Sarajevo I

Olympics:

Concrete snakes writhe down the steep mountainside, dropping away, extreme, into the mystery of heavy cloud, emerging again when it clears. We move slow, slower than the design encouraged, so much slower than the bullet vessels that raced to the bottom. It's slow enough to see the pine trees we pass. The branches steam and fizz with rising vapour, yesterday's snow heading back to the sky, like the aroma of a cup of coffee, floating up.

We splash in slushy puddles on the hard track, and laugh about taking pictures of ourselves here - for our mothers' benefits, of course - not our own. The graffiti backdrop to our poses reclaims these abandoned grey superstructures, like colourful flowers growing through the cracks of abandoned houses. You wonder if it was worth it, to build all of this edifice, imprint it upon your landscape forever, for the sake of a day or two of spectacle - when it didn't stop hell from raining down. didn't hold together a brittle peace when it needed to the most? These tracks lie in testament to a particular piece of the past - structures, and a past, that we don't know what do with. It all just sits on the mountainsides and in the valley, remembering and waiting, existing yet hidden, brimming with overcoats of new life, yet statically and monolithically future-less.Weiterlesen