I often lean on the balcony to watch the city spread out at my feet.
At my feet, I would prefer to have skis but I don’t say it, not too loudly anyway.
I live in the beautiful world of measure, of compromise: it’s already a chance to see the sky, far from the concrete floor.
The Eiffel Tower and Montmartre are my horizon. I would like to see those as masterpieces of the human adventure and all that crap, but I only see downgraded mountains.
Here it is: in fact, I live in a concentric circle of 26acres from which it is difficult to escape and where everything has to be deciphered: the monuments are one thing, but there are the moods of the people, all those billboards and the exhaust gases.
Sometimes I see birds flying. I don’t know if it’s me, but I have the impression that birds fly faster here than anywhere else, just like humans.
Even on a clear day, I can’t make them out.
They say that in the sky of Paris, you can see grey herons, little egrets and even flycatchers.
Yeah yeah, well, I only see black chevrons painted in big strokes, I wouldn’t care if they were crows.
That’s for sure: here, it’s better to be an art lover than a lover of wide-open spaces.
I’m not complaining, a chevron painted with big strokes in the Paris sky is sometimes as beautiful as a painting: when the sky turns orange, it looks like Japanese prints, and when it turns to rain, it reminds me of a Soulages lithograph.
I often lean on the balcony to watch the city spread out at my feet.
At my feet, I would prefer to have skis but I don’t say it, not too loudly anyway.
What am I complaining about?
If you think about it, being a Parisian is not so far from living at the foot of a mountain.
In Paris more than anywhere else, you can go up very high, down very low, all at a dizzying speed. And, finally, the routes to take are as varied as on a snowy face.
Even if you are 300 miles from the first resort, your daily life is a succession of fucking inverted Vs.
Just like in the white paradise, those who succeed in the city are rarely the same as those who remain in the memories; the legends, drawing for themselves their own line, using a certain form of radicalism.
I’m not one of those who succeed, nor one of those who become a legend, I’m just a guy sitting on his balcony.
At my feet, I see the gray when I would like to see the white. Yet, I can’t see these two colors in opposition to each other, worse, they blend together in my mind.
Am I alone in seeing things this way?
I would so much like to join a community, a collective whose members would be inhabited by a vision of skiing fused with beauty. Together, we would come down from our buildings, from our chalets to enhance our walls with bright colors, to the point of obsession; indifferent to the fact that they are of snow or cement.
text by Johann Pellicot // visuals by Noki Powlonski
