Chewing Fat

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Cudelice Brazleton IV, Niloufar Emamifar, Cayetano Ferrer, Nikita Gale, Ana Gzirishvili, Jasper Marsalis, Nicole Miller, Becket MWN, Umico Niwa, Lee Relvas, Em Rooney, Sandro Sulaberidze, Leslie Thornton, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Nico B. Young

Organized by Nancy Lupo

But, precisely this slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling atop each other was what, without anybody noticing, was making the construction in the air very heavy: it was getting saturated with itself: getting more compact, instead of getting more fragile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air.

Like a building in which everyone sleeps calmly at night, unaware that the foundations are sagging and that, in an instant unsuggested by the peacefulness, the beams will give way because their cohesive strength is slowly pulling them apart one millimeter per century. And then, when it’s least expected —-in an instant as repetitively common as lifting a drink to a smiling mouth during a dance —-then, yesterday, on a day as full of sunlight as the days at the height of summer, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and a jackhammer shattering stones and children laughing and a priest trying to stop, but stop what? yesterday, without warning, there was a loud sound of something solid that suddenly crumbles.

—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.