Excerpts from
According to the Law - Four Accounts of Humankind
By Solvej Balle
§ 4
Alette V.
Bodies held within a closed system into which energy is introduced will tend towards greater and greater disorder.
(Second law of thermodynamics)
No one who visits Quebec in Canada can fail to note the distinctive quality which the presence of so much metal has lent the town. Quebec is only a few centuries old, but right from the start buildings were constructed with an awareness of how metals change, an awareness that is rare in those parts of the world occupied and developed following the great voyages of discovery. The buildings in these streets possess the refined dignity born of a conscious association with long, slow processes relentlessly controlled by time, air, rain and snow; processes that far surpass the individual human´s powers of observation.
The way the green copper rooftops coloured the light in the town had more than once drawn Alette V. to Ville de Qu,bec in the late spring, when the chill air and the icy wind had lost their edge. The colour of the town´s roofs, statues, telephone lines and drain pipes, of verdigrised copper or bronze, softened the harsh North American light; and, around the harbour, sheets of iron, railway lines and heaps of scrap metal gleamed rust red against mounds of white sand.
Alette V. felt quite at home in most of the large towns in that part of the world inaccurately termed the West. Anyone who has lived in or visited towns such as Bordeaux, Basle, Lübeck, Copenhagen, Adelaide, Quebec or any of the other large towns based on the European model, may have noticed a woman fashioning portrait busts of passers-by for a fee. This was Alette V.
During the day, Alette V. could be found near the museums, or in the big squares. There, surrounded by showcards and plaster models, she turned out reliefs and portrait busts. In the evening she carried the faces her eye had perused in the course of the day back to her current workshop. She spread a layer of plaster over the portrait, melted the wax out of the mould and filled it, instead, with liquid plaster of Paris, before going to bed or out to a nearby caf,, to have a meal. The following day she carried the plaster casts back to her pitch, and during that day they were collected by their owners.
Those people who managed to acquire one of these casts prior to Alette V.´s untimely death are familiar with the strange feeling of first seeing one´s own face surveying a room from a bookcase, a windowsill or a mantelpiece. There is something quite frightening about these doubles, so speedily - and yet accurately - modelled in white plaster, and owners do, on occasion, ask themselves: This hawker with the measuring gaze, was she an artist?
Alette V. would have demurred. She was no artist. She conducted people to the world of things.
It was the turn of the seasons that drove Alette V. from city to city. She sought equilibrium. She sought seasons with enough warmth to keep her hands supple, but cool enough to prevent the wax from melting.
Frequenting these towns - all so alike - appealed to Alette V. She knew their squares, quaysides and harbour areas well enough not to be counted among the tourists, with their roving eyes and wary tread, and yet she was foreign enough, still, to be acknowledged - if she were recognised by the local inhabitants or shopkeepers - as an outsider; a distant acquaintance whose face one might remember, but whose name had long been forgotten.
As a rule, Alette V. took lodgings in vacant lofts, empty warehouses or shops that had closed down, and she wove her way with assurance around the objects in these quarters which served her as both home and workshop. It did not take her many hours to uncover the anatomy of a room. Within a matter of minutes she would have mastered the action required to overcome a stubborn door; assessed the amount of force necessary to unfasten a window´s hinges; or perfected the grip that saved a faulty door handle from continually falling off. Her expert eye soon found hooks and nails - long since painted over - on which to hang her clothes, and a suitable windowsill or ledge on which to set a few essential belongings. She rarely made any repairs and never felt the urge to alter these rooms. She confined herself to picking up some odd pieces of furniture, and within a few days she would be moving among these things with such ease that even the most rickety furniture seemed to regain its stability. She soon adapted to a loose chair seat or the particular pivotal points of a table, and then - in darkness or bright daylight, awake or half-asleep - she could find her way around these things with movements so attuned to their extremities and centres of gravity that she never touched them or disturbed them unnecessarily.
From Solvej Balle: According to the law
Harvill Press 1996
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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