Paris: expectations vs reality
Our world is deeply mediated. Most of our symbolic stimulus comes from various mediated sources where actual origin of information cannot be validated since everything is inherently hypertextual. When you reference some other reference which had referenced something else, the final image we get becomes twisted. An impression which is far from actual object. Thus whatever you delve into, having prejudices usually show up being incorrect, because our expectations are formed via mediated information.
Paris is unique within this phenomena due to the fact of how widespread its mediated appearances are. There are thousands of movies, books, poems, paintings and who knows what more, presenting the romantic image of this iconic city. Prior to arrival a tourist is mesmerized by the aura of all this feast of images, but every XXI century citizen is aware with the fact that what we see in our screens can be extremely different from profound reality.
Knowing that, century old Estonians wanted to see Paris by themselves in order to experience what all this fuzz is about. Edward felt a peculiar vibration here, and with a shake of his spraycan he uncovered deep layers of Estonian art history here. ts seems that his old artistic friend Eduard Wiiralt used to be active in Paris about a hundred years ago, so Edward decided to continue the legacy. Once the sun settled, once the streets got empty, once the sidewalks became home only for wind and silence, he hosted his mysterious ritual of materialization on the walls of Paris.
While meeting his century old artist friends, Edward found out that somewhere beneath the Paris there is a secret Nazi treasure hidden, with golden octopus inside, which is protected by Napoleon himself. These guys looked weird, so it’s better to take this information with a grain of salt, especially after they told a couple of more similar stories. Once the conversation reached its heights, they wanted to make a selfie, but due to outstandingly strong electromagnetic forces Edward posses, they were unable to use any cameras, thus Edward had no other choice but to materialize their moment of joy on the walls of Paris.
Party was great, but now it’s time to manifest the wishes of four old Estonians, who are eager to see this city by themselves for their own reasons.
“What is this city?” silently asked Enn. Her romantic vision of Paris got disturbed by eerie and cryptic atmosphere of nightly streets. Walls and trucks covered with graffiti, dirty corners, thousands of homeless people, narrow and repetitive streets became an unexpected addition to romantic honeymoon she planned to have with Miina.
It’s well known how high is Parisian fashion, thus Maali is proud to present her style to locals. Ats is warming up the crowd with his energetic bagpipe rock, as Maali is preparing for her fashion performance.
It seems that there’s no need for anymore portals, but Edward still can’t close his eyes in front of the inequity Paris presents. Mediated portrait of this city features the lovely side of western civilization, with advanced technology, fancy buildings and all encompassing romance, while real Paris is rotten with flaws of late capitalism and migration crisis. Social and economic division is easily visible. Thus the death started dancing.
A huge alien structure standing as a monument for the french aesthetics and attitude covered the sky with its alien lights and champagne-like sparkles. Edward felt that his mission is finally done. His shadowy body became a cloud-like substance, rose above the city, turned into the beam of light and disappeared into the deep darkness of the night sky.
