Where the Walls Breathe

We build walls to keep the world out. We paint them to convince ourselves that we are safe, that the color will hold back the heat, the dust, the inevitable passage of time. In the north, we use white to mimic the silence of the frost. Elsewhere, they use blue. It is a color that suggests water, or perhaps the sky, a desperate attempt to bring the infinite down to the level of the street. But color is only a skin. Underneath, the stone remains indifferent. It remembers the hands that laid it, the voices that have long since faded into the mortar. We walk through these narrow veins of stone, believing we are moving forward, yet we are only tracing the outlines of someone else’s solitude. Does the house know who lives inside, or is it merely waiting for the paint to peel, for the blue to return to the grey of the earth?

Kristian Bertel has captured this stillness in his work titled The Blue City. It is a place where the shadows seem to hold more weight than the buildings themselves. Can you hear the silence behind the walls?