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themselves able to find another space for giving theirstories a place. So their stories can be but a cry soevident and undeniable that nobody dares to doubtabout it.It is true. The elevators are urinals, dark stairwells ofgray cement are dealing places, and the entrancesas very complicated gymkhanas where you need apassword to go through safely, otherwise you willhave troubles.But there are also beautiful stories that are told in thesingular and cannot be part of that sad tale of collectivesafeguard, as if they were sharp and dangerousweapons capable of casting a shadow of doubt onthe collective imagery.These are stories of hidden gardens on the fifteenthfloor, cows fitted between a bathroom and a corridor,informal patisseries for wedding and ceremoniesin the neighborhood, home sitting rooms whichwelcome ballroom dancers a few days a month, andmuch more – stories whispered almost wishing toridicule them.However, these rumours are too often spelt outby those who govern these places for ‘memorialsactions’ that are translated in finely crafted books ordocumentaries, made in memory of a demolishedbuilding: a kind of bonus that looks like a gravestone.Instead, these things are said softly by the inhabitants,and we have get used to this whisper to collectthem. Media shout that it is a disaster and thenpoliticians shout promising another new future.These buildings get emptied, stuffed of dynamiteand knocked down in front of everybody. Then, whathappens?During this time between the ‘last second’ and thesecond after, since applauses, since speeches fullof promises, since the festival music and since thetelevision-styled cries that fill the soundscape ofthe pre-explosion, you find yourself in an instant ofsacred silence, still inhabited by the muffled soundleft of the collapse, when the crowd suddenly dismemberedand each one protects a little to cry freelyat home, to see the monster that disappered behindthe dusty smoke that is slowly falling to earth dueto gravity and to make holes in the grid that protectsthe rubble to go to take a facade tile as souvenir.A respectful silence that surrounds the rubble (Sebald,2004) and a slower tempo impose themselvesto the surrounding environment which can no longermove and gesture as before. A very special time, theone which envelops the period after the demolition,a suspended time that allows the image to settlewhere there is now empty and the demolishedbuildings’ great shadows to disappear slowly. Animage which corresponds still for a little time to whatwas, for the inhabitants, while for politicians andplanners it corresponds already theoretically to whatwill happen. A play of images that will never match,where the temporality of both rhythms absolutelynot in the same way the life of the neighbourhood.A ‘between’ which forces to get used to a landscapewhere tons of concrete became rubble, where piecesof everyday life can be glimpsed even in scraps ofwallpaper still stuck to the walls’ remains, but whereyou can not see, or you are not prepared to see, futurehomes and gardens in bloom. A ‘between’ whichsuspends also ourselves from being of that place thatis no longer, but at the same time that is not yet.13