“Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?”
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Waste Land
THE THIRD WALKING BESIDE US
One logic. An imperative stands between the two.
An element that creates a connection in the distance.
Vital, primitive, impersonal, third.
No longer human, more than human.
It is an order which separates.
You from me.
Oneself from another.
The thing, from the voice.
The matter from its name.
The presence and its destination.
One. Two.
A third type the law of dialogue.
The immaterial formula defines what lies between them.
Gives the gauge to measure what separates them
The ineffable sense that might unite them.
One. Two.
In the space between the bodies: a voice? A sound rather, faked, artifactual.
And the ground, waste, artificial. It disjoins them.
And the silence of mute matters disembodied,
And the pregnant waiting that does not know its own beginning.
One. Two.
The space between them stretches.
A code, impersonal, transcribes what happens between them,
investigates the interaction, examines the acceleration, twists the mystery
One. Two.
And a breath disrupts
an unannounced, unpredictable deviation, able to pervert the pattern,
to transgress the measure of “two.”
to break the binary order and make space for the multiple, for the ‘exceeding,
for everything that goes beyond any enumeration.
Can poetic exceptions shatter any given code?
The words of a third. And the empty space between two others
Matrix without source, everlasting movement.
An absence we cannot avoid. It walks beside us.
Stranger to the two the third sets its own rhythm
The landscape is shaped as a lawless order.
The rule of the encounter dissolved into silence.
Before the visible a third, imposes the beat.
Altofest’s dramaturgy emerges through a practice of contemplation. We observe the invisible threads relating the works that most attract our attention. Following the lines that connect the characteristic aesthetics and themes of the selected works, we try to leave space for questions that challenge us and our present.
This text and the title have an open and polysemic nature.
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We conceive them as the opening line of a polylogue, the curtain rising on a shared space of questioning. We invite artists, researchers, citizens and each member of the Altofest’s community to experience the Fest by inhabiting this queries. They will be nourished through presence, lived experience and the viewing of performances, continuing to unfold and enrich the texture of the reflection.