cutting down, pulling down

Paul bails the land in the corner of Ellery and Canfield E. street twice every summer. First in May and and second around the beginning of July. Last year he collected 800 stacks of hay.
This year, for some reason, the city decided to bail the land, cutting the hay so thin that couldn’t be collected.

We visited the field to give a helping hand in the bailing process, stacking the hay cubes in a truck and transport them to the barn.
Paul treated us with a cold bottle of beer on our return and we got ourselves talking about the tearing down of the old Ferry Pulbic School.

Built back in 1922, locals claim that the building has been closed for about 12 years but had its roof recently renovated.

It seems insane to pull down a building with such a history to the community, swallowing within every material and equipment locked in the walls of the school.

Though highly risky and illegal, you cannot help but thinking about engaging yourself to the act of rushing in, in the middle of the night and “grab” anything of “value”. And I am not only referring to that side of the romantics trying to withdraw objects as a maintenance of a future historic reference, but more thinking about practicalities, and the amount of resources going to waste during that act.

5.30 this morning Joao visited the location to documentate the workers arriving on spot to continue with the pulling down.
I joined at one and a half hour later to find him recording the interactions on a tool shop around the corner, having as a backdrop sound the roaring of the bulldozers crashing down the metal construction.

To him the whole act was nothing more than a visually portrait on the contradictive co-existence of maintenance and demolition, of hope and despair, of death and resurrection.