Clothes Lines

Abstract

This collaboration, featuring poetry by Christine Wiesenthal and photography by Elena Siemens, connects domestic spaces to the social, public and commercial sphere of the street: to relationships, traffic, gossip, and sundry forms of “dirty laundry.” In his essay on “Naples,” Walter Benjamin states: “Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere” (170). “Buildings and actions,” he explains, “interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations” (169). He adds: “The stamp of the definitive is avoided” (169). This unique characteristic of Naples, its porosity, also surfaces in the “unforeseen constellations” of Wiesenthal’s The Laundry Cycle, and Siemens’ images of Tel Aviv.