Surfaces are spaces of friction, tension and expression. They are the patchy areas between the hard and soft parts of the built environment, between stuff and air, between private solids and public fluids. Surfaces separate and expose, they contain and endure, and they brandish their cracks and colours in public view, often for public access. Classes of surface materials can be read as inventories of building technologies, but they are also objects of expressive interest which made me into a passionate observer and photographer.
Just like derma on living creatures, the skin of the city is deep and multi-layered. It exhibits textural intensities and variations, along with a multitude of exquisite imperfections. City surfaces accumulate paint and colour, creating a palimpsest of testimonies and experiences, but they also shed their fabrics in an unaffected process of self-preservation. Like skin, surfaces develop rifts and intervals, signs of deliberate modelling and trauma, which they continue to flaunt nonchalantly, always prepared for more. The process of looking at signs and inscriptions has led me to notice and discern their surfaces and acquire interest in them as pre-inscribed agents, whose depth and density offered much material for this study, and prolonged opportunity for reflection.
