TIME STICKS TO THE WALLS

As I breathe, as I sleep, as I eat, as I swim, as I shiver - I am haunted. (Pause 1) I am haunted by places and times. (Pause 1) I am haunted by other mes that have refused to stay quietly in the domain of the past and are clinging to memories of corridors, laughter, fear, the deep sadness of a present that slowly sinks into the cold dark swamp of a futureless past. Transitions leave landscapes of abandon. Decommissioned factories, plots of land that have changed ownership several times - from private to public, to private to public, erasing and disorienting the identities of built environments, creating fragmented and traumatic urban landscapes that leave the materiality of spatial infrastructure raw and punctured with the wounds of political and economic abuse. Now that this structured temporality of function is suspended, time sticks to the walls like mud, thick and inert. A concrete floor that flickers through each step, browsing through all possible times, all memories of a place and time, all the memories of joy and abandon. A door that is every door, screeching in all their little haunted voices, a tile cracked like all tiles, a smell of everything and nothing. In the aftermath of a failed concession, a water park in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, abandoned years ago, still looks like it was evacuated yesterday in a panic escape from unknown cataclysm, leaving everything behind scattered around.