Crescita XI: Urbino March 22 and 23, 2005

We descend a long staircase, are ushered into a room of brick built into the great walls of the hill town of Urbino, then descend along a wide and gentle spiral of the same red brick and told to wait quietly. Everything in Urbino is built of brick so this simple maneuvering disturbs any sense of place or direction, leaving one suspended in the very foundations of this city, perhaps even within the hill itself. It is dark oustide and a single window looks out onto a confusion of black masses and faintly-lit windows punctuating the buildings in the distance. There are fifteen of us standing in silence and cold air.

Our usher signals us forward towards a door that opens into a large chamber with high ceilings. One side of the room is empty and darkened and we find ourselves gathering here, standing and sitting, to look into the clutter that fills the other half of the room. There, half-lit from some obscured point, huddle countless pieces of wooden furniture casting shadows all about:chairs turned upside-down on dressers and desks outline a crazy geometric silhouette. One is reminded of Ionesco's absurdist play ''The New Tenant" in which a pair of movers progressively bring more and more furniture onto the stage, filling every corner of its dimensions with a material presence that swallows all, until that final tiny space reserved for the protagonist is boarded over as well. Here we are the excepted bodies.