There’s something about catching a human being in a moment of pure, unself-conscious grace that makes you realize how much of our lives we spend performing the wrong goddamn play. Ava’s sitting there beneath all that steel and majesty, and the bridge doesn’t give a shit about her and she doesn’t give a shit about the bridge, and somehow that mutual indifference creates this perfect fucking equilibrium.
The thing about Fort Point is that it’s been there watching this city eat itself and reinvent itself and lie about itself for more than 150 years. It’s seen the dreamers and the conmen and the artists and the tech bros, and it just sits there, immovable, honest in a way that people stopped being honest about three decades ago.
And here’s this performer, because that’s what she is, isn’t she?, caught between the machinery of the past and that soaring orange monument to human ambition hanging over her shoulder like some kind of ancient god that traded in sacrifice for Instagram opportunities. But she’s not performing here. Not in this frame. She’s just being, which is the hardest thing any of us ever have to do.
This is the real We Players shit right here: you put a human body in dialogue with space and architecture and history, and if you’re lucky, if you’re really fucking lucky, you capture that split-second when all the artifice falls away and what you’re left with is just the raw fact of existence. One person. One place. One moment that’s already gone.