an exterior extension ofmy memory and when I get rid of these, I’ll make space for more futureby removing the past! And that is what you should be concentrating onwhile cleaning your house: the future, my dear audience, the future ! ’With an elegant gesture Fred threw the roll of film in the direction of thegarbage bag in which it landed soundlessly. He then bowed three times,once to the right, then to the left, then to the middle and happily hestepped down from his chair. That was a good statement. Indeed, hes h o u l d n ’t concentrate on the sentimental value of the stuff in his home,but on a bright and clean future. A positive attitude towards tomorro w.He always had to remind himself of the importance of this attitude,

pressed to his ear to the window and looked outside. The boxes werestill there.

‘Fred?’ ‘Yes.’‘Was there something else?’‘Well, I would like to see you, but if you don’t want to see me, at least

I have your lighter.’Marina laughed, ‘You’re crazy Fred.’‘But, you know, it is quite nice how this little plastic object suddenly

gave me the feeling that you were very close, like around the corner, asif you were on your way up here.’

‘Fred you’re fooling yourself, really, you’re just fooling yourself.’‘Hmm, well, it does. When I look at this little pink lighter, I somehow

see you. I do. I really do.’‘Good, I am happy that I am so easily replaceable. Fred I am going to

hang up now, okay?’‘Okay.’‘See you later Fred.’‘See you. Bye.’He hung up and stared at the lighter. He remembered Marina had

a little, sand-coloured purse from which she had taken the lighter. Hehad been sitting, with practised nonchalance, on the armrest of the sofa.She gave him a light, before she lit her own cigarette. Her skirt was shortand when she sat down it showed the narrow line of the dark upperlimit of her stockings. Her black eyelashes were heavy, which gave hera languorous look. It made him feel a little insecure. He couldn’t figureout if she felt indifferent, bored or if she desired him. He had not daredto believe in this last possibility and now he believed that this had beenhis biggest mistake. It was the first time in months that he had thoughtof her that intensely. As long as he kept this little lighter she wouldsomehow remain his. He just had to look at it, to remember her perfume. It didn’t matter if it happened in the past, as long as he couldexperience this memory so intensely he could keep her close to him.

Suddenly he got up, walked to the corridor, ran down the stairs andopened the front door. His boxes were still there, looking somewhat

he vacuumed from the outside to the middle of the room by making thesquares indicated by his walls smaller and smaller, leaving an Egyptian-looking, geometrically combed pattern in his carpet. The surface of thecarpet changed drastically, blooming with a deep burgundy wine colourunder the systematic caress of his vacuum cleaner. When he broughtback the apparatus to the hallway closet, the relief of his footprintsbecame visible in the combed carpet, which made Fred think of the firststeps on the moon. Contentedly he sat on his couch and took a cigarettefrom his pack. He still had the little pink lighter. It was one of the fewobjects that he had not thrown away. While smoking his cigarette hekept turning the lighter over in his hand, thinking of Marina. Why notgive her a call? Yes, why not? He found her phone number in his mobilephone and pushed the calling button. Before the first ring had ended sheanswered.

‘Hello’. ‘Hey Marina. I found your little lighter.’‘My what?’‘Your lighter, the pink one.’‘What?’‘Your lighter... to light cigarettes.’‘What kind? Just a normal plastic one?’‘Yes, a small pink one.’‘Is this your reason for calling me, Fred?’‘Well, I was cleaning and the first thing I found was your lighter,

which made me think of you. And I thought you might wanna have itback.’

‘What? Fred, I don’t care about that lighter! If you want to speak tome, you can just tell me. You don’t need the lighter as an excuse.’

‘But I found it this morning.’‘Well, I don’t care about that lighter and whether or not you found it.’‘So, it doesn’t make any sense to call you at all, even if I hadn’t found

the lighter?’‘Yes, that’s right.’Fred was silent. He was thinking of the boxes of things he had put on

the sidewalk in front of his house. He walked with the cell phone

unstable in the crooked pile, exactly the way he had left them about anhour ago. Obviously no one had shown any interest in them and thatwas good, because these things belonged to him. He took them one byone and placed them inside the little hallway, just behind the front door.He even took the garbage bags back in. No way would he throw anything out. His past was hiding, well conserved in these things. Andwhat did he consist of without his very own personal past? Never againwould he throw anything away. Never!

fluid dynamics.

Before her death it was David’s, and before his, it

was Lorne’s; Michael (a flaming queen), a couple daysearlier... I used to borrow Ricky’s leather jacket:

now I’ve inherited it; Danny, Andrew, Tessa, Teddy,

Sam (we called him ‘Daddy’); our list was endless.

The funeral Alan prepared for himself was particularly

riveting (made me think that I, too, should haveGregorian chants and naked people carrying lit white

candles, solemnly and in step when my death-time

comes).

13≠

learning how to be [me]. First riddle of the seven sphinxes:

what does ‘visual culture’ mean to a blind person?

Answer: that which lies in the elsewhere of representation,

gaze, spectacle. We might wish to call this ‘elsewhere’ a matter of installation; ie, a matter of installing into

a singular-zap-instant: a memory, an event, a signature

[including one’s own signature], the multiple criss-

crossed dimensions of a curved time (one could say

‘duration’) which becomes ‘recognisable’ in the economyof its being there/being here/being with. We might want

to call this vision an acoustic; its being made manifest:

a p o e t i c (though one ripped away from its Nichomachean

ethics and other Aristotelian moorings of what usually

passes for the sacred or the profane). Perhaps what we are searching for, blindly or otherwise, is a kind of

poetic whose techne resembles more closely a queer

kind of recipe of the literal, the elemental, the periodic

chemical, the mimetic – one shot through with a

‘something else’ (say the sensuousness of its smell, taste, voice, touch). A different sense of time: perhaps

a ‘cooking time’ or even a ‘toxic time’ (for cooking need

not produce something healthy for it to ‘work’). Maybe

it just boils down to a question of seeing with one’s ears,

hearing with one’s pulse, smelling with one’s eyes, andetc. Or maybe it’s just a plea to take seriously habeas

corpus, ‘there shall be the body’, for any and all forms of

truth games to occur.

14≠

re-cycled pride (learning how to be [me]). Second riddle of the seven sphinxes:

what lies between the supposed rarefied air of genius

and the ready-made unity of ‘common’ sense? The ambitious (social) climber thinks of bridges to

their hilltops, and answers: networking! making a

name! But perhaps the answer is closer to a dose of

wilful conceit and its maligned offspring: doubt and

experimentation. (But then this arrogance requires acertain kind of faith, a certain kind of compulsion,

a certain kind of certainty, say about one’s own ability

to know [the whatever] whilst simultaneously accepting

that one must take the leap ‘out there’ for no other

reason than that it must be done [now]). A strange kindof juridical move, this oddly disciplined sense of self,

this mastering of several-selves without implanting

a singular self as master; a risk-taking without dwelling

for an instant on the possible disasters of what might

happen ‘if’ the knowing might have been gatheredfrom a whole series of misguided judgements or

parochial rumours or community standards. A certain

kind of conceit, this kind of faith; Kierkegaard might

call it: a certain kind of trembling.

15≠

the importance of a particular compulsion.

Let’s say the poetics of trembling involves the directo-

rial voice of both bearing and saying ‘yes’, a ‘yes’ sayingof the me-selves and the we-selves and the they-selves,

tattooed neatly within the parentheses of one’s own

flesh, history, habit, humour. A kind of dynamic carnal

knowledge without the dialectical and etc. end-game

of Eden or its apples or attendant serpents, angels or God. But if faith, curiosity, experimentation, work

of art, politics, aesthetics, ethics of comportment and

so on are to side-step an inherent messianism or even

a quasi-messianism which otherwise must be admitted

to our pleasant little game of truth, then perhaps thefollowing helpful rules of the game should be kept

in mind: ‘don’t look down and don’t look back.’ Para-

d o x i c a l l y, of course, should you follow that uncond i t i o n a l

rhythm of the beat, you may end up ruminating without

memory, experimenting without doubt, installing without the intensity of a compulsive stylistics; or,

to re-work an old phrase: you may be forced to repeat

the grinning nightmares of history, patched this

time (simultaneously) as tragedy, farce, and sterilised

violation. (but now we have secretly sneaked in anotherway to speak of carnal knowledge, without ridding

the picture of its moral imperative!) A risk if ever there

was one.

16≠

the cool factor.

Vanity, says Nietzsche, is the skin of the soul. Lies,

a mark of imagination or even cunning, and if done

in the absence of wilful deceit, a matter of supposed

innocence. But what of the cool factor: that ‘unsayable

something’ which gives off a kind of confidence orstyle of knowing (the whatever). Despite its call to

a basic form of signature, law or event, its statement

is that of paradoxical inhabitation: the inhabiting of

detachment, etched with dry wit, relaxation, sensuous

uncaring and the temperate codes of stuttering as a kind of fashion sense. Dare to say it has little to do

with Religion, Politics, or Art and has a whole lot more

to do with confronting and accepting head-on a very

particular impurity and very particular grammar:

that is, the grammatical impurity of the death sentence.A kind of repeatable knowledge that one is going to die

many times in the time span of their mortality, whilst

knowing very well, that one really dies only once.

Here in the parenthesis of time we so nonchalantly call

‘our own life’, history pops up as different dress codes,and one must learn how to use/discard/re-cognise

those codes not unlike yesterday’s T-shirt.

17≠

Digression [or the uses and abuses of kneeling].

Perhaps it is safer to say that faith and trembling have

more to do with the necessity to submit – and not only

that! but to know how and when, without knowingexactly why, and without knowing to whom or even to

what one ‘kneels’! On the other hand, perhaps this kind

of faith has nothing to do with kneeling or any other

form of submission, and I’ve just been carried away

with trying to explain what happens to me when I sniffout the uncharted paths in a manner according to my

custom, especially when night creeps towards day:

the stillness of air! the light! the dew! the quietness of

tone! the possibility of connecting a this with a that!

Perhaps what I am mentioning has only a tiny microslice to do with submission – but I mention it anyway,

for no other reason than that the combination of light

and touch and sound and smell compels me to inhabit

my body differently, now aligned/maligned with a

strange series of curiosities, hungers, expectations,promises, threats. This has very little to do with losing

(or conversely, with finding) ‘my’ self. It’s a peculiar

submission; perhaps even a peculiar mastery – this

gutter-ground gift, this instant eventness of desire and

pleasure and discipline and wandering: this holy placeof the bended knee. (But perhaps now I am confusing

the formal requirements of Philosophy and Art and

Religion with their bastardised cousins, greed, hunger,

curiosity, sloth). It is a delicate game we are playing,

after all.

18≠

beyond good, better, and best.

You find yourself encrusted in a huge game of chess.

What will you do to ensure the Queen or King is

protected, especially if you start off as Pawn of even

as Rook? Maybe you’re already a Queen (or King),

but you’ve been trapped by believing in your own propaganda, or can only think up to move three, and

now have lost all sense of propriety and strategy within

the art of this kind of power/game. Maybe you’ve lost

the entire sense of the game or even of power itself

(not to mention its art) for no other reason than thatyou thought you were playing checkers or bridge.

Perhaps your real status is as Bishop and what moti-

vates your every step is a peevish hunger to change

the status quo’s status to something more desirable,

say a transition toward saintliness, namely, your own.Knights have their own advantage, what with their

declared love for armour, the gallantry of the warrior

horse, and the beauty of its smells. But whatever

position you may occupy on this board, there are

two things that will never enter this game: the faith (or not) in miracles and the importance of trust.

19 ≠



| d r e a m | e m p t y | f u t u r e| [ h a u · z i n ] | h o m e | h o u s e




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|the tired man speaks.

(The tired man speaks… In the last mili-seconds of the‘what does it matter?’, the tired man speaks, wears,

brandishes his/her last speck of individuality, possession,

dignity). Hmmm. Haven’t we heard this somewhere

before, say in some famous man’s remarks about the

ability or not to write poetry after the genocidal stamping out of human identities – as so many singular

beings (identified, too, with the individual group

identity of jew, christian, moslem, gay, mad, whore,

gypsy, ‘other’) were condemned to endure – a collective

headstone of black ash, smoke and dust, which, asAdorno so morbid-eloquently put it, wriggled ever

skywards from the ovens of Auschwitz and elsewhere.

But by saying this, I want to say, also, that to want,

and to know that one wants should not be forgotten

or thrown away as if it were unimportant or begging the question. For those honest enough to admit it, it

remains at the very basis of a new being, poetics, and

indeed, socialised politics.

21≠

old joke revitalised.

Dolly-sheep genetics (not quite) aside, there is now the

(illegal) possibility of cloning humans. So, you arrive

at a party, as the old joke used to go, but now, instead of

worrying whether someone might be wearing the same

bargain basement outfit, they are wearing your body,warts, bad haircut and all. This may not be a problem

for those workaholics who need to have replicants at

their service answering their mail, attending to boring

events, doing the bills, settling old scores. But what if

you don’t quite approve of what the ‘other-yous’ mightbe doing? Or what if they’re having more fun than

you’re having at the moment you voyeuristically or

otherwise watch ‘their’ goings-on? What if there are so

many ‘other-yous’ floating about that you cannot even

keep track of their pathways and actions. What if youforget who the original ‘you’ is. Plato could never have

envisioned this kind of mimesis, not to mention, this

kind of ‘originality’ or ‘copying’. Should we? Would

this constitute a different ‘deadly sin’, say the ‘eighth’

deadly sin? Or is this the first deadly sin of a new codeof ethics, series of timings, multiple happenings, events,

Weltanschauungen? Or should we just side-step the

whole question of sins, times, speeds and world views

altogether? I want to say: ‘Hey there! wait just a minute!

I need some room [time, space] to think! Let me just be![all of the me(s)]!’

20 ≠

. . . : . . / . . 8 . 0 0 w a k e u p c a l l 1 . . n e w s o n t h e r a d i o . . / / . A m e r i c a n b o m b s o n B a g h d a d / . - . . / / 8 . 1 2 w a k e u p c a l l 2 / / . . / / . . / / . .

. w e a t h e r f o r e c a s t / / / t o d a y w i l l b e a s u n n y d a y . . . . . 8 . 2 4 / / / w a k e u p c a l l 3 . . / / C h r i s I s a a c ’ s B a b y c o m e h e r e . / / I t h i n k o f N a s s i m . .

. . . . 8 . 3 0 - - / / r i s i n g u p . . . . . p r e p a r i n g c o f f e e * / / * . g o i n g t o t h e t o i l e t . . _ - . . 8 . 3 5 d r i n k i n g a c u p o f c o f f e e w h i l e l o o k i n g i n m y d i a r y. . .

t o d a y w i l l b e a b u s y d a y i n B r u s s e l s _ _ 8 . 4 5 . / _ d o i n g s o m e e x e r c i s e s . , . . . . _ - . . 9 . 0 0* : / / t a k i n g a s h o w e r, . . . / _ b r u s h i n g t e e t h , . . . .

s h a v i n g . _ 9 . 1 5 . . d r e s s i n g u p f o r t h e d a y , s h a l l I c h o o s e t h e r e d o r t h e b l u e T- s h i r t ? . . _ _ 9 . 2 5 l e a v i n g m y h o m e _

. . 2 1 . 2 5 . > > a r r i v i n g h o m e , t a k i n g o f f m y s h o e s > > l y i n g o n m y j u d o m a t f o r f i v e m i n u t e s , l i s t e n i n g t o t h e r a d i o . . / / / / . . _ 2 1 . 4 5

. _ p r e p a r i n g p a s t a w i t h s a l m o n a n d t o m a t o e s / / / 2 2 . 0 0 / ’’ / - - - - - / / e n j o y i n g d i n n e r o n t h e t e r r a c e l o o k i n g a t t h e b o a t s p a s s i n g b y. . .

o n t h e r i v e r - . . . _ - 2 2 . 3 0 . . _ - _ d o i n g t h e d i s h e s . ) ) . 2 2 . 4 0 ) . l e a v i n g h o m e f o r a l i t t l e w a l k o n t h e r i v e r s i d e , , , , i t ’ s a l m o s t f u l l

. _ - - m o o n _ _ _ - 2 3 . 0 0 . _ / / - . _ - c o m i n g h o m e a g a i n - . . . _ - 2 3 . 0 5 s i t t i n g o n t h e t e r r a c e w i t h a g l a s s o f r e d w i n e : : : r e a d i n g a b o o k _

. . . . . . . . 0 . 2 0 . . _ g o i n g t o b e d . . . . . . . . ) ) . . . . . ) ) . . . . ; ’ ; ’ . ) ) . / / . . . . . _ - - . . . _ - - - - - / / / . . . . . _ - - . . . _ - - / / / - - - / d r e a m i n g o f b e i n g I c a r o s . . . . . _ - -







the cunning of democracy.

Amongst all this dolly-sheep business, and quite distinct

from the elemental fascist rules of a massification-game,

it would seem possible, indeed probable, that a some-

thing ‘new’ or a something ‘else’, perhaps even a some-thing ‘better’, is being invented, born, repeated.

(The spoiled child speaks, unwilling to accept the fascist

game as the only game of a massified life left for us to

play). One dreams here of, say, democracy with echoes

of the old plea/command to change the subject (or atleast to recognise there might be some other agenda

at play), especially if the people who are suggesting ‘it

cannot be otherwise’ just happen to be in positions of

power.

22≠

playing with fire (illusion).

One must learn the tools of one’s trade. Is it so difficult

to surmise from this declaration that if the tools are infinitely complex, multiple, layered, or even (indeed,

especially) ‘deadly’, then they must be ‘handled with

care’? A certain coolness, a certain detachment, a certain

humour, a certain respect for their toxicity is in order,

is required, demanded. There is no room for conceptslike ‘morality’, not to mention ‘the lack’ or ‘the excess’

(though they seem always to creep in, by the by). These

bug-bears work off a particular use of contradiction and

negation to underscore and value ‘difference’, ‘identity’,

plurality’, ‘meaning’, ‘truth’, ‘relation’, ‘the visual’. In the metaphysics of this move, one falls prey to the now

infamous ‘excluded middle’, which, in its wake, is filled

with the aforementioned excesses and lacks, self and

Others, spectacles, gazes, and etcetera. But if we take

seriously the tools of our trade, then the only entity ableto fill this aporia (and in so doing, make mockery of it)

is life itself. Toxic to the extreme, a violent kind of

graphic mutilated fleeting ‘ready-made’ projection,

neither excess nor lack inhabiting (if only for an instant)

its ‘being here’. Perhaps I want to rewrite this ‘event’ asviolence; its projection: memory; its fleeting recognition:

installation; its very existence: a stylistics. Its dynamic:

a politics, an a-radical, strategic, politics, gently (or

otherwise) renamed: poetics. But take care! For inhabiting

this poetic, where metaphysics bumps up, over, into andalongside its variegated technologies; where history

gains a whole new lease on life; where identity gives

way to signatures and copies; where speed and distance

overtakes time and, indeed, becomes it, there’s always

the risk, indeed, the probability, that you will get burned,and burned alive.

24≠

discursive whoring:

Tell all, reveal nothing (perverted Heideggerianism).

23≠

h o u s i n g

proceeding #2

proceeding is a series of publications published at irregular intervals by the Jan van Eyck Academie.

Editor: Lieven De Boeck

Copy editor: Joyce GogginDesign: Ralph BauerDrawings: *. LaBTranslator: Panorama, Dorrie Tattersall Production: Jo FrenkenPrint: Drukkerij Rosbeek BV, NuthBinder: Handboekbinderij Mathieu Geertsen,Nijmegen

© 2003 The authors, Jan van Eyck Academie

ISBN: 90-72076-22-2

Special thanks to: Nassim Berouag, Gam Boden -hausen, Koen Brams, Vicky Carolan, Paul Casaer,Xaveer De Geyter, Jo Frenken, this Group, SuchanKinoshita, Winnie Koekelbergh, Aglaia Konrad,John Murphy, Laurens Schumacher, Filiep Tacq,Kim Thehu, Dorien van der Wiel, Simone vanDyken

Lieven De Boeck: [email protected] Loontjens: [email protected] Bauer: [email protected] golding: [email protected]

*. LaB is a collaboration between Lieven De Boeck and Jurgen Vanderdonckt. This publication also includes contributions from Roeland Dudal and Jeroen Bekaert.

Jan van Eyck AcademieAcademieplein 16211 KM MaastrichtNetherlands

[email protected]

re-learning how to fly (same, but different).

Well, if it is true that the age into which we have

flung ourselves (or have been flung) – this age we so

euphemistically call ‘the information age’ or ‘age of (supposedly) new technologies’ – if it is true that

this age is able to re-write the event, the signature,

indeed laws around nationhood, societies, bodies,

ethics, ‘truth’ into a whole new massification economy,

a whole new ‘end-game-now-as-mid-game’ of warfare or history or politics or philosophy or art (and all other

modernist narratives of science and of life); if it is

true that this post-post-modern predicament of ours

produces and continues to produce, invent and accept

violent poverty, violent extremes in living standards,knowledge and access to power (and the expediential

rate at which these extremes seem to be proliferating);

if it is true that this post-post modern dispersion of

particalised-/ wave-lengths of power, micro-powers /

multiply-dimensioned and libidinal bandwidths of power, and the regularities to which new types of

power relations are made to ‘stick’ in a way that rips

through our bodies and plays itself out as if the Eternal

Return of Night of the Living Dead; if it is true that our

post-post modern world S T I L L seems to be producingfascist agendas left, right and centred, or vacant

identities crushed by instrumentalised reason and all

its related paraphernalia; if it is true, worst of all, that

we seem always already bent on the sickly path of

bombs over bodies – does not mean that it is doingexactly and precisely this all the time, every time or

– more importantly – that it cannot be otherwise.

I am not dreaming.

25≠

Lieven De Boeck

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