Betraying Gestures #22
rustling 'n' rousing through a brief passage
The Beach Beneath the Street has been carried more than read; a readying. Harry's book is adorned with a bright flurry of curled post-it notes, rustling in my bag in Strasbourg, Ærø, Berlin. Mackenzie Wark writes on the "everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist International", or, as I understand it, their capacity to work fiction into reality.
They would be proud of my erratic moving about. Would they be proud? Maybe I would prefer for Ursula K. Le Guin to be proud.
Back in my bachelors the situationists would stumble their heads through my Art History classes, and were the de-facto protagonists of one of the books that finally brought my body into play: Francesco Careri's Walkscapes: walking as an aesthetic practice. Art educators gleefully throw the derivé around as an excuse for pedagody. But I never did understand what the fuck the Situationist International were or did.
I used to go to the São Paulo equivalent of Ikea after school with my friends and spend hours moving from couch to couch, from constructed situation to constructed situation, vagabundeando, loitering, shooting the shit. Sounds about the same? Our own self-referential love nest, you name it, that's the whole deal here. They took their nest and gave it a name.
With a name people can write about you. You can write about yourself. Generate an archive, a parallel existence in a museum. You can be referenced and pointed at, separated from a certain zest.
Over breakfast this morning (it seems our morning routines can line up) D. pointed out the J. on last week's old letter (let's call it season premiere) could be at least two different people among our common friends. Maybe the J. of Betraying Gestures #2 and #5 and the J. of #7. I agree, people change. Should we change the index? Most variations on his name D. can think of are biblical to a degree or another, though. I shiver and shrug off the idea of a second christening. They've co-existed in the world for the time they've been alive and they might as well share the space of an initial with the million others they've always shared with. D.'s pointing gesture is the one that yearns for meaningfulness. Or creates it. The initial conditions hold the trajectory. Is coincidence (serendipity?) a space of togetherness? K. would agree with D.
I'm tempted to call it a forceful gesture, however. Not unlike the meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, a trick. As if changing the world through acts of intention was the worst sin humans could commit. As if God was still an affair of concern and Ginger Jesus could be an adequate moniker for J. (turns out the low hanging fruit was an apple).
There we go, shit. Language has made me hostage. It forced me to write that sentence: I like the sound of Ginger Jesus too much, forgive me Goddess Almighty. I swear it has nothing to do with meaning: it's about the gestalt of of the G and the J, and the Gin and the Jêêê and the Jiiii and the way they vibin' my teeth ressonatin', that's what they said, the Bauhaus people, the avantchigárdê, was that not what they were on about? A world of form, ressonating form while Freud laughs it off and I wish Rorschach from Watchmen could be my best friend. It also sounds like an off-beat flavor edition of Brazil's famous Jesus brand soda pop. Enough gesturing. Send help.
Once I met a piano player in a bar, at a bar, on a bar. Art and Music quickly became our argumentative diagram, given the respective studies that brought us here (the bar, of course; Denmark, of all places). You can't really lie, can you? The audience can always tell. My eyes must have glistened for a second --- lying is my job, I retorted. The artist is a trickster, it's right there in the word: artifice. I left entertained but convinced his music background must account for the gap in our worldview. Can a sound lie?
Glistenings betray. But I do some of the same: I believe. I trust. No such thing as art without faith, even if it is just my own fantasy charging up the charade and holding this world (a world) together, or the eternal flame of the communist party fueling revolutionary dreams in one more ragtag group of parisian bohemians. How come in the 19th century all of those european fuckers seemed to know each other? In Copenhahen too, it's just like that. São Paulo remains chaotic. In the 19th century there were only a billion people in the planet, Paris was tiny. A step back, though: is this how you change the world? Band together, argue passionately, support and incentivize each others projects, oppose capitalism, or brag about opposing capitalism, that works too. Get heated. Vitality, where are you! And how do we expand? Expand outward, toward, communion, others, otherness, etecetera y tal. Alterity is a word I learned with my Art History teacher. I wanted to print a scarf with the words alterity and complexification and all other difficult and electrifying words Sônia Salzstein used to lecture with and gift it to her. Write obssessively, lecture, print, publish, throw and flow with language, sing, drink, make a mark, archive everything. A presence, loudness. Or enough volume, just enough. The buzz has to be collective. Write to each other. Write about each other. Weave, tangle, nest and travel; seduce, convince. Gossip. Love each other, trust language.
It feels insufficient. Yet here's this book.
An entry in the bibliography reads: On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: the Situationist International, 1957-1972.
During our Chapel Session #8, V. talked about Joe Brainard and his friends. Maybe a week after, we and our friends also found ourselves a name, Mindelunden. V., I., D., A., Harry, K., S., and yet another version of J. are all included in it. In another life, I translated Jo Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness to A Tirania da Ausência de Estrutura and became convinced that friendship groups are the core cells of societal power dynamics.
Romeu is crossing the Atlantic for the Venice Biennale and I won't be able to meet him. There's shame in this dull betrayal. Can't think of anything more precious than time and space together (home). Using intentionality to make space. Yet I will manuevre reality away from him. When we were there the first time, the Serbian Pavillion displayed a screen several meters high, featuring a single swimmer crossing an olympic pool. His strokes creased a wide triangular ripple across the surface of the water, making each particle tremble despite his unawareness of the effects of his resolve.
The micropolitic of weaving affection into the texture of the everyday and understanding our relations as the site where change is actualized, interdependently to intention and counscioussness, is an idea I have held dearly. Loving, living as loving, requires me to hold a space where change feels actionable. You, me, we, us. It is a matter of shifting scales: my friend B. speaks of group-circles of shared experience, that go on to form wider group-circles until we embrace something of a whole: people with the same initials, edy artists, store clerks, musicians, dancers, friends, a single thruple, two of the same or two different, the old man and the pidgeons, a city, a religion, the group of believers, the faithful, the dubious ones (we are legion), the beings in flux and those stilted, oscillating, earth, the universe and everything. Life, 42. Serbian swimmer realness.
The piano player seemed to trust music.
podia ver a fantasia
entrar pelos seus dedos
you could see fantasy
enter through their fingertips
An earnest trickster. Or a garden-variety jester. Maybe just a we getting excited, sharing, learning. Dance.
When you and I met, Vinícius Maffei wasn't yet part of an affair with Betraying Gestures. D. called me:
On the other end of the line was a friend I sometimes thought was myself. We shared so much and what differentiated us was perfect opposition. I was a man/she, a woman. We were born in the same city. We were both artists. We went to different art schools. Hers, was public/mine, was private. We were both writers and self-published our work, circulating it in the same contexts. We admired the same people. She is outgoing/I’m shy and reserved. She got to actually meet the people I only admired from the distance of a screen. She tells me she used to be just like me–I hear she wants to say that there is hope for me. We never met in our hometown, we met in another city. We eventually also meet in our native city. I drink beer and wine/she doesn’t drink alcohol. We met in different cities as well: one night in Prague, I was drunk, and she told me she used to be just like me. I believed her. I was happy she agreed we are the same person in different lives in different bodies.
I finish this new letter the way most of my eletronic mail starts:
Dear readers,
Hello. My name is Marina Dubia.
Hope the electric blue infects every grain
of these ours glorious times,
just about
now.
Ahhhhhhh!
Thank you,
Cheers!
