Place: Brenda Lozano
We asked Brenda Lozano to write about an especially intriguing place. She sent us this brief text on her armchair, "the space where daily life gets interrupted and gives rise to fiction."
Versions of the armchair
Photos submitted by author
If I had to choose a place less abstract than a city, I would choose an armchair. I would praise the armchair. Everything that can be done in a horizontal position—the books which can comfortably be read, the time lost online, the conversations that can be had there, the phone calls, the messages sent from there, the cat over a pillow, suddenly yawning. The little planets to which the cat seems to travel when he sleeps. All the places I’ve gotten to know from where I sit on the armchair. Its gravity, its orbit, its stars.
An armchair must have all the necessary characteristics in order to be a Milky Way.
I would choose an armchair because I believe that the space it takes up in the house is like the space Moby Dick takes up in the sea: that place where reality gets detached from time. It’s where we go to watch movies, to read, to talk at length. The space where daily life gets interrupted and gives rise to fiction. I’m interested in that kind of place, the modest margins that are comfortably broken, so that other houses, other cities, and other worlds take place.
It turns out I’ve been away from home and, where I am right now, there’s no armchair, so I’ve had to find versions of the armchair, such that in the feline world, I’d like to think of the armchair as a cat. It’s good to know that there are other kinds of felines.
I’d have to start with the National Library. That lion or that sun, depending on how one sees it, is the center. It opens its door, democratically, to everyone. No matter how far you are from home, everyone, books and people, are welcome.
The couch in the coffee shop at the corner. It doesn’t belong to the formal world of chairs, and neither is it a domestic armchair, but it lends its comfortable support in order to read or work on the computer for brief periods.
The grass from the botanical garden. It doesn’t reach the limits of the bench or the dryness of the rug, but it has its own laws.
Headphones. A simple iPod, austere, screen-less, can isolate you. The headphones mark those boundaries. In the subway station, at the park, at the coffee shop. Music has the capacity of disrupting your sense of time. Walking down an unknown street, listening to music I’m used to listening at home, is somewhat similar to biting an apple and smelling an onion at the same time. The known and the unknown occur simultaneously. Or vice versa. To listen to new music while I walk down the known street. I think that listening to music isolates and disjoints reality. Even if it’s just a few centimeters, barely anything, something gets disjointed. Kind of like what happens with the margins of an armchair.
Walking, with my headphones on, I’ve noticed that a city can have the ways of an armchair. For instance, empty lots. Especially when they’re in between two tall buildings that have active office lives. That space where nothing happens draws one to ask what was there before, what will be there after. Or to ask what could be in that place while grass tufts become uncombed by the air. It’s a space where one’s glance can drift away and imagine.
One fine thing: the narrow space in between two buildings. In between two tall buildings, that space, that flight where there is nothing. A little grass, a little flower. Trash. As one goes through, that minimal gesture interrupts continuity, the functionality of buildings, lending its narrow space to all kinds of speculation. What is a shoe doing right there in the middle?
The armchair and its versions which, I think, are more than one. The spaces that interrupt, that get in the way of functionality, that make up part of daily life, that are there to allow the existence of other things. Like fiction.
Other entries:
[Gabriela Bejerman]
[Eduardo Halfon]
[Pilar Quintana]
[Mercedes Cebrián]
[Wilmer Urrelo Zárate]
[Ronaldo Menéndez]
Versions of the armchair
Photos submitted by author
If I had to choose a place less abstract than a city, I would choose an armchair. I would praise the armchair. Everything that can be done in a horizontal position—the books which can comfortably be read, the time lost online, the conversations that can be had there, the phone calls, the messages sent from there, the cat over a pillow, suddenly yawning. The little planets to which the cat seems to travel when he sleeps. All the places I’ve gotten to know from where I sit on the armchair. Its gravity, its orbit, its stars.
An armchair must have all the necessary characteristics in order to be a Milky Way.
I would choose an armchair because I believe that the space it takes up in the house is like the space Moby Dick takes up in the sea: that place where reality gets detached from time. It’s where we go to watch movies, to read, to talk at length. The space where daily life gets interrupted and gives rise to fiction. I’m interested in that kind of place, the modest margins that are comfortably broken, so that other houses, other cities, and other worlds take place.
It turns out I’ve been away from home and, where I am right now, there’s no armchair, so I’ve had to find versions of the armchair, such that in the feline world, I’d like to think of the armchair as a cat. It’s good to know that there are other kinds of felines.
I’d have to start with the National Library. That lion or that sun, depending on how one sees it, is the center. It opens its door, democratically, to everyone. No matter how far you are from home, everyone, books and people, are welcome.
The couch in the coffee shop at the corner. It doesn’t belong to the formal world of chairs, and neither is it a domestic armchair, but it lends its comfortable support in order to read or work on the computer for brief periods.
The grass from the botanical garden. It doesn’t reach the limits of the bench or the dryness of the rug, but it has its own laws.
Headphones. A simple iPod, austere, screen-less, can isolate you. The headphones mark those boundaries. In the subway station, at the park, at the coffee shop. Music has the capacity of disrupting your sense of time. Walking down an unknown street, listening to music I’m used to listening at home, is somewhat similar to biting an apple and smelling an onion at the same time. The known and the unknown occur simultaneously. Or vice versa. To listen to new music while I walk down the known street. I think that listening to music isolates and disjoints reality. Even if it’s just a few centimeters, barely anything, something gets disjointed. Kind of like what happens with the margins of an armchair.
Walking, with my headphones on, I’ve noticed that a city can have the ways of an armchair. For instance, empty lots. Especially when they’re in between two tall buildings that have active office lives. That space where nothing happens draws one to ask what was there before, what will be there after. Or to ask what could be in that place while grass tufts become uncombed by the air. It’s a space where one’s glance can drift away and imagine.
One fine thing: the narrow space in between two buildings. In between two tall buildings, that space, that flight where there is nothing. A little grass, a little flower. Trash. As one goes through, that minimal gesture interrupts continuity, the functionality of buildings, lending its narrow space to all kinds of speculation. What is a shoe doing right there in the middle?
The armchair and its versions which, I think, are more than one. The spaces that interrupt, that get in the way of functionality, that make up part of daily life, that are there to allow the existence of other things. Like fiction.
Other entries:
[Gabriela Bejerman]
[Eduardo Halfon]
[Pilar Quintana]
[Mercedes Cebrián]
[Wilmer Urrelo Zárate]
[Ronaldo Menéndez]
