Thursday.

Twilight.

St Kilda Road, alive with the freedom and madness of rush hour. Pedestrians, anticipating being home or prematurely celebrating the weekend, actively forget the travails of their recent past – the daily grind of their own presences and presentness.

Each passer-by hurries, harrying hither and thither, as four blue-coated, cream pant-cladded figures armed with white umbrellas and resplendent skivvies eerily cross back and forth through the intersection. Like lost resolute ships in the night, are these damned ghosts from a condemned future (fore)shadowing our present presences and/or our pasts?

A child’s gait slows, entranced, asking curious and wondrous questions of their guardians about Crossings’ silent phantasmatic spectres rendering the familiar strange. Crossings’ performative logic of the pedestrian – the ‘civilising process’¹ of merely walking from here to there – courts a limbo-esque utopian place/no-place and a timelessness somehow beyond the here-and-now, neither future nor past.

Within Crossings’ liminal threshold, (mis)recognition of knowledge and ignorance, an alterity exteriorising intimacy and alienation, the accumulative estrangement of repetition and its affective effects impact upon the enduring immediacy of life’s everyday reality. With all the time in the world to repeat each of their crossings – time stands still, going nowhere – Crossings becomes a dialectical image of messianic walking² and entropy.

From Crossings’ simple quotidian observation of a prosaic or commonplace ritual secreted or hidden in plain sight, the energy flow of the street’s vibrations ripples transfigured and/or transformed. These uncanny presences delightfully bemuse, perplex and bewilder, as a revelation of the emplacement we are subject to when negotiating the social fabric of urbanity, and those ebbs and flows imposed from within and without – including their transgressions.

Like stepping machines³,we pedestrians take for granted Baudelaire’s insight that when crossing amidst the chaos of (post)modern urbanity, t/here is ‘death galloping at me from every side’⁴. These – our crossings – consume and unconsciously transcend, sublate or negate death’s shadow. For might not crossing intersections court defiance? That is, the defying of death; a gateway to a temporal immortality?

The everyday or quotidian performance of Crossings, as a mobilisation of our common ‘death-defying’ corporeality, hazards the street as a parade ground, whose procession expresses concrete lived experience, and an awakening from urbanity’s abstracted dream reality, unto nightmarish ‘profane illuminations’ that we are indeed hauntological – dead ghosts⁵. For within Crossings’ formal utilitarian uniformity, these figures comfort and intimidate as though memento mori.  Irrespective of urban guardian angels or grim reapers, Crossings’ seductive solace manifested itself within a besuited man, whose temerity inspired mirroring one of the figures’ prone bodies upon a traffic island.  Another passer-by enquired, concerned, until a ‘selfie’ – the post-modern eternal equivalent to Benjamin’s ‘ruffle on a dress’⁶ – allayed fears.  It was this entrancing enactment of emplacement and the strange uncanny familiarity of a bin-cast umbrella that Crossings’, as a research enquiry, proposes that those deaf and dead amongst us might listen still – at least figuratively speaking.