Hall of Windows

“Goddamn what happened to them?!” he blurted as he walked into the room.

Who is he? Who knows? And who cares? He could be anyone.

But them were two pairs of cream leather boots standing upright with balaclavas resting solemnly atop them. They stood there attesting to some sophisticated and fashion-conscious job of spontaneous combustion which destroyed the flesh but took mercy on whatever clothing two scantily clad women were wearing. The cartoonish impression of smoking boots left after an explosion almost invaded his mind until he noticed that the boots looked soft but not too soft[1]. “This couldn’t have happened” he thought, “because who goes around wearing clay boots?”

Once he grabbed hold of his head to stop it from screwing off, it dawned on him just where he had wandered into. This place was no longer on Whitechapel High Street, that’s for sure.

Dimensions of time and space coalesced together here in orgiastic excitement. Every object in this place came from a world of their own, and each world wholly unlike our own. These sumptuously alien artifacts acted as windows through which he could peer into the realms from whence they came and have his mind gripped by marvel, bliss, indifference, disgust, or intoxication. Flowing through this hall of windows was the intermingled air of 46 different vistas which brushed upon his skin like invisible glitter.

In the colours of an adjacent wall a red giant star was burning, and like cold spots upon its surface stood out four objects which looked like a cross between a womb and a control console. Three blue elongated ovals and a jagged green shape had wheat gestating within them at different stages of its production. Hooked up to wires which worm from flesh to machinery, wheat waits in its womb, to be bestowed upon a civilisation like the gift of Prometheus, to lift them like Lazarus out of their tomb.[2]

The materiality of his human body felt unexceptional when held in comparison to the dreamlike beings and residue from spaces incomprehensible inhabiting this room.

A human-unicorn visitor[3] made of a scattering sunset forlornly swinging without its body.

The sheddings[4] of giants – skins, prophylactics, organs – still sticky from whatever metamorphosis they’ve been involved in.

Fragments of faces chipped away from the block of their perpetual mutation watching our humble observer unnerved by a person slicing off bits of their wet face with string.[5]

The resonant sounds of clockwork compelled him to a universe inside a train station-esque dolls house. Through its tiny windows he was mesmerised by feline-avian-humanoid creatures languorously sweeping up the remains of eternity in boundless rooms. There was a palpable sense of utopic belonging not just among the hybrid beings of this night station[6] but across all the figures inhabiting the room. It was a jamboree where the guest of honour was every body at all stages of their existence.

But the festivities did not continue upstairs.

Without a warning he became engulfed in a vengeful cloud of sand where each grain stung him like wasps. A stentorian rumble so low that it vibrated his stomach like a twanged tuning fork was mixed in with the tinkle of watery glass and it pounded in his ears. The financial district of London, usually a frenetic blur of suits was totally deserted, and the wind howled between the skyscrapers a lament so sorrowful that it filled him with unnameable loneliness.

He slapped himself to stop this vulgar scenario from going any further and suddenly found himself in a small room with a dune of sand pleadingly climbing up the wall and the same oscillating low rumble jostling his brain. More perplexing was the gigantic molecule spinning on its own crooked axis above him. Complex and unfriendly, it looked anything but healthy.

Technology bound inextricably to organic matter, and capitalist greed being the underlying[7] cause, society’s downward spiral had finally reached its irreversible nadir.

While the previous room sounded funeral bells, this one gave a wakeup call. Dancing among the warnings, which if left unheeded would lead to unspeakable disaster, were ways to cope and mend.

Three salon chairs sat empty, cradled by a dark blue wall covered with a crowd of photographs showing all manner of hairstyles on exuberant Black women. Passing through that small slice of an afro hair salon he felt the reverberations of an entire community who had sat in those chairs, exchanged snappy gossip, and donned the shield of a wash, cut, and dry against the brutality of the world. [8]

It’s not common to be confronted by any news older than yesterday, yet here were the fossils of newspapers from two years ago accosting him.

At least they looked like newspapers, hundreds of them hanging on a rack to dry, but under scrutiny he noticed them as metal printing plates. These embryonic frontpages were stacked as thick as a Vespa and as tall as our dumbstruck observer.

Documented across these proto-papers was the strange year of 2020 when the world fell to its knees under COVID-19. Accumulated before him wasn’t just a year’s worth of fear and uncertainty but also its disposable by-product which signalled a concerning culture of wanton waste.[9]

He found himself standing in an empty space frozen by stillness when birds started falling out of the sky. Parakeets plummeted to their doom and hit the floor with a heavy thud as if petrified into lead, and by the time the feathers settled 180 dead birds lay at his feet.

His impulse to look up was stifled by the fear of not finding a blue sky[10]. Instead, he looked deep into one of the parakeets’ eyes hoping to find the afterimage of the thing that paralysed them, and there he saw to his horror the collective face of humanity.

[1] Madeleine Pledge (2019)

[2] Rafał Zajko (2020)

[3] Candida Powell-Williams (2022)

[4] Eva Fàbregas (2021)

[5] William Cobbing (2020-21)

[6] Hazel Brill (2020)

[7] Ami Clarke (2019)

[8] Juliana Kasumu (2020)

[9] Eloise Hawser (2020-21)

[10] Patrick Goddard (2019)