The Hub Arcade Food Court
Surely this is a museum piece – diorama of some time in the recent or the conservatively imagined future. Plastic tropical plants luxuriate in the mirrored fluorescence. Perhaps this was to be an experiment: a panopticon of food outlets for the self-moderating narcissist.
This is not an empty space which is evocative of something missing; you don’t hear the sugar-induced hyper-active screaming of children, nor do you envisage large, plump families in tight-fitting tracksuits nosing amongst a litter of various ethnically pastiche foods. No, everything is as it should be, unmoved, unused, on display – a kind of model Food Court that one may see at an international exhibition of Food Courts and Ethnically Pastiche Food Industries.
The pale pink, plastic and mirrored fluorescent ambience does suggest other service industry spaces: hospitals, megaplex cinema’s, retirement homes, modern churches, gaming venues. This is probably what Heaven looks like – an amalgation of semi-essential services, a place where you can take comfort in the knowledge that if you were to drop something on the ground, something you no longer wanted or needed, then it would reliably disappear, be gone the next day, removed forever.
This place exists beyond the burden for change. It is neither life nor death, but the plateau of CLEAN and SAFE (monitored). It is almost as though the protective plastic wrapping has just been removed and everybody is standing around (shredded wrapping unobtrusively being removed from the ground), shaking their heads, wishing they hadn’t removed the wrapping, trying to imagine it as it used to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment