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Shortly thereafter we witness two cycles of activities, connected with a passage from Friedman where he reflects on the self- sufficiency of cities and how convenient it is for them to be formed of smaller inter-connected villages. First, we see the community of characters rearranging portions of the city, which may be parts of dwellings or whole buildings (incarnated in cardboard panels at a scale a person can handle), or elements for the construction of structures that call to mind real living spaces (cabins) or buildings (frames and trestles for scale models). In other words: the city’s own displacements become its main activity, and also the main figuration of its interminable dynamic. A city’s sole purpose is perpetual mobility. The displacement of fragments, buildings, and whole blocks recalls Michel de Certeau’s remark in L’invention du quotidien: “Dans l’Athènes d’aujourd’hui, les transports en commun s’appellent metaphorai.”4 The toiling of the city dwellers reshuffling the city fragments might be called metaphorical in a literal sense – their city “metaphors” are not evocations of something else based on it, but veritable translocations, displacements. The hustle and bustle of the big city is thereby encapsulated in a choice of emblematic gestures. A while later, the attention of the all-seeing camera seems to be diverted towards a lake. As it carries us along the banks, panning from right to left, we find a group of city dwellers standing in line forming a bucket brigade. One of them fills a bucket with water from the lake, and then pours it into the bucket being held by the next person in line, who pours it into the next person’s bucket, who repeats the operation, and so on and so forth until the water is poured onto a PVC pipe being held by others and through it reaches somebody else’s container. We never get to see the water’s final destination, but we witness how in every transfer a little bit (or perhaps quite a bit) is spilled. Entropy is therefore a factor in this hydrological translocation – in every possible transformation of energy some is irretrievably lost – but the lake holds much more water than may be measured by a bucket, and the city dwellers continue with their activity. Again we wonder whether the indifference of agents/actors is a function of their prior knowledge of the representation involved, since their activity is merely indicative of another, perhaps a simplified rendering of far more complex transport chains; or whether the whole point is to find out how many times the water can change hands, or whom it can reach along the chain, as in a game. Or whether what is being enacted is the spillover, the non-refundable expenditure. At any rate,
4 Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1990, p. 170.
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