Konferenz

Part of the conference centre site is under construction, creating diversions around hoardings. The diversions are well sign-posted and curve about as if a product of intentional landscaping. Posters on the hoardings, images of the town itself, three miles distant. You are here. You are not here.

Along the pathways the human components move. Purposeful, encumbered by bags or trundling wheeled cases, alone or in groups. In the morning.

Inside the centre, the rooms, the coffee, the awful coffee. Sessions spawning break-out sessions like raiding parties into subdivided rooms, returning with flipcharts, those bloody flipcharts.

The coffee, indigestion. The flipcharts, enervation. The taxi from the airport, indifferent disorientation.

Lunchtime. Two delegates have strayed from the building and have found their way to the station. They look longingly at the shop, with its newspapers, chocolate, fruit juice, basic stationery and distress purchase items. Then they look at the OV-chipkaart gates, open for now but potentially thwarting their path to or from the shop.

Light rain outside, early dusk, the windows of the main hall indigo. Except for one on his feet, the inmates feel the drowsiness of cats. They fiddle fretfully with personal communication devices.

Then the last handouts. Feedback forms. Autumnal shower of exhausted post-it notes.

Release.