Thursday.

Twilight.

St Kilda Road, alive with the freedom and madness of rush hour. Pedestrians,
anticipating being home or prematurely celebrating the weekend, actively forget the
travails of their recent past the daily grind of their own presences and presentness.

Each passer-by hurries, harrying hither and thither, as four blue-coated, cream pant
cladded figures armed with white umbrellas and resplendent skivvys eerily cross
back and forth through the intersection. Like lost resolute ships in the night, are these
damned ghosts from a condemned future (fore)shadowing our present presences
and-/-or our pasts?

A childs gait slows, entranced, asking curious and wondrous questions of their
guardians about Crossings silent phantasmatic spectres rendering the familiar strange.
For the (un)-common sense of Crossings performative logic Being a pedestrian; the
civilizing process1 of merely walking simply from here to there courts a limbo-esque
utopian splace or no place, whereupon negotiating an encounter of others and crossing
intersections, a timelessness somehow beyond the here-and-now knows neither future
nor past.

1T. Ingold, Culture On The Ground The World Perceived Through Feet, Journal of
Material Culture, vol 9, 2004, pp 315-40, cited in J.Urry, Mobilities, 1st Edn, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 2007, p.66.

Within Crossings liminal threshold, (mis)recognition of knowledge and ignorance, an

alterity exteriorizing intimacy and alienation, the accumulative estrangement of
repetition and its affective effects impact upon the enduring immediacy of lifes
everyday reality. With all the time in the world to repeat each of their crossings time
stands still, going nowhere; Crossings becomes a dialectical image of messianic
walking2 and entropy.

From Crossings simple quotidian observation of a prosaic or commonplace ritual

secreted or hidden in plain sight, the energy flow of the streets vibrations ripples
transfigured and-/-or transformed. These uncanny presences delightfully bemuse,
perplex and bewilder as a revelation of the emplacement we are subject when
negotiating the social fabric of urbanity, and those ebbs and flows imposed from
within and without including their transgressions.

As if stepping machines3, we pedestrians take for granted Baudelaires insight that

when crossing amidst the chaos of (post-)modern urbanity, t-/-here is death galloping
at me from every side4. These our crossings consume and unconsciously
2Crossings performative provocations approach a transgressive utopian project.
Within the ruins of neo-liberalism Crossings evokes Walter Benjamins dialectical
image through a temporal [Messianic] arrest in which the dreamlike illusion of
historical progress is shattered, and revealed as the hell of repetition. As the trash of
history small pieces of historical experience otherwise dismissed as insignificant,
beneath attention, unassimiable dismissed as immemorable, worthless, as not
candidates for meaning and a "unique site marking the interruption of the truly
heterogeneous into the continuum of repetition, might Crossings redeem hope for the
lost ur-phenomena of the flaneur and flanerie. M.Pensky Method and Time:
Benjamins Dialectical Images in D.Ferris ed., The Cambridge Guide to Walter
Benjamin 1st Edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p.191-4.
3Urry, loc. cit.
4Urry, op. cit, p.68. C. Baudelaire Lost Halo Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown Conneticut, 2009, p.88, cited in M.Berman
The Mire of the Macadam All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of
Modernity Verso, London, 1983, p.156 &159.

transcend, sublate or negate deaths shadow. For, might not crossing intersections
court defiance? ie. the defying of death; a gateway to a temporal immortality?

The everyday or quotidian performance of Crossings, as a mobilization of our

common death-defying corporeality, hazards the street is a parade ground, whose
procession expresses concrete lived experience, and an awakening from urbanitys
abstracted dream reality, unto nightmarish profane illuminations that we are indeed
hauntological - dead ghosts5. For within Crossings formal utilitarian uniformity, these
figures comfort and intimidate as though memento mori. Irrespective of whether
urban guardian angels or grim reapers themselves, Crossings seductive solace
manifested itself within a besuited man, whose temerity inspired mirroring one of the
figures prone body upon a traffic island. Another passer-by enquired, concerned,
until a selfie the post-modern eternal equivalent to Benjamins ruffle on a dress6
allayed fears. It was this entrancing enactment of emplacement and the strange
uncanny familiarity of a bin-cast umbrella, that Crossings, as a research enquiry,
proposes that those deaf and dead amongst us might listen still at least figuratively
speaking.

5Richard Wolin approaches Walter Benjamins profane illumination as capturing

the powers of spiritual intoxication in order to produce a revelation, a vision or
insight which transcends the prosaic state of empirical reality; yet it produces the
vision in an immanent manner, while remaining within the bounds of possible
experience the most seemingly commonplace locations and objects, are
transformed into a phantasmagorical wonderland of chance encounters and surprise,
where the monotony of convention is burst asunder by the powers of lhasard [sic]
objectif [objective, chance, coincidence or unpredictability] After traversing these
enchanted landscapes, could life ever again be experienced with the same
complacency and indolence as before? . R.Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of
Redemption, 2nd edn, University of California, Berkeley, 1994, p.132.
6ibid., p.130.