Dreams

On the flip side of the Ruins of São Paulo, right behind the cluster of jam-packed Calçadas fronting the Ruins and the Monte do Forte is a web of small streets where locals of Macau go on about their everyday slow life as if tourists never existed. There unassuming Buddhist temples, Taoist shrines and deity altars have been sitting side by side to each other in everyone's living memory. Small shops and eateries continue to serve regular customers instead of dreaming big money. Seldom will one find selfie mobs pottering about here.

Strolling down Rua de Tomas Vieira, one would come across an intriguing street art on a lumpy wall fringed by the leafy shadows of a tree. Was the random shadows meant to be read as part of the art in flux? Was the slogan a sarcastic remark or a notion of subversion? Was the letterbox an act of intervention or, oh well it obviously belonged to the house next door.

As one reviewed the odyssey of shifting thoughts which had accompanied the photo-taking session one and a half years ago, an almost identical picture showed up in the same album, time-coded 3.44pm and taken on the same day as the main image chosen for this visual token. The differences were subtle and indefinite at most. Perhaps a quiver in one of the leaves, a slight drop in colour temperature and a minor variance in framing. But they are different pictures, no doubt about it.

What had actually happened on that afternoon of photo-shoot? Had the researcher been going around in a loop? Why were two almost identical pictures taken at the same location at two diverse points of time?

Was this a duality of images which suggested the unresolved nature of memories and data? 

Or did it actually capture the exact moment between the known and the unknown? Something we call the magic hour, as day yields to night and darkness resumes its sovereign.

That empty chair in the COD stencil, could it be an invitation instead? An invitation not to go along with the impulse to occupy the unclaimed, but rather, allow the expansiveness of ambiguity to simply speak for itself?