Betraying Gestures #18

gestures carrying on

Before I entered the taxi, I said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I didn’t call the following day; the following day, we didn’t speak. I was proving the difference between deceit and betrayal. A betrayal on every flight? I wrote in Betraying Gestures #13 that a betrayal is committed in every flight. A writer I like as a podcaster says text is something he commits. While researching the concept of deceit, I read a paragraph on the difference between lying and deception (which led me to research the difference between deceit and deception—while deception is more associated with the accomplishment of purposeful misguidance or misdirection, deceit is more closely related to the intention and practices). Unlike lying, deception implies success. “Fly” can be used to express success. E.g., “That text didn’t fly with the readers”. My mental web of perfidious terms was interrupted by the plane's rough but successful landing. Betraying Gestures back to UTC+2 (checklist: update the “about page”, the “welcome email”, and the “email banner, header, and footer settings”). The silly dialogue I was writing on my cell phone about deceit and a phone call was interrupted by a WhatsApp message I got the moment I deactivated airplane mode. It wasn’t a message that hadn’t gone through, I received it that instant. The precisely timed message to which I replied, “I just landed”, was M wishing me a good return. She answered, as a desire, “A lot of thoughts about flights and planes to write about now :)”. From the plane, I took the metro and then the bus. I unpacked as soon as I arrived, regardless of how tired I was. I’ve been exchanging emails with K. “Reception? Gestures?”, as I betrayed in the last edition. After unpacking, I wrote K. I wrote: “I arrived and immediately unpacked—I had three suitcases: a very big one, one medium to big, one small—to escape outstanding luggage (language).” The other day, she wrote, “This email happens to be a lot about words.” Disappointing M, I thought nothing new about flying and planes—no conclusions on committing betrayals on airplanes or betrayals committed by airplanes (carbon footprint?). I only reinforced my already known belief that connecting such faraway places and things is dangerous and costly for what is transported—the body; the luggage (language?). I committed myself to the inside of my room. I treated it as a middle place before I had no more outstanding luggage or reduced my outstanding luggage to the point of carrying on. Slow transition. Carrying on, this week, is exciting. Carrying on means working on the exhibition Sauce X Ovenpå, a processual exhibition in which four artist duos each take over the space for a week, engaging with each other, the space, and the works of the other artists. I’m participating with Marina Dubia. One more thing we can call Dubious Gestures, that has already resulted in Colaglue, our tape released by Betraying Gestures in partnership with Coisas que Matam, and our participation in Feira Tijuana. Reencountering my bed after a long trip made me think of one of the pieces presented at the exhibition. An inflatable bed—a sitting arrangement for two videos. A carry-on bed has nothing to do with my bed. Our week (we are the fourth and last duo) started today, and the first thing I did was take Bed by Tao Lin and place it on the bed. A reading suggestion? A reading superposition? The attempted deceitful dialogue that opened this edition ended with an explanation. The explanation: I was reading Por Escrito and thinking I could write a letter instead of making a phone call. “Por Escrito” translates to “In Writing”. I like to watch distracting movies on airplanes. Action movies usually do the job. I saw a movie where, in a situation room, the Foreign Affairs secretary dealing with a hijacked plane says, “I’ll take and make the calls.” I find it unbelievable that airlines don’t screen for plane incident-related movies. The thing about letters is that they take longer than phone calls—a phone call is simultaneously made (performed) and delivered. Por Escrito is a book by Brazilian writer Elvira Vigna. I recommended it to M—a reading suggestion—and it became a reading superposition—whatever a reading superposition means, when we talked on the phone, she was almost finished and was clearly exhilarated. With good reason, it is an outstanding book by an outstanding writer. I remember reading that Elvira was a polyglot and did a translation of In Writing herself. I confirmed it: it was an excerpt published in Wasafiri Issue 82. Another fact about Elvira I recall but couldn't confirm—I didn’t find anything about it—was a sort of origin myth for her fiction. When she was a kid, she told someone (maybe her parents, maybe a friend) that she had seen a sofa fall from the window of the building she lived in. It turns out it wasn’t a sofa; it was a bride. I was taking turns between reading Por Escrito and setting up a printer to enable remote printing. Marina and I will work on the exhibition through a printer. She is not in town, so we thought the printer could be a way for us to communicate and register our communication but also for her to have some autonomy in the space from a distance. Some sort of carry-on concept? I suggested the printer function as a fax, and then, reading about faxes, I discovered the word “fax” is short for “facsimile”. The word I repeated so many times in Feira Tijuana, describing In-flight. I have a tab in my browser about the history of fax machines. Did you know that the first fax to be sent was in 1843? I have other tabs I’ve been saving for Betraying Gestures on my browser. Things I may want to write about but that have, by now, been hanging there, forgotten, for months. Like a Google Images search for Bernhard Cella. One of the images shows a man wearing a hat and glasses (Bernhard Cella, I suppose) in a bookshop with a particularly large amount of books. Bernhard Cella is an Austrian artist and curator. I click on one of the images, and it opens an article that reads, “Cella is an advocate of artist books as a medium and has curated numerous exhibitions with and about artist books. He has stated that a good art book can replace a visit to a museum, because it offers many possibilities for discourse and experimentation”. Clicking on another image, one that shows the cover of a book by him called and. Learning English has no use I read about the homonymous project in which he used “reproductions of his artworks to overcome language barriers that he encountered during a stay in Nanjing, where he used the aesthetics to create modes of communication to make it possible for him and the Chinese students to work together.” Another tab I’ve been saving, which I thought had good potential, is Emma Gray’s Artnet column, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, because of a note about Pruess Press, a publisher I’ve been researching and that I promise will be further explored in another edition. There’s also the website Veneno Live because yesterday I heard Aiko’s participation in Coisas que Matam’s program, Interrail, The Guardian, Words Without Borders, etc. The reason I haven’t resorted to the content in any of these tabs before is that when I sit or lie down to write Betraying Gestures, I write unequivocally, even though I know the text would be completely different if

I had written it at a different moment in a different setting. I’m convinced the gesture is what matters most to the text—what defines the kind of writer I am. The rest can be enticing or not, but there is a value that rests somewhere else. “Arises and settles” somewhere else? I have this excerpt from my artist statement in mind since the person doing the translation to Danish of my statement for Sauce X Ovenpå asked me about the word “settles”. They told me there was no direct translation. I explained that the way I wrote “settles” has to do with “to land” or “to rest”. I write Betraying Gestures with what is around me and has produced effects. Last week, it was the word “outstanding”, that still resonates. When I read that the first fax was sent in 1843, I wanted to exclaim, “Outstanding!”. I regret having used “outstanding” in an edition—the last edition: outstanding gestures—that was so limited by time and my travelling. I also feel I could have done a better register of Betraying Gestures as Dubious Gestures in Feira Tijuana. Not that I cannot write about it anymore; I can and I am. I could rewrite it. However, I should maybe hear what this edition ended up being called: “gestures carrying on”. Thank you for reading!