One day Olaf Brzeski was cleaning the chimney of his studio in Wrocław, Poland, when something terrible happened. “A column of soot 10 metres high fell down through the chimney,” he recalls. “It covered everything in the studio. And, of course, me.”
As he stood blinking black dust from his eyes, Brzeski couldn’t even blame someone else. He had unleashed upon himself the weight of the past, brought dark matter to light, unclogged the chimney of all its waste as effectively as a course of colonic irrigation. Freud would have called it the return of the repressed; others might have seen it as soot’s revenge, getting its own back on the humans who had burned its previous incarnations.
