Betraying Gestures #19

the reminiscence of a gesture&omen&email

Dear readers. Writing in gestures carrying on that it is the gesture that matters most to the text (and what defines the kind of writer I am) was an omen. It astonishes me that I never wrote about omens in Betraying Gestures before. I repeatedly asked writing whether it was or not an omen. I say I asked writing; who I was actually asking were my friends, who heard the question again and again. I dedicated a great part of last week to writing with a stamp. Assembling the littlest rubber letters in a stamp using tweezers, I stamped a text onto the walls of Ovenpå, for the exhibition mentioned in Betraying Gestures #18. The gesture communicated that I desired its slowness and time-consumingness. The remnant of the gesture communicated a strange text written by a transcribed and translated conversation; it communicated another long-lasting question I address to writing: how to exhibit text in space? Since it has already been established that there's nothing sexy about papers on the wall. And neither is there to stamping. But "showing a gesture is an answer", I thought while letter-by-letter stamping, seeing in it the possible reminiscence of a gesture—the gesture of writing. I remember the part of the text I was stamping when I interrupted myself to make a note on my phone, because it was my favourite part of the text. It was: "This river exists, this river of information and we are in it, you know yesterday I said that I wanted my flight to last fifty hours. Uh-huh. That's what I'm writing. Maybe this is a noisy trip but I was thinking if I go at this speed. Yes, yes, extend it, right? It is very long and this time has time to be covered in this space. Yes, and you have this thing about using transitory spaces as this place of pause, right? Resting, settling down, right? When you can suspend other things and stay

there. So, this feeling of suspension makes perfect sense to me, you know? Wanting to dream, wanting that, wanting to build that too. You talked a lot about this plane and I like this plane, I like the image of this plane. That's why it reflects the sky itself. Reflecting the sky also has a cry, right? Well, we had the plane." I rested vehemently after finishing the stamping. On my way home, though, before the vehemence, I got an email. It was a reply to an email I sent in May. An email that was an omen to Betraying Gestures. I sent it to a dear friend after she sent me the image of a work she produced from a conversation we had over wine on a delightful summer night last year. It was written fifteen days before I wrote Betraying Gestures #1. I’ve seen that a few newsletters have edition #0. I regretted not having had one—a foundation—but as I read the reply, I realised that my email might have been the letter #0. Since I sent it, I've remembered every other week that one day I'll get a reply for it. I don't publish the reply. I publish the email the email replied to. 

—

Cara*, 

I am writing you from the ferry. I’m on my way to Travemünde to meet a friend. I wanted to go where a ferry could take me. This Finnlines ferry will take 10 hours, and I missed lunch. The service was only until 11am(?), so I’m eating frozen pizza and drinking coffee. I didn’t know I was dreaming of frozen pizza when I dreamt about hours on the ferry without internet connection. What I dreamt about when dreaming of time on the ferry was putting my head back into place, which also meant writing you. Well, answering you, but not through WhatsApp. I feel the tempo and dimension of our conversation prefer to be an email. 

Yesterday I was at a big opening; it felt like summer, the street was loud, and the night was approaching. I wasn’t drinking wine; I drank beer that made me wake up in the middle of the night, sick. Afraid I wouldn’t wake up well enough to take the train at 6:30 to Malmö to take the ferry from there, I prayed (is asking with fierce praying?) that I woke up well. It worked. I prayed because I really needed the ferry time, and to write you.

Since I came back from Berlin, it’s been very busy, and I’ve had a number of turbulent disappointments. I’ve been learning a lot. I look at the sea, surrounded by all the truck drivers, thinking about what I've learned, life, and artistic creation, and reaching the conclusion that I have unwillingly excluded the word strategy from my vocabulary. I recover from artistic disappointments and suffering by thinking about gestures and betrayal. Writing/translating/displacing/moving/stealing/appropriating/copying/beco-ming/calling/conversing/making-believe/fictionalising/pretending/representing boundaries and breaking them.

I like the person you see in me pointing out the value of things. They mean a lot in a symphony of polysemy. I can be seen through the texts I write. Texts that can be referred to as poems. I’ve been writing many short texts I don’t necessarily call poems. They can show a reader I’m a person who is afraid of a lot—or so I feel. Yesterday, before the opening, I was at a symposium called Yet, it moves. There were some CERN researchers at it, so, during the coffee break, we were talking about the particle accelerator, and I remembered a teenager I who was kept awake thinking the world would end absorbed by a black hole initiated by the kilometre-long particle accelerator. Any small text/poem of mine would say that if it weren’t for the particle accelerator, other things would have kept me awake. I think I’ve revealed too much.

I see the need for strategy. 

The lack of strategy, tho, has given me most of what I have. The most amazing things and some disappointments. The big work I talked about in excitement at the bar became a tiny work. A poem—a poem to characterise what is small in size, not necessarily in quality.

Disappointment has taught me that I no longer want to make works of art. I want to write a publisher called Betraying Gestures. I want to find out what writing a publisher is. And, who knows, maybe it produces works of art.

The last time I took the ferry, when I came back from Berlin, I travelled with a small suitcase and a small backpack. On the bus from the terminal of the port to the ferry, I lost my wallet with my passport. I was with a friend. I looked at her, desperately going through my backpack, all my belongings scattered on the floor of the bus, and said I didn’t know where my passport was. The ferry was about to leave, and I was in panic. I told my friend she should go without me. She said she wouldn't board the ferry by herself, that we were together. After mobilizing the whole port, I found my wallet in the secret pocket of my backpack, where I had put it and forgotten. The empathetic bus driver rushed onto the ferry that left with both of us and my passport back to Copenhagen. 

I only think of secret pocket now. 

For today's ferry trip, I decided to bring only one backpack as baggage. It is working so far. I’m more organized. 

Two notes about luggage, one for each picture of the sea I attach (one with the shore and one without):

-I’ve written about a suitcase I bought for thirty euros called “skyway”. 

-There is something to pay attention to between “luggage” and “language”. 

With love from the Baltic Sea,

V.

*(auf portugiesisch means expensive and means dear)

Ps: We didn’t talk about your reading of Ana Cristina Cesar. But we need to, to talk about correspondence. 

—

Thank you for reading!