Read Me #4: Relativity on the beach
1. CORRUPT FOLDER
A paper aeroplane has been visibly stuck in a high section of chain-metal draping at the Bibliothèque Francois-Mitterand (the huge brutalist library in southeast Paris) for eight years. “It is impossible to retrieve,” an employee tells Read Me.
2. RICK OWENS THE MEMORIOUS
Wild Memory Radio, my new project in collaboration with WePresent, has been released and is available to visit. You can read my article about it here or just wander straight into an experience that someone lately described as being like “a forest of memories.”
The memories belong to artists — visual artists like Gilbert & George and Ryan Gander; musicians like Nadya Tolokonnikova and Andrew Bird; writers like Ishion Hutchinson and Lisa Taddeo; and other kinds too, like fashion designer Rick Owens and ballet dancer Francesca Hayward. I spoke to them all a few years back, mostly over Zoom calls during the second lockdown. We then condensed the anecdotes into monologues, short audio artefacts, never more than a couple of minutes. Oh, and importantly each memory is attached to a very specific place, whether a Venetian park bench, an Arctic post office or, in the case of astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli, a beach in the South of Italy.
3. SUN, SEA AND SPACETIME
“Condofuri,” says Rovelli. “This is the name of the place. August. The furious heat. The beach. The luminous Mediterranean Sea shining and the dazzling southern sky. The smell of the sea. The softly scraping feel of the warm sand sticking on my arms and legs. And my eyes are immersed in the book I’m studying. It is my General Relativity textbook. I’m studying by myself here in the southernmost tip of continental Italy, the tip of the boot. I came here to study because I do not like to follow university classes. I prefer to study by myself, in books, and the book talks about the curvature of space and time. I’m trying hard to understand, to get it. I raise my eyes to the gleaming still immensity of the waves in front of me, and suddenly I see it. I feel it, like a vision, the curvature of space and time. I get it. My gaze on the nature of reality has been changed, forever.”
4. FOLLOW-UP
READ ME: Which book will you read the next time you are on a beach?
CARLO ROVELLI: