IN A WORLD WITHOUT WINDOWS

“Imagine a world without windows”. When I was presented with this challenge of imagination, my mind initially went to the dystopian: a WALL-E-esque world in which the outside was hermetically sealed off from the world that was lived within.

And then, I thought of the small box of vintage Kodachrome 35mm slides sat in my desk drawer, bought from a flea-market in Auckland. I’d been intrigued by them, loose mounds of stranger’s personal histories, windows into other people’s worlds scattered in deep wooden trays.

So I bought a few dozen of them, and brought them back to my flat in Amsterdam. One evening, with this proposition ringing in my mind, I decided to pull them out and turn these tiny windows into a photographic mobile - other people’s memories brought into a new imagining.

In a world without windows

after sight was destroyed

The screen became king

and the famous our god.

The photographs, the memories

The halogen, the LCD

The filmed, the films of fim

The present suddenly ended

when the curtains closed.

And there was only the recollection

in all the blue light reflections

Of green trees and goodness

Of street lamps and sadness.

By Rebecca Took, after ‘In the Green Morning, Now, Once More’ by Delmore Schwartz