The Structure Breathes, Too

Pergolas mark a space that is at once demarcated and open. A linear roofbeam attached to another building, perhaps a house.
A protective outline where light and shadow play.

We took down the wooden pergola in our yard in the middle of winter, many years ago, to have more light enter the living room.
During Sukkot, we used to seal off the sides of the pergola with colorful summer blankets and thatch the roof – the pergola would instantly turn into a sukkah. In the fall, its roof filled with twisting vines and became an orchard.
The day we took it down, the pergola went back, in ten minutes, to being just a large pile of lines on the grass.

Sometimes, when I enter a building, it seems as if the structure, like all the materials that make it, is changing with me. It opens and closes, is dismantled and rebuilt, trying so hard to appear solid and enduring. But when I go fast up the stairs, its pulse quickens as well.

Tic-Tac-Toe

The sunshade is stretched over my head – a cheap, lightweight sheet of PVC, easily frayed. But its Hebrew name, Shimshonit, refers to Samson and suggests qualities of strength – Shimshonit the hero gives shelter, for a moment, from the threatening sun.
I look at the shape of a circle imprinted on the sunshade. It was made to pass the air, to make sure the plastic sheet does not stretch excessively, to take some pressure off.

A building gets built facing my window. On its ground floor the façade of a new store showed up, still vacant. The windows are covered with white X’s of paint, probably put in by one of the workers. This X alerts us not to step into the glass, reminding us, in spite of its transparency, of its material being.
The glass gives and takes simultaneously. It allows gaze but blocks touch. The glass of a store window brings us closer to the thing we wish to buy, yet at the same time keeps us away. It is generous to the eye, but also harbors a real danger: if I try and go through it, I will be wounded.

Tic-tac-toe is a “solved game” – when both sides play flawlessly the game will reach equilibrium and will always end in a draw.
I, too, put materials, lines and forms through a system of motions, seeking the brief moment of equilibrium joining them together – the draw.

Awaiting the Sun

The sun is everywhere, but not inside the house. Here there is a ceiling above me, and above my ceiling there is someone else’s ceiling. At the end, when the neck is stretched already all the way back, there’s a roof.
The windowpane waits for the morning, then the sun will pass it through, and when I will open the blinds the table will be covered, band by band. Reaching for my cup of coffee, I place a hand within the thin bands of the sun. The floor lozenges now strike me as wider. Little hairs I hadn’t seen before show up. Dust, that I thought I had cleaned already, becomes apparent.

I went outside this week, sat down by a tree and waited for the sun. When it arrived, I immediately got up and went into its shade.
The rays met the branches and filled with them the sidewalk. A green leaf got blinded by the sun and turned white.

Light is a substance that slips between one’s fingers. It aspires to keep on moving, spreading.
Whether it is strong (scorching, demanding, revelatory of details) or soft (blurring, sublimating, flattering), light always brings a change to every material and body it encounters.

Parking

I had a dream about a parking spot. It was beautiful and spacious, the kind you effortlessly glide into. As the dream began I was already in it, leaning back in my seat, relaxing. But then, even though I had already parked, the parking spot was gone. I circled around again, once more watchful and alert. For a second, in the left mirror, the parking spot showed up again. I rushed towards it, but just as I was about to get there it was gone.

A marked parking spot is a rectangular, abstract drawing that expropriates a public space, for definite periods of time, on behalf of a single car.
A white rectangle painted with an assured hand on searing black asphalt. It marks an occupied space.
The parking spot pulsates being and non-being. The existent and the hidden. We search for it, wait for it, grab it.

Occasionally, when I find an empty parking spot in Tel Aviv, I park there for a brief moment, even if I didn’t really plan to stop.

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