The Topography of Tears is a visual investigation of tears photographed through an optical, standard light microscope, a vintage Zeiss from the late 1970's, mounted with a digital microscopy camera.
Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited. Shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.
Radić's texts are almost always assemblages of several pieces or paragraphs that, although written by an architect, do not attempt to refer to a particular project or work (and if they do, it is always laterally, avoiding explanations of the how and the why, or demonstrations and apologies).
Like notes from a fragmentary diary or a review of a collection of memories, at times they share the melancholy tone of the writings by Aldo Rossi and at other times they recall the obscure density of John Hejduk's poems.
There are places I will never go. Due to laziness or boredom, or premature fatigue. But there are also landscapes or buildings I should have visited a long time ago. This text reviews those possible places. All of them are part of my story, and they are places I am familiar with in one way or another.