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Architecture is dust

Rome,


Poem composed on the occasion of the presentation of Cardillo’s House of Dust project in Rome






Poem



Architecture is dust.
Dust that becomes form,
Dust transfigured by the mind.

Dust is memory so dust is also death.
Ancestral memory of death,
Dust refers to the beginnings.

That modernity that disowns sediment,
That shaves walls, that sanitises space;
That modernity that disowns dust,
Disowns even death.

Deprived of memory,
And so slave to a credible youth,
Ignoring its end, it repeats itself;
Without end.

In this house classical orders
And golden proportions celebrate dust:
Angels and choirs have abandoned Heaven,
And Heaven has adorned itself with earth.





Recitato


(voice and music)




House of Dust

Antonino Cardillo, House of Dust, Rome, 2013.






Source
  • Antonino Cardillo, House of Dust, tr. Charles Searson, Rome, May 2013, p. 7.