Clean lines, white walls,
green tables for ping-pong,
machine precision,
love of less and faultless geometry –
the interior
recalls the Lenin’s Worker’s Club
of Alexandr Rodchenko,
designed a century ago for Paris Exposition,
now featured in the European Union buildings
and bodies:
an assemblage of modular and standard
components
devoid of handcraft and devoid of soul.
The plague of sameness
promises the better conversion rates
but it’s not keeping my sanity.
I’m taking the quirky, the unmodern way
I’m choosing the absence of patterns,
I am choosing the irrational:
I am rooting for carpets and curtains
For frescoes and painted domes,
I waste free hours
Inspecting Brussels’ Hotel Metropole:
I taste the Corinthian columns,
warm furnishings,
Grand piano and paintings, paintings…
the leftover of Horta,
the Belle Epoque’s ghost
in the centre of the Belgian capital.
The concierge is reading aloud
the newspaper:
“The plastic surgeon was murdered yesterday
by the female patient
who was unsatisfied with her new nose”.
I am back to the thoughts
on growing sameness:
The times when human behavior
leads to the inevitable extinction
of people,
The times when human behavior:
what we eat, when we speak, how we live –
is led by the political and commercial
silhouettes
sitting in the white walls,
thinking in clean lines,
using green tables for ping-pong during lunches,
inside the interiors
that recall the Lenin’s Worker’s Club
of Alexandr Rodchenko,
designed a century ago for Paris Exposition,
now featured in the European Union buildings
and bodies.
