Hardboiled
Nick D’Alessandro + Yixiao Zhao
I can understand why astronauts find it difficult to readjust to life on earth
August 30 – September 26, 2024

In Hu Fang’s Notes from the Glass House’, he explains his fascination with a story, or rather a “tragicomic reality show”, where fourteen strangers- seven men and seven women— are asked to live in a glass house for one month. Stripped of their previous lives, these participants are lured by the promise of a million-dollar prize and are tested to the utmost vulnerability of humankind. Over time, isolation begins to drag them into despair, and perhaps a great love will spur from thes seemingly transparent, perfectly conditioned wreckage. The show ends with an endless kiss for the lens of the cameras, for the audience, shattering the glass house and screens of their loved ones at home. Almost romantic, always excruciating painful. The noble premise of revealing our truest selves eventually falls into the stereotypical trope of reality TV. As a collective we live for the exposure of privacy, gossips, and word of mouth, indulging in this form of entertainment that extends beyond the personal by placing a filter on our desires.
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The fear, powerful enough to put us all in immobility, is the fear of an ending. We come with expiration dates, and this known secret will forever haunt us as long as our flesh and bones continue to interact. So we become travelers of time, of space, of anything particular enough to make us feel more alive, or less dead. We seek covers, find distractions, collect trinkets, spend days lying in bed trying to build our own glass house, so that one day our linear narrative can overlap with another person’s storyline. Finding oneself can then become finding each other, and we shall share an endless kiss, perhaps even a timeless one.

What I am offering, is a chance to trace back the origin, to the most elementary, almost fundamental form of companionship a listener who will sit beside you, only answering when asked, for minutes, hours, days, months, years, until everything has tumbled out, until there’s no more shivering or trembling.

However, this journey you’re invited to pursue is destined to end. The shades are yet to be drawn, but they will be, and all the sunlight will inevitably come in. Our alliance can only last so long, and the stories will be documented, reproduced, staggered into files. And when that moment comes, you will feel the pain, or ever so slightly wretched, but please do not take this as an act of betrayal-as if I have purposely misled and abandoned you. It’s only goodbye for now. Because everything we do, beyond just two bodies in a room, is all on the record here. Instead of asking if it would last, imagine a foreign timeline where past, present, and future coexist. This intimacy, whether as an observation of being oneself or the performance of being itself, is no fair game. It never was. And that’s perfectly fine. You will leave me with a bit of confusion, and that is the best part of the story.

For the price we pay for connections, and for your worst nightmares, these residues of lived life are evidence that all of them were true, and none of them will be forgotten. Try as we might, they will prevail over us.

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