EMPTINESS

ARIANE
It begins like this. A house replete with emptiness. I tell you about it one heat-bursting day in Sao Paulo. The tale of a grey-ghost house locked in the rolling folds of the Shropshire hills - on the other side of the world, in England, 9250 kilometres away.

The Hurst - because this house, like a person, has a forename - dates from the 18th century and was last privately owned by the playwright John Osborne - the infamous angry young man of the 1950s who played an important role in English literature and inspired the founding of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Locked behind its stone walls hewn from the surrounding hills, John's House contains empty rooms which hold nothing now but silence and space - all that had been there and may very well soon be there too...It's a house awaiting a presence - with a staircase, doors and passages ready to guide you from one deep jewel-coloured room to another - rich reds, greens, golds. That's all there is: this present (of) emptiness filled. There's nothing else. Simply a promise to be (t)here.

PATRICIA
I see the images of that incredible house. We don't have houses like this here in Brazil - I mean in terms of the age, the material, the colour and the personality, the sobriety. This house could only exist in England, according to my literary England, which I know through books.

I face a very masculine house - John's House. I think the house has an experience of people: I have an experience of houses. We'll meet in a present time and see what happens. I will only know by being there. The house is empty, so I imagine I'll be able to see it as a whole. It was impossible to do this in the over-filled Chilean house - my grandmother's house - where I worked last year. I had to divide my grandmother's house into different chapters, different thoughts of being there - such a labyrinth it was. A feminine labyrinth.

I arrive at The Hurst. The cold weather is almost unbearable for me. But I trust it must be warmer in a month. I get in this grey house that reveals so many inner colours. Strong ones. Affirmations, even though they are deeply enclosed. I read Gaston Bachelard again, and Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll. I try to understand how to begin...

Strangely, though I feel at home from my very first day at the Hurst. I clean the house, I open the windows, I regularly use the front door. I wander all around the house. I fill the emptiness everyday with walkings, with movement, with displacement.

I don't want to lose this intense quality of emptiness...This absence of everything that it is outside - forest, trees, flowers. Everything, but the shadows.


ARIANE
We talk about emptiness - how in a different place, it has different meanings, different sensations, different resonances. In Japan, emptiness is sheer aesthetic wonder - a revelation of the beauty of space and light. It fills a room, with a wondrous in-be-tween-ness - sheer spacefulness and a sensual architecture for the eye. But in Sao Paulo, Brazil, your city, which is constantly torn to be reborn, emptiness signals destruction. To be empty, is to be demolished - to be a void waiting to be knocked down and replaced by new fullness which empties again, 10 years later. Buildings in your city are caught in a never-ending chain of novelty and reinvention, one sequential emptiness replaced by novelty and fullness of purpose, then emptiness again.

Then there is England. Here, emptiness is full of time - all time, every time. It is the present tense, holding fast the history of the past between four solid walls, whilst awaiting the future - right now, this minute. Emptiness is a house full with possibilities. And so it is here, in John's House, where you are to be immersed in this very peculiar English emptiness, that you come, carrying in your hands an eighteenth century mirror speckled with time, like an inward all-seeing eye with which to look at John's house, roving between fixity on floors and walls...