I was reflecting on what I had left behind. I had distanced myself from the past, focusing, as I always do, on the present. It would have been beautiful to stop time in the moments that once were. To freeze space, stories, to halt everything in order to preserve memory.
I came from Palermo, where the sky is cerulean blue and sounds travel with the wind, filling the streets. I carried with me a sense of time that exists only in the tides, never in the seasons, in the pale blue of the morning that becomes a vivid blue, eventually shifting into the dirty gray of the evening. The infinite palette of a single tone.
This changes when you arrive in Oslo, where color frames everyday life. The contrasts are sharp: dark buildings and white snow, a legacy of a time when darkness was adapted to, not fought against. It is a dichotomy that is also found indoors, in homes, in offices, and within RITMO.
Photo: Annica Thomsson
The building that houses RITMO is austere, a gray container for an incredibly colorful content, full of different shapes and details. Everyone inside takes on their own shape, colors it, and becomes part of this infinite space that transcends both concrete and abstract limits, deconstructs geography bringing together seas and lands that once seemed unreachable. The great strength of a community like RITMO lies in its ability to make space for each of its members and to enhance every small and large goal.
During my time there, I saw how an idea takes shape, nourished by the insights of countless people, familiar or unfamiliar, developed and brought to life with almost unnatural ease. For me, a PhD student, it felt like living inside an ideal future. What you want to achieve is clearly visible, along with how you wish it would happen. In my case, the idea was to combine the topic of my doctoral project, sensoriality, with the perception of rhythm, to create something new and evocative that would allow me to understand more deeply both my field of research and the parallel field of groove. Talking about it and sharing the project during the weekly Food&Paper event was an opportunity to receive feedback and suggestions that helped smooth out the rough edges of the initial idea.
Photo: Eirik Slinning Karlsen
The real challenge is having the strength and courage to let go of all of this, and all those gazes you met for months in the large shared space that is RITMO. You have to reckon with many variables; one of them, the most important, is that there is simply too much, entire months of stories that a lifetime is not enough to process. So you convince yourself that the only remedy is to stop trying to freeze time, to accept that there is always a place, somewhere, that continues to hold what we do not have the time to analyze right now, a building that occupies land without permission, defying all regulations. It expands through rooms, furnishings, the paintings on the walls, until you begin to realize that you can no longer even distinguish where the first tile was. But perhaps it no longer matters, at least for now, to know where the beginning is…
Tusen takk Bruno, Alexander, Eirik, Kate, Pedro, Sarah, Tobia, Baptiste, Patrice og alle som gjorde denne reisen til en sublim og kjempefin opplevelse!
