SPACE BETWEEN CITY AND DWELLING -

SIMULTANEOUS SURFACE

This space or threshold is the surface described above - it is simultaneously the floor of the CITY, the roof of the HOUSE.

The top of the surface above is the facade of the house that faces the public space of the city, it is the floor of the marketplace, and on occasion has been the place where we stood, awaiting the presence of visitors to the city from below, who arrived into crevices left between some houses. If the visitors were welcomed, the ladders were dropped. The surface above me, when seen from above, is a surface with many scattered apertures, and sometimes the plumes of the furnaces rise from them, while at other times, people moving in and out of their houses or shrines slip across the surface, appearing and reappearing. When visiting the various shrines or the house of a fellow city dweller, we rely on our memory of the slightly shifting terrain of the city floor that accommodates the spaces in the layer below, along with the pattern of the crevices of the city entrances, to guide our navigation.

I move in and out between the multiple layers of public and privacy in this house as I slide across and through its surfaces.



M-A. Ray