A man stands on a bridge.
Some people passing by think
he wants to or will jump.
This bothers him, he sits down,
hoping this will make him more invisible.
Actually, he’s not thinking, not at all, about jumping.
He just likes bridges,
and enjoys looking into the water.
He never learned to swim,
and because he never dares to enter the water,
he doesn’t know whether he’d sink or
perhaps be able to swim like a dog.
No one ever taught the dog to swim.
Every day he stops to look down.
It’s satisfying observing the water surface
totally frontal as if
there are only reflections,
no world.

He writes a fairly poetic note on his phone:
‹The reflection is quieter than the world.›
Then walks away.

The next day he returns to the same spot.
without quite knowing why.


I like to look at bridges, reflections,
flowing water, passing birds,
that’s totally normal.
I like to watch soccer, to forget; most
of the time I don’t remember who’s playing against whom, and if
I do know, I forget the colors. Who’s red? Who’s blue?
I like to smell the apartments’ of strangers, the smell
says something about them. I will
also check what books are on their bookshelves,
with the question: do they actually read the books or is it all staged?


It makes me happy we have eleven bridges in town,
I visit each bridge periodically,
some more often than others (the
one in the industrial area is hard to reach).
I was once on an island with no traffic lights,
only traffic circles, I found it fitting. In the family of traffic circles you can also find traffic islands, there’s an affinity there. I assume there are languages where
‹island› and ‹circle› are the same,
one describes the function, the other the form.


I really liked building with sand at the beach when I was a kid,
my playmate always dug tunnels, I built the bridges.
The really big bridges always required a support, a piece of drift wood washed up on the beach from Africa or Cyprus, or something, to have enough load capacity.
If one dug too much under the bridge’s pillar everything would collapse into the abyss or water would rise from the depths to the surface destroying it all. We were kids, we didn’t notice that we were
building our life stories
in the sand.


My childhood friend had a
nervous breakdown when she was twenty-eight,
she never recovered.
I still build bridges.


I don’t really need my living room,
I live alone and have a study, and
basically never have guests over. So I will
use the living room, with the furniture we
arranged together, to build a world of bridges.
Hokusai made a woodblock print
showing a landscape with thousand bridges,
I will recreate it in the furniture landscape of my
living room.


The project consists of the following stages:

1) Detailed drawings of the living room’s landscape from all possible angles. A first examination shows that it will produce twenty-eight or twenty-nine drawings (perhaps twenty-seven is enough).

2) Scanning of the drawings.

3) Dream the bridges into the drawings, here comes an important
rule: The bridges must differ in concept and material from each
other! (Are lists not the poetry of late modernity?)

4) Build, only ever one bridge, carefully,
Process the material, build, assemble, photograph.
Then on to the next.

Two parallel series will come into being; the bridges themselves
and the photo series, in which more and more bridges form the
background for new formations.

Bridges and reflections, the reflection is always
more tranquil than the reality.

He started with the project on the ninth of October, six years later, planned or unplanned, he took the last shot on the same day.
The place you’ll now visit is cleaned daily by our Nano vacuum cleaner so the room will be the exact same it was the day he left town. You’ll find the photographs exhibited in the rest of the house. We assume he’s still alive, in Haiti, but no one’s really sure. The house with the bridgescapes has been given to our museum and city with the condition that no one will ever search for him.