gallery vertigo

I’ve mentioned before that I live directly above a prominent art gallery; this features prominently in my forthcoming article for Society and Space.

Tonight I dropped by the gallery again to look at their new show on my way upstairs. And suddenly I was struck by a sort of vertigo when confronting a somewhat logical fact that I had never noticed before. The gallery is an exact double of my own apartment.

And of course, it would be. This is the sort of building where all the units stacked on top of one another are exact clones in terms of floor plan. Instead of all the furniture and my other possessions, it’s bare floors and walls covered with fairly upscale works by Egyptian artists. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same, including the kitchen and bathrooms (though one of the latter was converted by the gallery into office space). Even the fireplace is there. Not sure whether mine works, but I wouldn’t want to try.

It’s not too surprising a fact that the places would be identical, then, but the effect was one of vertigo. I felt as if I were visiting my own apartment 20 years in the future after its conversion into a gallery. Or as if I had met someone from a parallel universe who happened to be my own self after vastly different life choices.