2 years and 1 month ago Milton Glaser asked my fellow classmates and I to write a short but detailed story explaining how we imagined 1 day in our lives to be like in 5 years time. We even had to include what we would eat that day. Interestingly, 20 years would have been too far away and 2 years would have been way too close from what are lives were like at the moment. 5 years was the most challenging amount and that’s probably why Milton decided on this time span. It’s an awesome exercise if one does it seriously and although I did take it seriously, now I think that I was extremely romantic and idealistic about the experiment. Oh well, it’s a fun read 2 years later and now that I only have 3 more years left to reach those 5 years I wonder if I am doing anything at all to push myself towards this direction… Maybe this post is a start? Here’s the whole story:
I wake up early in the morning just outside Bamako, in the capital of Mali in Africa, where I am living alone in a typical Bamako home.
As I shower I play some loud Adria Punti to expand my imagination or a Mozart piano sonata to boost my mathematical and spatial reasoning.
For breakfast I eat a small but varied platter consisting mostly of market and garden fruits. I have been living in Bamako for a year and my French is starting to sound like the African French my neighbors speak to me.
I take my dog for a walk up the hill and breath in the fresh air as I look at the dramatic but peaceful sunrise. I run down the hill with my dog following me, open the wooden gate and grab my bike.
I need to go to the center of town where I am working on a permanent theatrical art performance with the Barcelonian deconstructivist theatre director Calixto Bieito, the Mallorquin abstract painter Miquel Barcelo and the British land-artist Andy Goldsworthy.
We work until the sun sets on a large human sculpture made out of dead trees, massive rocks that feel suspended in air and huge amounts of paint.
Miquel Barcelo, who has already done theater sets for Peter Brook asks me to come up with some sketches inspired on the sculptures by Eduardo Chillida, for the base of our sculpture. I do them as we listen to music by Takagi Masakatsu while we drink local beer and listen to an African township story explained by a wise local friend of Barcelo.
By the end of the night I am exhausted. I pick up my white bike and ride back home, dog by my side. When I get home, I feed him and then feed myself to some Humus, a salad and water. I read some random story on an old Spanish newspaper and go to bed.
1 month ago
