Betraying Gestures #32

boing goes the autumn

I’m, for the very first time, sitting at the table I am sitting at, a table that has a white laminated top and metallic legs. I had been itching to put it together. It was in Jana’s room, which’s next to my room, disassembled. Jana found it on the street; so, even though it has a seal granting it the status of Danish design, it cost her nothing—it cost me nothing, too. Jana already has a table in her room, its legs are wooden and it’s black top, the day before yesterday, before we had dinner, while we sat and waited for dinner to get ready—Kristian was preparing pumpkin soup, pumpkin soup for the third time in the week—we discussed whether it’s made of leather, because it isn't wood, because I can easily carve my nail into it, Jana told me, and I tried it myself before agreeing. I had been itching to put this table together and to start writing this text (not necessarily correlated deeds). Writing this text means going back to writing these texts. I told Marina my itch to go back to writing Betraying Gestures, and her reaction was: to defend her project of accomplishing her 20 editions, originally intended to be published weekly for the 20 weeks we lived together in a flat where I had a table narrower and longer than the one I have now; a plywood top table—Oscar’s table that I called mine for the 20 weeks Marina and I lived together at Oscar’s and Anine’s flat. To make it clear(er): I wrote Betraying Gestures once a week from May 2023 and stopped writing it in October 2023, coinciding with the period Marina and I would be living together at Oscar’s and Anine’s this year. Marina started writing Betraying Gestures on Betraying Gestures #21, on May 13, 2024, on "It is the first time I live with someone who can be called a friend. M. lays at the sofa (phone), V. sits over at the table (laptop).”. I can feel the joy I took from reading it in my email inbox while still waking up, in a week I was sleeping so terribly because of the dazzling spring light. Marina and I discussed the logistics and politics of her takeover and decided that we wouldn’t spell out the takeover to the readers; that Marina was going to write it along the editions; and that the transition between the typing fingers of one writer and the other's would play the structures and rules that had written Betraying Gestures so far, abandoning some and applying new ones. The rules and structures became so rigid, it's them that I am tired of, I told people in October last year explaining my decision to wave Betraying Gestures goodbye. I want to write new things, the same people heard from me. With new things written—whose description follows further in the text—and thinking of the sentence I heard out of a philosopher’s mouth in the summer, “Writing is help and having written is heaven,” I sit in my new room, which is spacious enough to have a table in the middle, by which I sit now, feeling ostentatious, and, as such, celebrating it with this text that I write over tea instead of over the wine that would be my usual choice because yesterday I already had a fair amount of it over the phone with Mafe. Looking at the window across from the room across from my new table, I try to write Betraying Gestures as a snug comeback that also ventures into stitching the ends of what Marina, with such spirit, did with/to Betraying Gestures and what I did to Betraying Gestures writing “new things.” Further in the text is now: by my side on the table, whose sterile feel—also in the other furniture in the room—reminds me... (look at me coil, exercising the word Marina deploys after rummaging through her vocabulary looking for a translation to the Portuguese word "enrolar," in Betraying Gestures #25) …of a room I stayed in Berlin for a month in 2022... (getting to the description of one of the new things I wrote in the meantime, between the Betraying Gestures #20 and this one, #32) …is the invitation for Betraying Gestures’ exhibition at From Me To You Space. The side of the invitation facing up has two columns of text—the text that I have described as the synopsis for Betraying Gestures, the novel (another new thing I’ve written in the meantime), takes two columns that, following the other invitations from From Me To You Space, represent the front window of the gallery. The text in two columns is in a font I call Betraying Gestures. The novel to be “semi-published” at Betraying Gestures' show at the Space that invites publishers to showcase their work in Antwerp is also in the font Betraying Gestures. I flip the invitation, and its back that gives practical info and a brief text on Betraying Gestures lies upwards: "Betraying Gestures at From Me To You Space is the semi-publishing of the homonymous novel by the homonymous publisher. Betraying Gestures is writing and publishing weekly texts online to try where the writer in Betraying Gestures ends and where the publisher in Betraying Gestures begins. Where writer and publisher overlap, Betraying Gestures is doing physical publications. Titles such as Sleepy and Sad (happyberry), Make-believe Hotel Room Telephone, and In-flight circulate in publication fairs and exhibitions. Publication fairs and exhibitions are producing narrative on Betraying Gestures, and where it isn’t only Betraying Gestures producing narrative on itself, Betraying Gestures is a novel and the title of the novel. Betraying Gestures is in the writing and the publishing. Every time Betraying Gestures comes to the public, it is semi-publishing. Betraying Gestures semi-publishing is operating writing as not merely a constructive process but also an informative one. Betraying Gestures semi-publishing is operating publishing as not merely an informative process but also a

constructive one.” I was at the airport with Jana; we were in Fortaleza waiting for our flight that at long last took us back to Europe when Marina sent me an audio message asking about the state of my intentions to come back to writing Betraying Gestures; she asked me if my intention had been overwritten in almost a month spent in Brazil. She said many other things in the audio since there are many other things to be said since she, after we moved out of Oscar’s apartment, relocated to France, and, so, amidst the airport craze, an entire month of travel to tell, ãhnnnn's and uhmmmmm’s, in my audio message, I forgot to address the state of my intentions with Betraying Gestures, the newsletter. Also because I wouldn’t have had an answer—I was not yearning to come back to write here, but I think I was hoping that, in time, the yearning would come back. A table and an invitation on the table brought it right back to life. Today is Saturday night, and I’ll call Marina tomorrow and tell her that the following day, Monday, as usual—for my first twenty editions and some of Marina’s, before she made the Monday tradition looser, as well—I will post a text in Betraying Gestures. I will tell her Betraying Gestures’s showcase at From Me To You is the main reason for now being the moment to take Betraying Gestures back to under the hit of the keys of my fingers. Today is Monday, and yesterday I spoke to Marina on the phone. I was in the supermarket and we were catching up, and I only delivered the Betraying Gestures message after she told me she would have to hang up. Then I told her everything I needed to tell her would be in the letter she now knows to expect. So: I’ll be necessarily posting on Mondays, but I’m dropping the every Mondays rule off; Marina is invited/expected to publish her last nine texts completing her twenty-letter cycle on any day besides Mondays; other authors shall have their texts published on/by Betraying Gestures. Mafe, who before Marina had plans to do a takeover on Betraying Gestures, which maybe got lost in us overthinking how she would fit the strict rules that were at play at the time, which have been relaxed—hence me using people’s real names instead of the usual initials—I’d like to publish. And Oscar has a text for Betraying Gesture in line. He’s been writing an essay on gestures, a bash on gestures, from what I understood (I haven’t yet read it) from what he told me. From what he told me, I found the working title for a project I’m currently working on, Not a Gesture Reading Club. It was supposed to be an actual reading club, but now I think that it is the name of a play—precisely Oscar’s criticism on gestures, a way to not actually act on/with something but just point to it, precisely what Betraying Gesture fought so much not to be, in its first twenty editions, that’s why all the rules. Betraying Gestures’ presentation at From Me To You Space opens on the 25th of October—a day after my dad’s birthday and exactly a month before my older sister’s birthday—and during the exhibition period, 50 semi-publish(ed)ing copies of Betraying Gestures are going to be distributed. By train, trusting my packaging abilities, so the volumes arrive in Antwerp undamaged, I will carry, along with the 50 copies, 25 exhibition copies to be shown at the window of the gallery. 25 copies, I’ll leave behind at home, and once I come back, I will distribute them to friends and interlocutors. Some I will send by mail, and if you wish to get one, reply to this letter with your address. I look forward to writing them down on envelopes, buying stamps, and posting them to you.