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Text for Miwa's new "Invisible People" idea[ Miwa put up golden name plaques of all the people who helped set up the show but are not direct participants. Reminiscent of all the Donors plaques stuck all over most buildings in the US, she was motivated in part by this writing of Pessoa. What if instead of thanking God before eating, a family thanked all the people who made the meal possible, from the farmer or cowherd, trucker, shelf stocker. Other humans are what make your life possible. -- Marco ] I'm in a trolley, and, as is my habit, I'm slowly taking notice of the people sitting around me. For me details are things, words, sentences. I take apart the dress worn by the girl in front of me: I turn it into the fabric that makes it up, the work that went into making it - but still I see it as a dress and not cloth - and the light embroidery and the work involved in it. And immediately, as in a primer on political economy, the factories and the labor unfold before me - the factory where the cloth was made, the factory where the twist of silk, darker in tone than the dress, was made, which went into making the twisted little things in the border now in their place next to the neck; and I see the components of the factories, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses, my eyes turned inward penetrate into the offices, I see the managers trying to be calm, I follow, in the books, the accounts involved in it all; but it isn't only that: I see, beyond that, the domestic lives of those who live their social lives in those factories and those offices ... All of them pass before my eyes merely because I have before me, below a dark neck, which on its other side has I don't know what sort of face, a common, irregular green edge on a light green dress. The entire life of society lies before my eyes. Beyond all that I sense the loves, the secret life, the souls of all those who worked so that this woman seated in front of me in the trolley can wear around her neck the sinuous banality of a band of dark green silk on less dark green cloth. I become stupefied. The seats on the trolley, made of tightly woven strong straw, carry me to distant regions and into multiple industries, workers, workers' houses, lives, realities, all. I leave the trolley exhausted and sleepwalking. I just lived an entire life". Fernando Pessoa the Book of Disquiet |