ABSTRACT
Or imagine it like this. A square-sided (15 cm x 15 cm) glass tube one metre long– a hollow and transparent beam, a column of air and light– is suspended horizontally in the art gallery at head height: the height of an average human adult. The tube leads straight to a window, which it pierces by a centimetre or so. A direct opening to the world outside, except the tube is a sort of pretender. You look into it and you see that opening to the outside multiplied like the view inside a kaleidoscope. And the view moves as your eye moves. You put your nose to it and you smell, well… I hardly remember now, but we are in the middle of the Italian city of Naples, one or two floors above street level. You feel the air on your face and you smell from outside what you imagine is there to smell, you smell something of the city or perhaps you don't. And, as you put your ear to the opening at this end, here in the art gallery, listening now to what you can't see, what you hear may well be the voices of the young men in the street below talking around a moped, but what it sounds like is the city itself baffled and captured, as imaginary as it is seductive.
