There is a place

There is a place in North West London where time stands still,

and in doing so it allows anyone who decides to stop and breathe and take in their surroundings for a change to feel the ground spin beneath their feet, as the chasm of time, or rather its other side – where everything that’s ever been and can therefore not be again is discarded into memory and perhaps fable and imagination – unravels before their unsuspecting eyes.

It is there, in that reverse, in that fold in time (but also space) where this story – if its ever going to cross that threshold – must be found, like one must find their way tentatively back into their bedroom every night after the house lights have been turned off, fingers running softly on the walls like a Theseus of old following Ariadne’s yarn of wool towards some sort of respite.

This place is a park, and in that park there are five sculptures. Once, they stood there, in the open, for everyone to walk around and in between, to measure up to them and to observe the blueness of the sky shimmer on their resin surface. But now they stand hidden by the veil of normality, of another piece of public art that you no longer register as you go on about minding your own business.

And just like they seem to have been forgotten, so have the lessons we were meant to learn from the events they still bring to the fore – if you look close enough – so vivid they could have happened yesterday, or even worse, tomorrow.

These sculptures – one, two, three, four, five (or rather four plus one, the extra added as an act of reverse self-censorship) – have been there, in my park, for about fifty years, and prior to that they were the sole property of one man.

This man, the sculptor, Fritz, carried them around in his head for an equal amount of time, ever since the images of what he had lived through in his late teens started to come back and reverberate between his ears as he himself returned to a Europe – and to an identity he had left behind – that he could hardly recognise.

This is a story of perseverance and of art-making as an act of defiance and survival in the most uncertain of times, and it’s an attempt to go behind the dark back of time and recover one life, and also about the impossibility of ever doing so.