In another life, another Aurora and another woman who had just woken up, had a conversation over rich, organic coffee and milk, heavy nut and berry filled scones with jam in a marble kitchen. Later they spoke across distances, through phone lines and computers, from different countries. 
They talked about travelling and displacement - their own (neither lived in the country in which she was born) and their conversation drifted to homelessness in the way that women's conversations often travel, all over the place, covering large swathes of fertile terrain.
 
A • When I was in New York, during the summer, I read in the Brooklyn Daily Star that homeless people in Brooklyn have been getting together for some time now to discuss whether anyone is interested in moving to an island off the east coast, almost on the border with Canada. It seems there’s a philanthropist who wants to buy the island and make it available for them to live on.
 
G • The idea is curious and interesting but it also seems a bit like creating a ghetto...
 
A • At first I thought it was a strange idea too, to isolate homeless people on an island. But the thing is they’d only go there if they wanted to. The newspaper article is very lengthy and interesting. It seems as though the intention is to create sufficient enough infrastructures that they can subsist and that there’d also be possibilities to work part-time, there’d also be access to the internet and television, and there’d be a social center with trained staff, a hospital, and schools for the children etc. A utopian idea, but why not?
 
G • Yes, it's utopian and kind of wonderful on the part of the philanthropist. It's interesting too how your attention was drawn to the article.
 
A• I think I have a kind of complicity with homeless people. Some times I start conversations with them. I once met a homeless man who drew his house every night putting stones on the sidewalk; I mean, he marked the limits of «his house» on the sidewalk and afterwards put cardboard boxes making a kind of mattress where he slept. He was depressed at the time because the girlfriend, with whom he lived in the «house», had left him a month before. I knew someone else who was very interesting, no one would have said he lived in the street, he was always so well dressed, and with style. He went around with a notebook he wrote poems in. He told me that every night when he lay down he loved to look up at the sky and

read more