© Xavier Ribas - Stones (2000) 6 C-Type prints size 110 x 130 cm. Edition of 6 - PDF
In William Faulkner's book As I Lay Dying, a man sits on his porch, waiting. Made distraught by the storm and a promise he had made in life to his recently deceased wife, the man curses the road that runs right by his doorstep. He sees the road as a threat to the universe of the house, of domesticity and intimacy. He thinks the road shall bring to his doorstep the unknown and the undesired, while at the same time carry away all that the house keeps hidden, of life as well as death: "But it seems hard that a man in his need could be so flounted by a road", exclaims this man locked up in himself, for whom the 'long ways' of the road and everything that needs to be always moving from one place to another is in conflict with the verticality and rooting of trees, of the house and of man. In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes about the poetic image offered by the house's intimate spaces, but he also writes about all spaces that invite us to come out of ourselves, about provisional refuges and occasional shelters. Images of intimacy, he sais, are not just the product of our dreams of rest, but also of the dreams of the man that walks, his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches: "all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home". The stones under the shade of the trees, like the flowers by the side of the road, suggest a presence defined by absence. If the flowers mark a place of separation, of loss and passage, the tree, the stone and the shadow, in contrast, represent a meeting place, a place of recollection, of abiding.
© Xavier Ribas (2000)
