Remembering their past lives? Is that what they're doing? The offshore breeze snaps at those tethered pteradactyls they use for kites as if it wanted to cut their taut, umbilical-cord kite-strings and hurl the paper wings out over the horizon. I used to think people wanted to hold on to their souls for dear life, and not risk them in lakeside sport. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe one ought to rid oneself of an upstart soul as quickly as possible and settle down into the quiet life of a marble statue (I remember the Marquis in Alexander Sokurov's brilliant film, Russian Ark (2002), exclaiming in ecstasy before a shining, white Canova, "Mother!...Mother!!").
The people in the photograph at the left are unaware of their souls. They stand in groups or move aimlessly about, traversing the granular, unbreathable spaces of a site as sepulchral as the that of Alain Resnais's claustrophobic film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
