How to open a pomelo when you have chapped lips?
2026
Questions called or perceived as useless often serve a purpose other than getting an answer. In this video, we quickly realize that the question will never truly be answered — because the idea is to listen and open a dialogue: a way of thinking, of making one feel, of keeping a conversation going, of shifting meaning toward experience rather than toward the answer itself.
The central tension is that certain questions are called useless precisely because they promise neither immediate application nor a final answer. But that doesn't make them worthless. That's where the video finds another resonance: opening the fruit, placing it in context within a given situation, applying the lip balm — these aren't useful or useless gestures in themselves, but moments where something comes into existence simply by being done. The shift from one subject to another carries us into a different space-time, one that follows the nonlinear thread a conversation tends to have.
Jakub Vrba's attempt to answer my question, posted on the bulletin board at La Fabrique, Université Laval, Québec.