A place empty, with a past gone; memories of machine noises, of cry of joy and whispers of disappointments, echoes of boredom and excitement, of successes and failures. Empty, shell where all happened; where everything and everyone was more, or less, we could imagine. A life of work, regularly purposeful; Lights to store and fix and glue and hammer, bright colors to lighten the mood. Offices space, benign and touching in what’s left of their “make it like home“ attire. Rooms of use unknown, concrete and iron turned anonymous because of their emptiness. Beige and white, neon lights and just a hint of past, a faint echoes of a million steps, in and out. Despite the silence, in the air there is still some energy, low hum left by so many lives passing by; making, creating, fixing. Before the void, one last round;
absurd and abstract, joyful and carefree. An homage, maybe, to all that was, to all who were. A way to inhabit this building, one last time, one final time.

Thursday, studio session to complete a model’s portfolio. Tall, blonde, slender; your archetypal Russian model. Preparation... at dawn, pruning shears in hand, I plunge into a flowery fallow and cut, cut the necks of wild and magnificent flowers. A little later an undergrowth loses some tall herbs and some shrubs a bit of their foliage.

Mirabelle, aka Anna, a bundle of flowers, in her arms, fidgets a little, her eyes narrowed in discomfort.

- “все хорошо? “ Is everything fine ?
- “да да; Все идет хорошо!” Yes, yes...

Well, let’s continue then... Laying on a Pulka (Lappalainen’s) a mile of perfect legs, her expression... focussed. Definitely not that comfortable. Checklist: the temperature is perfect, the decor ad hoc, the clothes, hairstyle and make-up as discussed. Well, maybe it’s one of these days...

All done, thank you! At these words, Anna springs on her feet, pierces me with a blazing blue gaze (® of Russian female archetypes); grabs the huge bouquet of flowers and foliage and throws it violently across the studio.

“I don’t like flowers!!!”
...

Despite a long frequentation of said archetypes, I am slightly taken aback. Until, following her gaze, I realize that the white background is now strewn with insects. Chitin and darts and claws, crawling and flying, and after two hours of close proximity with Anna, well sated.

It was this episode that inspired me for this series.

What’s dark and what’s not. You may think the difference between lights and shadows would speak by itself, I doubt it. We see lights where there is none and darkness under a midday sun. Reality is only as  absolute as we want it to be. Fiction may well be the fabric of your day if you let it unravel. Doubt your reality! Dream of shades and silk, of troubling gaze and dead leaves, of unloved flowers and sparks of red lights.”

I left the last year’ flowers to dry in a box. A box of steel, sealed by heavy doors. A control box of uses unknown guarding it, Bakelite buttons and rusted green pipes hovering above.

The box stand in a space in between, seldom walked; A wooden stair painted teal, hidden in the shadows to access it. Stained doors, yellowing stickers of brands forgotten. On the walls, printed in soot the shape of tools long gone. In the air speckles of concrete dust falling of concrete beans, shine in the sunlight.

Stillness of silenced industry, heavy and airy altogether, as a faint echo of a deafening sound dampened by gone years. A stillness who tells of finality and uncertainty, a prick to our imagination. What is and what was, is there a way to shape the present from a disappeared past ?

Among the flower’s seeds, misplaced by the hand of fate, one, instead of petals and leaves, sprouted skin and smile and wanderlust. Spring in a steel box.

A cut flower is a dead flower; a bit of rather tragic beauty, if you want to think about it.

Cut, or rather mowed in the fields and forests near my house, the flowers used in the “I don’t like flowers” project, after use, were stored in a dry place, in an old paint oven.

From flower to seed, and from seed to flower, this short series celebrates our persistence and the uncertain beauty of past things that we do not want to abandon.