Betraying Gestures #14

counting gestures

Betraying Gestures’ readers know I’m travelling. Even though I didn’t clearly specify where to, most of the readers know, by deduction or because we’re close, where I write from. I don’t usually specify where I write from unless I'm in motion—when I make a point of specifying. I don’t write people’s names unless they are part of a Betraying Gestures project. I don’t give much information that localises me; I’m a writer fighting specificity, but in the last edition, writing about how to write from afar, I wrote at the risk of pinning Betraying Gestures down to a specific location on planet Earth. Managing the secrets I tell and the secrets I withhold—Betraying Gestures comes from the belief secrets are meant to circulate but I sometimes dread the impression I’m telling all my secrets—the smell of home reminds me of many secrets. From calling projects and works secrets, a particular secret work finds its way into this edition. A work that counted "one / two / third / fourth / five / half a dozen” to tell a story because the Portuguese words for “to count” and “to tell” are the same: “contar”. The smell of home, last edition, reminded me of when I had my head wrapped around what I had to have to practice art; this week’s, a redação logística (a logistic writing?). Thinking (forever thinking) how words, texts, move, I wrote many poems and small texts based on the "one / two / third / fourth / five / half a dozen” way of counting, thinking of other ways of counting stories, thinking of narrative structures. This past week was dedicated to moving Betraying Gestures close, to this side of the Atlantic. It encountered other things being counted and told, such as the poem Count the Almonds by Paul Celan in which the polysemy of “contar” is revealed in German. The word “zählen” (to count) is also in the word for "to tell” (erzählen). A trace of this comes across in the English translation of the poem by Celan, who counts to fix the aftermath of the holocaust in the world's memory, counting himself in as a survivor: “Count the almonds, / count what was bitter and kept you awake, / count me in”. I began Betraying Gestures #12 counting. I wrote, "I began by inaccurately counting in an effort to find a smooth way of correcting something I wrote in Betraying Gestures #11". I never liked math, but I always liked counting. Counting how many seats there are in the plane I’m on is a distraction; counting how many kilometers I walk is a daily habit; counting how many DVDs I had was a reason to be proud, I remember, writing from the room I grew up collecting DVDs in. This Monday, I have something to tell, something to report on. Am I trying to find a smooth way of telling it, the same as I confessed to doing in Betraying Gestures #12? Why would I want to be smooth? Then it is not smoothness that I want; I want—need—to find a way of making it tell itself. On Tuesday, Aiko and I, as announced, among others, in last week's edition, performed the aloud-publishing of Beliche. If I were to count the audience/participants, using letters to refer to people in my fight against specificity, I would have an alphabet soup: A; M; L; D; P; V; B… We were supposed to have started at 16h, but at 16h, I was at the copy shop finishing the spiral binding of the reading-edition Aiko and I printed for the aloud-publishing. On Monday I met with Aiko, we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and the first thing we did together couldn't have been more perfect for our partnership: we went to the print shop. We printed the 57 pages of Beliche and the poster announcing the event (the publishing of Beliche as well as the launch of Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry)). Right after letting the owner of the bar know we were planning an event at his establishment after having already spread around the neighbourhood posters announcing his bar as the location of our event, we ordered a beer and read the beginning of the text planning how the aloud-publishing would play out. We decided to make a reading-edition using the A4 copy we had just printed, mixing it with an A3 copy we would have to print. On Tuesday morning, we decided to make four reading-editions; therefore, we had to print two A3 copies and one more in A4. Each reading-edition combined A3, A4, colour, and black and white copies. The hard part, what delayed the reading, was putting the spiral in the A3s and in the sheets of A4, which were randomly distributed across the width of the A3s. At 16h, Aiko went to the bar, located on the other side of the square from where the copy shop was. I stayed at the shop helping with the binding. When I arrived at the bar, Aiko had arranged our setting on two yellow tables on the sidewalk in front of the bar: a speaker to play music, copies of Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry) on a support,

a couple of posters on the table, and a collage Aiko made with some important registers and documents of Beliche, all in front of a poster we had glued on the wall the previous day. We ordered a beer to keep the owner of the bar happy with our presence—when we informed him of our pretensions to do our event at his bar, a regular sitting at the counter said he was like Scrooge McDuck, he liked money, so he would be happy to host our event as long as it brought him business—and in the dear presence of a one-person audience/participant, we started reading from the beginning—from where else would we have started? we count in order. Almost four hours and 57 pages later, we finished the reading; it was already dark, and we were, by then, in more than a dozen. In Betraying Gestures #12, I said every word is a gesture. In that edition, I used the word “gesture” 50 times—I counted using a text analysis model. I had to use the word “gesture” so many times in order to understand that I always write about betrayals but not so much about gestures because I don’t have to; gestures are something I have to make, and writing is a gesture. The aloud-publication of Beliche with Aiko was a gesture—an important gesture—for Betraying Gestures. I count, and I use the text analysis model to ask what Betraying Gestures is made of. Sometimes I find myself having to tell what Betraying Gestures is. I had to do it to apply for an art book fair, Super-BOOKS, in Munich. I had to write it using a maximum of 600 characters; I wrote: “Betraying Gestures is a publishing enterprise that includes Vinícius Maffei. Asking what writing is and from the question at the beach, "To write is to live, Vinícius?", Betraying Gestures desires publishing as a conceptual operation—a writer's publishing practice and a publisher’s writing practice. Betraying Gestures makes public in art book fairs, exhibitions, books, a weekly newsletter, posters, cassette tapes, novels, aloud publications, and translation—thinking of how language travels from one person to another, Betraying Gestures associates with other artists, publishers, and spaces.”. I didn’t say Betraying Gestures is a model; I always say Betraying Gestures is a model. The text analysis model’s data said Betraying Gestures is made of 897 occurrences of the word “I”, the most used word, followed by "a", "to", "and", "of", "in", "is", "it", "that", "was", and finally “betraying". Ultimately, Betraying Gestures, according to the model, is made of 2843 words—1529 unique words, 452 words used twice, 210 words used three times, 149 words used four times, 78 words used five times, and 425 words used six times or more. Following the realisation from using the word “gesture” 50 times, Betraying Gestures started to find more truth in being made of 2843 gestures than of 2843 words. Preparing for Feira Tijuana (with Marina Dubia, as Dubious Gestures) and now for Super-BOOKS 4— Betraying Gestures’ way of telling about itself seems to have found resonance since I received an email informing me they have now made their selection "and are happy that Betraying Gestures is among them!”—among other editions that have already been mentioned in editions of the newsletter, Betraying Gestures will circulate the documentation of the vocal-publishing of Beliche. They were made by six sound recording modules. These modules are composed of a microphone, a speaker, and two buttons connected to the module by wires, one red and one black; the red one you push to record and end the recording, and the black one to play the audio once it has been recorded. Each of the modules records up to 4 minutes. After they were recorded, I cut the red wire so nothing could be recorded over them, and they now only execute the documentation. Aiko felt the process was a bit intense. I’m going to put them in little acrylic boxes, label and number them, and circulate them as one of Betraying Gestures’ editions. Screaming, whispering, overlapping, improvisations, and singing—mine, Aiko’s, and D’s (the only of the audience/participants who vocalised the publishing with us) voices—were recorded in the modules, along with the sounds of vehicles and pedestrians passing by and all kinds of interference. The most beautiful moments of the evening were when the three of us were reading together all at once. In the end, we were all tired, and the reading became a little bit about persistence, the same as some Mondays for the newsletter. Beliche has had a long trajectory that didn’t finish on Tuesday; it continues to be written and desires to be featured in Betraying Gestures’ newsletter again, announcing other aloud-publishing, under other conditions. This was at a shabby bar surrounded by friends drinking beer. Its documentation on the sound modules is likely to disappear with time. Sounds appropriate…