Betraying Gestures #27
pra dentro de mim o mundo vai / de dentro de mim o mundo sai
Dear readers,
You are invited to Chapel Session #9 on the 29th of April. We start at 18:00 and end at 21:00. And as usual, you are welcome to come earlier to help cook and stay longer to keep talking.
In 1972, Sônia Maria Sampaio Além watched on TV the news of her own death. Or almost. A woman born in the year she was born and named the four words that make her name had been shot by the police in São Paulo. The body was not of a primary teacher, mother of three at age 25; it was an art student and one of the leaders of Ação Libertadora Nacional, National Action for Liberation, a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla fighting military dictatorship. Born Ana Maria Nacinòvic Corrêa, she also answered to Betty, Márcia, Leda, Maria da Graça Souza Rego, Renata, Maria Tereza Teixeira, Josefina Damas Mendonça, Loira (Blond), and Esmeralda.
When a person is accused of identity fraud a boundary is touched. Does pointing it out create it? I am not that I. It limits the multiplicity of our potential incarnations. (Person, that legal fantasy. I, that linguistic aberration.) Perhaps identity fraud is a kind of experiment as experience, a savoring of attention and sensing under different conditions. I've found so many sharp words lodged in my meat, lately.
The meat of our bodies, that thing english-speakers like to call flesh, that is just that: meat under a different name. Stealing itself away from implications. A rose under any other name? Experiment as experience: which one leaves I changed? Or just one, under I: eye sees you, V. and S. and D. and the people reading, living vicariously through me, the lirical eye. Maybe any experiment also entails a moment of fraud, or?
Could this be a place where distinctions between art and what it means to act politically get blurry?
Brazilian art critic and activist Mario Pedrosa wrote: “Art is the experimental exercise of freedom" and the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber said of direct action that it is “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free”. Perhaps art, experiments and politics always entails some errand not only with truth, but also with fraudulence, of oneself and others.
Or to ask in the negative, if we don’t want to change, if we only and always want to have an already established relationship to ourselves, then why make art? We hope the Chapel Sessions can be a place where one can engage in fraudulous action and experiments.
You sneaky one, you, come out to play I. Time to be we.
18:38 It is Monday, June 24th. The Chapel Sessions coincide with the time Betraying Gestures is getting jotted down. I stole myself away into a Espresso House, in a rare moment of social aversion (an anxious vibration turned insides over, some exposed wounds numb not yet cauterized). I’m coming, though, I’m coming out to play.
18:44 I already knows what it wants to say: I always has something to say. This time, it's that I should be subsummed into we and disappear; I is always subsummed into a pool of sense-felt-sensation-textures-entwined, and there's an acknowledgement (by no one, we don't work with any whos here) that it is a useful organization for making those intensities articulate and (ok, let's go:) readable. I likes having a body and being able to walk, there's no craving for evanescence or transcendence or any type of ence; this particularly organized I has never understood the whole Body Whithout Organs thing, and it would like to be able to relate to the world in a way that maintains agency. I need joints to make decisions.
Maybe that's why I still need I, despite being convinced of the benefit of its destruction. Maybe that's why I have appeared 174 times over the course of the past 6 editions of Betraying Gestures. What do each of them betray?
I like stories, right.
So we need characters.
18:53 I step inside the Chapel and am immediately greeted by V. and a baby.
18:56 It's Harry's baby.
Is it still a baby if it can run around and play with the big red balls in the room?
18:59 K. arrives and starts tending to the Chapel.
Cheerful voices beyond, in the Kitchen.
19:03 While K. creates a kind of listening situation in the Chapel, I sit on the edge of The Kitchen Table and observe. J. (yet one more J.--- I get interrupted by V. & the baby.
19:06 Sitting in the Chapel now. In the Kitchen--- V. “thought it was a good idea”, he interrupts me intentionally this time. V. has been questioning self about sanity and insanity.
19:10 Back to my chair at the edge of The Kitchen Table. Apparently this table cost the school 8.000 kr.. Or was it 80.000 kr.? Something ridiculous like that. All of the chairs are designer chairs, too. The new J. is making his way to the toilet, A. is standing next to me observing the baby, V. continues to live his parenthood fantasy; on the other side of the room a new new J. (why are there so many J.'s? Was J. the first to explode their selfhood?) is talking to another A., S. takes care of the food and four of the adults (C., E., G., M., and the J. on his way to the toilet) are chatting up in spanish to her right, then Harry and the most lovable of all the J.s’, who is leaving Copenhagen for a good stretch and has her last day with us today, are talking next to the computer. Adult J., or AJ., has come back from the toilet. I hear steps up and down the wooden stairs behind me that lead to a mezzanine and resent the position of writer/observer/infiltrated non-participant: writing an I removes me from being.
I won't say, though, something about an expanded we that demands writing. I won't say it.
19:20 The pasta is ready.
19:22 C. arrives.
We all have seats on The Table.
19:27 I mention the word family. We clamour for the food. K. is still setting up cables and some kind of Chapel situation. Her body catches a sun ray.
19:34 AJ. is curious about the history of the Chapel Sessions, so we talk about pigs and clay and Harry--- I am interrupted by AG., who asks me to pass the pasta. J. has been telling her project's story to AM.. AC. disowns her pig: "I will hide it forever".
“It should not be about art.”
S. smiles when our gazes meet. Don’t let her hear me say this, but I think the flavor profile of her pasta is really good.
The pigs are about economy and value. Bronze pigs. This sentence is punny compared to the knowledge coded in her work. They’re about so much more.
K. looks like she could use some help, but none is offered. She is a fugue vector away from our food-motivated gravitation.
The adults want us to come to their event at Jesus Baren. Betraying Gestures' writer feels satisfaction at having an excuse to mention Jesus again (gestalt, ressonances, associations, a thing, a thicket).
It is now 19:43.
At 19:51, I accepts J.'s decision to leave.
19:57 The baby is holding dear to her priviledge. She bites it, points at it, flails it around, bites it, drops it to the ground. I get interrupted---
20:02 The situation shifts. Cleaning up. A little cleaning up, anyway.
20:04 "Expectations on leaving."; "But now I know better what to look for."; "But now I am mostly avoiding... I think I'm mostly avoiding spoiled... men."
D. finds self sitting outside in a conversation about spoilt boys, featuring V. and C. The sky is blue, which excites something in self that is not I.
N. shows up. She crosses the courtyard, not part of us.
20:12 D. comes back inside the Kitchen and sits on The Table. A., AC., and V. are engaged in a conversation about Harry's garden home. A. says having such a kolonihave is her dream. The others gather in the Chapel, waiting for gravity to swivel into the situation K. is about to offer. The baby, apparently, is too much into it.
I was typing something brilliant one J. said, but I get interrupted. We're excited at her latest analog photography shoot. It features me. So of course, you know. Ego tripping. I allow myself to write this even though I should be paying attention to Harry's invitation, that he is reading out loud right now.
I shift my attention.
(I is useful as an attention device).
20:22 "In reality, having no responsabilities would be really lonely."
20:29 The album we will listen to is called "The Full Experience". K. asks V. to read, D. copies the text from the e-mail invitation to Chapel Session #10:
Romanticizing the past, I longed for the idea of inviting a friend to listen to an LP together. An album that one of us has, but the other doesn't. And at that time, the album would be a precious thing. We would lay down on the warm, wooden lacquer floor in my room, staring at the low, white ceiling full of shadows and shapes. And there in the room, we shared the experience of just being. We would feel each other's presence, not fully understanding what it meant. Listening to the same sound. Together. In the past.
According to scientists: There is no space in which there's not a single molecule of gas or the smallest particle of dust.
Thus, a vacuum is actually a space in which there is a very, very small amount of matter.
According to scientists: Light travels through a vacuum, but not sound, because matter is needed for sound to travel.
I always related to sound as non-material one. Without matter.
The ceiling will be high this time, with no shapes or shadows on it. The floor will be flat, plastic green-blue-gray, and cold. I will play an LP for us. The one I wanted but never got. So the Full Experience will be just the borrowed one, for this occasion — it won't be yours, and it can’t be mine.
20:33 A voice comments on ways of listening to the album. I have some pain in my shoulder blades. I becomes useful again, when pointing out organized physical phenomena. But one of the difficulties of pain is to understand it transversally, pain and violence. This is something the adults were discussing earlier today. Oh, there's also music here.
Like, proper energetic music that holds you together.
20:43 The Chapel holding space for us listening to hold space for each other listening. Doing what we would not have done otherwise, from the generosity of its offering and the generosity of our commitment.
The sensing apparatus that is I is grateful to find the music enjoyable. If a tad pretentious? Can a sound be pretentious?
20:47 I dissolves and resolves self through movement of these hips. This particular instance of hips. Swaying. Releasing pain. Kissing the ground.
20:55 Adults M., J., E. and G. are leaving. The record is interrupted. These two events ressonate, but hold no causal relation. I am listening with ears and hips and skin and pain in the neck. I am listening with you, couch and linoleum floor and yoga mats spread around. I am listening with other eyes, their experiences quite imaginable: something is ahred among us, of course. Let's take it here and call it I, what is shared. Other I's: V.'s and K.'s and AC.'s and new new J.'s and Harry and the baby have disappeared, though their abscence makes them part of this, doesn't it?
21:02 D. squirms around and notices A. and A. are also still here. She concedes they, too, must have some dosage of her. Even though she doesn’t care too much for them.
21:07 "I wonder if this guy is on spotify."
Well, yeah. J. is. J.Z., this guy, not Jay-Z, but yeah. Yeah he is.
21:12 It's over now.
21:16 Entropy growing.
21:30 Music, beer and laughter.
23:00 Back home, chewing on the leftovers of a lively conversation including but not limited to improvised music, Goddard’s Goodbye to Language, the average attention span of a museum visitor and whether an artist should feel responsible for the experience of their audience. “But then you are a politician”, K. protests. Could this be a place where distinctions between art and what it means to act politically get blurry?
David Graeber also makes the point in his work Debt: The First 5000 Years, that freedom is the capacity to maintain moral relations to each other.
Experiments in stabilishing and caring for relationships.
Does this skeleton of a text hold space for everything that was traded, moved and cherished among us tonight? The meat shook with laughter, jokes aplenty, and the choir of humming appreciation at the bite of S.’s pasta? If there are micro worlds of affective engagement, that is because attention is always portioned. There can never be a Full Experience, right? Wasn’t that your point, K.?
My desire to feel connected to the others took me out of the music and into the room, fiddling around the floor and the pillows to catch glimpses of their expressions, their poses and gazes. Pursed lips, a straightening of the eyes, a pulse that gives rhythm to a foot. An illusion of insight. So much is happening whitin each particular organization, a magma of associations, ressonances, a rich and dense experience—- self as touching matter, hormones rushing expansions and contractions, bones that rub into meat and parse waves of pleasure and discomfort with subtlety, precision and utter opaqueness of process. Practice sharpens the sensing apparatus; practice shapes a sensing collectively. Connecting magmas, a flooding. And then it leaks:
smile, nervous hand, slight shift of weight. gesture.
With this in mind, Marina Dubia will discuss a work she developed and showed recently in São Paulo. She writes: I call “study of implications” a thinking together with gestures and images, a sketch of relations between “how did I get here” and “what do I do with that?”.
We have time for one more presentation, please write to us if you would like to be (or pretend to be) the one presenting.
Thank you for reading!
All our best,
Carla and Niels