Almost Anywhere
My room is in Berlin-Marzahn on the Avenue of the Cosmonauts. It is also in the Stalinist skyscraper next to Lermontov Square in Moscow. The entrance of it is somewhat also in Rostock-Evershagen… where I was born. From one window I can see Helsinki and from the other one Tallinn. My yellow wall is the outer wall of the Great Mosque of Djenne in Mali and my other orange wall is the bathroom entrance of Hooters in Las Vegas. My mosquito net is the same as in an airport hostel in Douala-Cameroon. My rotatable armchair stands in the Hilton Garden Inn in Hong Kong and the lamp in the corner is the highlight of a display window of an antique shop in Nuremberg. But my lamp on the ceiling seems more glorious than the chandelier in the Semperoper in Dresden. Only the design of my window blinds — that protect my room from the overly strong heat — remind me that my room is actually in Milan.
Beyond the visual there is more reminiscent of Milan. The Wi-Fi comes from a router just placed outside my room and I can close the door as much as I want, it will always enter. This router comes from a shop just down the street. The air I breathe is an amalgam of the smog from the cars that pass from the Central Station to the eastern outskirts and — (so I hope) — some free and fresh alpine air from the closer north. The electricity that runs through the walls may come from Lake Garda but may also come from Russian or Turkish gas pipelines.
Between these different realities and degrees of imagination, I can almost only be sure that I, myself, am rooted in Milan… isn’t it where I travelled to by train? But even I am full of experiences and memories that constantly resettle me, so that I am left with no other choice than to believe that I am in Milan. But the clothes I choose to wear every day are not from Milan and neither is the water I am drinking. My room is a VPN with a global setting. Whereas I am writing this text in Silicon Valley, if I happen to fall off my chair, I am falling into a forest of linden trees that my floor is made from. Beyond that, the reflection in my mirror would remind me of Chilean salt lake Salar de Uyuni, if I did not have to clean the mirror from my fingerprints again….
Tom Brennecke researches loneliness in his second year as a PhD Candidate at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
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