Betraying Gestures #11

a gesture is a gesture in itself

I’ve been staying up late every night and have paper cuts all over my hands. Betraying Gestures is publishing Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry), a text I wrote last year with Aiko Carolina. After the text was edited and reviewed and the publication diagrammed, it was time to sort out the paper, print, cut, punch holes, stitch, and glue. Betraying Gestures is doing an edition of 75 volumes. Being this Betraying Gestures’ newsletter, the newsletter of a publisher that is becoming more and more graphic, I have to write about its projects and announce the launch; but the reason I open this edition with Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry) is that it was with it that I learned the future likes repetition. The sentences that close the text are, "It’s 16:13 here. It’s 22:13 at our destination. The minutes are always the same. Keep looking at your watch, soon you’ll be able to make a wish.” You get to make a wish when you see double, triple, or quadruple numbers. This is edition number 11, and since the future likes repetition, I thought I could make a wish. I try to avoid making this newsletter too self-referential—a gesture in itself. When I wrote, a few lines above, that this is Betraying Gestures’ newsletter, it felt weird, as if saying that this newsletter services Betraying Gestures. I think Betraying Gestures is this newsletter (and believing tautology is necessary: this newsletter is Betraying Gestures), which is a sign of the self-referentiality I feel ambiguous about. Referring, for instance, to the number of this edition, I decided to allow; in last week’s edition, though, I refrained from mentioning that it was a very hard one to write and that I almost broke my rule of publishing one letter every Monday before midnight (UTC+2). Last Monday was not the easiest day, and during the week I heard it produced a sad text; I also heard it was melancholic. However, I’m glad I could assemble myself and write, as it is written on the drawing of a note I read every time I unblocked my phone—a Frances Stark work that was my phone background—that read: “Why should you not be able to assemble yourself and write?”. I heard that language tends to become about itself. My artist statement, which has merged with Betraying Gestures’, says I "write in different formats and media that prompt reflection on their own existence, speculating on the context and conditions in which they emerge and settle.” I know two reasons why I avoid writing Betraying Gestures' newsletter in a much too self-referential way (if that ship hasn’t already sailed), even though self-reference is at the core of my artist practice: 1) It can be very boring; 2) Betraying Gestures was created from the desire to be unhesitant—as I said in Betraying Gestures #10 (now I add a link when I mention something from previous letters), Betraying Gestures is public and verifiable, in opposition to being a rumour. From a conversation I had with D in my studio, I realised I am trying to escape precarity. D was using a card to fold flyers, I was measuring, or cutting, or binding, something for Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry), and I asked her if she wanted to use a folding paper tool. It is a bone folder. I bought a bit more than a year ago with the wish that I would make "more real books"—the way I phrased it, I wanted to say books that were less precarious, both on a processual and a material level. In the past, I printed and bound books in very improvised ways (what I'm calling precarious); I used, for example, to hammer a broken needle with pliers to punch the holes in them, print in a printer that printed yellow stains, and invent my own binding techniques. This "precarity" produced the most precious objects, which were only the way they were because of this not only imposed but pursued condition. D defended this pursuit, and even though I bought the bone folder in the hopes of having the proper tools to make books, I also defend it; but it is an existential precarity that makes me want to hide what seems to threaten its existence—something so dependent on itself. Attempting to make something bigger and less fragile is Betraying Gestures’ ambition. I write this, and I hear the name of a thesis I brought up in Betraying Gestures #8, Literature is Something Very Fragile. On Tuesday I talked about the weather, and on Wednesday I talked about talking about the weather—is this the repetition the future likes? Is the future self-referential? I like talking about the weather, and I like writing about the weather. Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry) is the result of "writing the weather” from bed. Aiko and I wrote it together one evening. I was in Berlin and she was in Florianópolis, and we were both looking with dread at the world from our respective windows. The text is mostly in English but has some parts in Portuguese. One of my favourite aspects of the text is how it transitions from one language to another as if they were the same, how it doesn’t refer to being bilingual, explaining, justifying, or differentiating. This being Betraying Gestures' newsletter, it has to deliver Betraying Gestures' news: Betraying Gestures and Aiko are launching Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry) on the 22nd of August, and at the same evening, we will also vocally publish Beliche, a text we’ve been writing together for three years. So everyone that is in São Paulo is invited to join us from 4 p.m. at Boteco do Ceará (Praça Mario de Andrade). I write, and I wrote, with Aiko, the weather, as a way of looking at the outside from the inside, and every time I write, it changes; language tends to become about itself. The weather has been very unstable. I phrased last Monday as not having been a very easy day. It is an evasive way of talking. Talking about the weather is often taken as an act of evasion of silence or of talking about a subject of greater importance. Ulrike Meinhof wrote, "Everybody talks about the weather... We don’t." I've been evading thinking about Betraying Gestures in Portuguese, if it's still Betraying Gestures. Someone told me Betraying Gestures (the title) makes complex use of English (I smiled) and suggested I translate it to Portuguese on Google Translator; it would lose the complexity and become clumsy, something that would translate back to “lying actions” or “traitorous behaviours." I’ve already used Google Translator a lot as a tool for writing, for finding what I wouldn’t otherwise find, and to begin a text, the same as writing about the weather or talking about the weather. I’ve found amazing things from using Google Translator, going back and forth from language to language

—a Babel tunnel, as I have called it—one more thing that points to language's tendency to become about itself. Last week, when I considered not publishing a letter, which I have already planned will one day happen, a betraying gesture, I concluded that this newsletter only becomes what I want it to be if it has continuity and proves itself worthy of a coming betrayal. A quality of quantity. I was looking for this quality when I was trying to write a five-hundred-page book a few years ago, which ended up being a one-hundred-page book published very precariously, which made it one of the most beautiful objects I’ve ever made. A professor, when I showed it to her, said she could see how important the materiality of that book was for me; last week, a couple of people I showed Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry) to said, "It is very you". I wonder what that means. After I published Betraying Gestures #10, I found a list of the 800 Most Painful Quotes on Betrayal And Being Betrayed, which you may assume is not very well written and has many repeated quotes. I use it to make a wish, because the future likes repetition, and this edition is #11. Even though it is not formulated as a wish, I include it here as one: “Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.”.