“A Description of the World is the World” is a performance piece I’ve written for a gallery show (theme: exploitation) in Berlin in mid-March.  More details on date and time to follow.

A Woman and a Man.  The Man carries a short stool and a laptop.

The Woman kneels down on her hands and knees.  She bends her head down and stares at the ground.

The Man approaches the Woman, sits down on the stool and places the laptop on the her back, then opens it.   He starts writing on it, using the woman as a desk.

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The train pulled into Rome’s Termini station late afternoon on that hot, sticky August day.  It was just after Ferragosto, the Virgin’s ascension day and the third most important Italian holiday.  The arrival into Rome past the crumbling old city walls is not an inspiring one.  The train tracks, overgrown with grass and littered with garbage, are lined with rundown apartment buildings, laundry hanging outside windows open against the heat, and scattered, desolate, overgrown ruins from the Roman Empire.  Rome may be the eternal city, but time has not been kind in its decline and fall.  German train stations are clean, orderly, and impressive while Italian ones are dirty, chaotic, and unimpressive.  Compare Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof and Rome’s Stazioni Termini and you’ll see what I mean.

While stopped at the Brenner pass at 3 am for the changing of the guard, I’d started chatting with a young Italian woman seated across from me.  Valentina, 28, a journalist with black hair and a bright wide smile, spoke a mixture of Italian and English and wrote about calcio, soccer, for a small Roman paper trying to compete with the pink pages of the national Gazetto dello Sport. It was half the price but had only one third the readership.  She joked about working for the second largest sporting news in the capital and about her boyfriend, Ciccio, who was getting too fat to even consider sleeping with.  When girls complain about their boyfriends, which they usually do, they’re either looking for confirmation that they’re still attractive to someone else, or they’re on the hunt for a new boyfriend.  After a few more hours of chatting turned mild flirtation, since I didn’t have an Italian cell number yet, we exchanged email addresses when we arrived at Termini and said we’d get together for caffé and chiacchierata, more chitchat.  But before even thinking about replacing Ciccio, I had to concentrate on finding a place to live…

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