It vanishes

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At dawn, the world ceases to be what it was the day before. Streets and faces emerge in fragments, like notes of a wider rhythm — repetitive, shifting, on the verge of fading away.

Shreds of landscapes, flashes of light, sleeping faces: in these images taken in China, the world seems suspended between appearance and disappearance. The figure of the circle returns like an echo — in a sign, a window, a fruit, a flower. It weaves connections between things, bodies and cities, moments and time itself.

Time stretches in these moments of latency. A worker sleeps in the shade of a construction site, a waitress rests her eyes between gestures, a passerby drifts into thought. The world seems still, yet continues to turn. Between fatigue, contemplation, and waiting, another image of movement takes shape — one that advances through slowness.

Here, light becomes the matter of silence. Empires rise and dissolve in the brightness of day; productivity dreams of itself. And yet, in these ordinary intervals, something resists the idea of progress. Time folds back, light lingers — and suddenly, everything vanishes.

Everything passes, and perhaps it is within this disappearance that the present reveals itself.

 

“The Chinese have a theory that boredom is the road to fascination.”
— Diane Arbus, quoted by Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977