Questions, more information, and the pursuit of truth, through different readings, echo to fill these spaces. Fiction is not allowed in – and if it does enter, it enters via wandering thoughts upon hearing someone pulling on their zipper, or the sound of a phone ringing in a near-by room. You wonder if all the rooms on this floor are identical and are also void of anything on the walls – I’m sorry, could you repeat the question? – you ask this but you’re really focusing on how muffled the pacing footsteps sound on this carpet.
This carpet. Wow, it’s so hideous. If there is anyone who would know what is hideous and what isn’t in the carpet world, it’s me. You know I first started out cleaning carpets before I got promoted to selling them – my family is in the carpet business. We shipped all over the old world – loop pile, cut pile, cut & loop pile, hand-tufted, wool, silk… but no, not this carpet. This is some synthetic over-scaled sandpaper. And there are just certain things that should not even be made to last this long. So if there’s anyone who is to be interrogated in this building, it should be the person responsible for having chosen this carpet. Some may think that the real criminal is the person who designed it but I say ‘Nay, it is he who ordered it to be made this way who should be up for questioning’. My theatre play, The Carpet Designer from Galati who stood Trial, is interrupted when a woman’s voice, speaking over a man’s voice, speaks to me in my own language and says: “We want you to say ‘yes’”. I look first at her, she is sitting next to me, head turned towards me. She is beautiful like an angel, how can I say ‘no’. But then I look at the other person across from me, whose utterances sound like choppy waters in this room with horrible carpet. And then I look down, at their shoes, and notice that the carpet is actually just Velcro laid down tiles of carpet. How ironic. So my chair is the only furniture in this room bolted to the ground but the carpet could be easily pulled up at any time.
Room 61B. This room, this place, has become permanent both in its function and choice of decor, but this was not un-intentional by the designer, builder, city-planner. Forget the notion that demand determines supply. Here it is the inverse, where the supply of endless identical rooms, perpetually wanting to be filled, deems it necessary to create the demand to fill them, push-demand as it’s referred to in supply-chain strategy – ‘of course I need you’
Our failed furniture as seen from the future: Where personal space and field of vision are configured from bolted down chairs and fixed furniture is considered a happy development. Waiting room art is a boat at sea, a man on a horse or simply, soap on a rope.
While in our youth, one could re-arrange their room, their house, their desk, and one could hide (wanting to be found), however now everything is locked in place: the almost-out-of-ink pen is chained to the counter and all the plants have been cast in polymer. We’ve been told these changes are for the better; more efficient, less waste, more freedoms elsewhere, but the disposition and specific placement of the woman sitting on the other side of this glass wall, and the fact that I can only communicate with her by bending down to speak through nine carefully drilled holes that look like a rain-spout, attest to a reality that the job-position filled by her, is more permanent, and longer lasting, than perhaps even her breathing, tender life.
‘Can I go home now?’
R.Carey
