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“You are waiting for me to start my story. Perhaps I was waiting then. But my story already started –I was only like you, and didn’t know it.”

(Waters, S., Fingersmith, p. 14)

Short story no 203. June 8, 2006.

In Rome I stepped into a work of art. I didn’t notice it until a guard came running after me. She said my ticket wasn’t valid behind the work of art. If I would not come back, I could not return. Ever. I returned. She was making notes while talking to me. Probably by instruction of the artist.
In the afternoon I waited in front of the Keats and Shelley House to meet the curator. We went up the stairs to enter the small museum. He had told me by email that he initiated a project in this museum about storytelling. He had said its collection was excellent to be queered. Next to artists, poets and writers he had invited my friend, the archaeologist. That was an excellent idea as well. Then she could tell stories about sheep herself.

When I met the curator that first time, I didn’t recognise him immediately, but that was correct, because he isn’t a curator —he told me later.

I remember the first time I fictionalized my art. After a partying group had ruined my work outside the exhibition’s opening hours, I had put a note next to my work. It said I considered my work a chain of actions and that this last unexpected action didn’t change the concept of the work, rather reinforced it. Propagandizing indifference towards interpretation of aesthetics —i.e. the choices that I made, and that were now made for me—, the note was of course my way of managing my anger. I wasn’t indifferent at all. The note told people that. I can understand that now, while I'm writing you these stories. I needed fiction to say things I couldn’t say out loud. I need fiction to tell you I love you. But isn’t fiction our only way?

I am writing the curator a love story about my neighbours. I think they are living in a commune. They share a garden I can view from my attic room. Last Sunday one woman was trying to chat up this other woman. While she was using the right smile and arm movements, the other was reluctant to put away her book. To help them a bit I opened my window and played Lorraine Bowen’s Sunday Afternoon Sex. I created the ideal context for me to follow the story. It is like creating a work of art. Either the artist creates the ideal surrounding that gives opportunity to fully experience the work of art, either she/he creates a site-specific work, which can be fully experienced in the already existing environment.
My archaeologist friend thinks art is creating the ideal circumstances for people to meet each other. She finds it remarkable that the actual experience of bad or good, and sweet or horror art doesn’t seem to have any influence on this social aspect. In that way art objects —material or not— are traces of interaction between humans.

In 2304 an archaeologist will work together with an art historian, who researches a series of paintings in the period from 2050 to 2067 that visualises —according to the artists— Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathrustra. The two scientists interpret the traces of art objects they found in the cellar of a governmental art institute (closed down in 2021) not only religiously but also semiotically and call their collaboration historically interdisciplinary.
At the same time their colleague runs a cyber excavation in a small databank that searches for artists’ websites from the beginning of the 21st century, preserves them or restores them with contemporary software. Soon she publishes a new model to interpret material and immaterial art objects from the beginning of the 21st century. She says historical sources has taught her that interpretation of 21st century art only makes sense when one makes links between different works of art, and relate them to economical systems of art in that time. Next to this, she says, she always considers to be set up by the artist.

When I came back from Italy I found again a sheep in my house. I went to the library and borrowed a book on sheep as domestic animals. Dolly II is now happily grazing in my neighbours’ garden.