1. On February 3rd, I posted a carousel with two pictures on Instagram. A printed matter mostly takes up the first picture; the only other element is a dark grey textile in the upper left portion of the image, underneath the printed matter. The printed matter is orange with a white circle positioned towards the left-center of the picture. In the upper right corner, cut diagonally by the framing of the image, are four letters printed in green. There are three visible letters in the top line and one letter in the bottom line—they are upside down, so the bottom line appears on top. The three letters are "c", "ã", and "o". The one letter is “r”. The second picture of the carousel captures a top-down view of a white disposable cup containing black coffee. Because of the perspective of the photograph, the rim and the inside of the cup, partially filled with black coffee, form a white circle with a black circle inside. They are framed in the same position as the white circle on the orange printed matter, which is the cover of a book. The four green letters that appear in the first picture write the title of the book Preparação para o Amor (Preparation for Love, in English). It is a book by Argentinian writer and artist Leticia Obeid edited by the Brazilian publishing platform Par(ent)esis.
2. A lot has happened to Betraying Gestures this past week. What happens changes Betraying Gestures, and the idea of a model is insistent. Dubious Gestures is an art book fair enterprise that includes Marina Dubia (D) and Betraying Gestures. This past week, Dubious Gestures wrote an application for the art book fair Feira Tijuana, taking place in Rio de Janeiro in September. On Friday, three days after sending the application, I woke up with an email informing Dubious Gestures our project had been selected.
3. Fragments rhymes with complete. I finished Betraying Gestures’ webpage. It is a list of everything Betraying Gestures is (what is already written + what will be written = a complete list (This night I dreamt I went back to school to learn a math equation)).
An imagined dialogue:
—Why is this public?
—Because if it weren’t public, it wouldn’t exist.
A neurotic continuation:
—And would it be a disaster if it didn’t exist?
—This is not a question that is in Betraying Gestures' equation.
Betraying Gestures' webpage parasites Vinícius’ webpage by using his domain: viniciusmaffei.com.
4. How does memory work? because I have a note on my notes app for every week’s newsletter, and on this week’s I wrote about Leticia Obeid, an editorial project she has, and another writer who she also is, whose name I had the impression was something similar to “Tamara". Preparação para o Amor is a book that is a bit of a diary, narrating the happenings and mishaps between airports connecting Europe and South America and being an artist, writer, filmmaker, foreigner, woman, and lover. I sometimes take Preparação para o Amor from my bookshelf, look at it, go through it, and eventually even take it on a trip with me to think about preparing something and preparing for something. A model? This morning I leafed through Leticia Obeid's book, preparing to write the newsletter, just to realise that memory works in clusters: it is not Leticia Obeid who has the editorial project I was thinking of and is also another writer whose name I recall being something like “Tamara”. This is a different person who is also Argentinian and that I read and researched a bit about at the same time I was reading Leticia, but I can't remember her name.
5. One day I was going to travel the following day and was talking to Aiko (A) on the phone, and we were talking about preparation, and Aiko was telling me about the novela (not novel, not novella, but novela—soap opera) she was doing on her Instagram, and she asked me if I would take Preparação para o Amor, the book, with me to the airport and onto the plane and to the trip and document it for her novela. I said yes, and the next day I went to the airport with the orange-covered book by Par(ent)esis, photographed and filmed it (us) in displacement, and sent it to Aiko. Aiko was supposed to be awake and posting in real-time, but she woke up late. When she woke up, she commented on the post I had just done with the cover of the book and the white coffee cup, saying she overslept. She started posting all the videos and pictures I had sent her and tagging Leticia Obeid, who started following the both of us and wrote a message, a bit stunned about what the hell was going on with her book but thanking us for taking it for a trip.
6. It is not so much about the books as it is about what I did and what Betraying Gestures can do with each one of them, what I model the books on, or what the books prepare Betraying Gestures for. Or Betraying Gestures prepares the books for. I think of a prepared piano, how to use and misuse something. I wish I could say more about prepared pianos; instead, I watch a performance of Bacchanale by John Cage, his first piece for a prepared piano.
7. So after a long morning of searching notes, my browser history, print screens, and WhatsApp conversations, I finally found the name of the artist whose practice I accidentally merged with Leticia Obeid's. Her name is Fernanda Laguna, and the other writer she also is is not "Tamara”, but Dalia Rosetti. Her editorial project is described as a DIY publishing space, an art gallery, an art supply store, and a meeting ground for Buenos Aires’ women and queer artists and writers. Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness, in English) is the name of the art gallery-publishing-meeting space. Belleza y Felicidad is a movement that began when Sergio de Loof, an important figure in the Argentinian art scene, invited Cecilia Pavón to do a show at the bar he owned, and Cecilia extended the invitation to Fernanda. They did a show called Fácil (Easy, in English); they showed framed poems written by both and made a catalogue composed of photocopies of the poems. On the last page of the catalogue, they thanked Sergio (in English and a tad of French), "Merci Sergio, king of beauty, queen of happiness”. This sentence anticipated the words that would name their space/publisher that would question individual authorships, another characteristic anticipated in the catalogue and the exhibition, as the poems weren’t signed—they had collective authorship. Cecilia and Fernanda referred to Belleza y Felicidad as a publisher in photocopies. I read about all these in a thesis called Literature is Something Very Fragile and I smile in correspondence; it is their emotional attachment to the mediation and conditions (technologic, economic, artistic, affective) and the immediacy and conceptual forcefulness between the writing and the publishing that make me smile in correspondence. For Belleza y Felicidad, circulation was more important than the object of the book itself—they were very concerned with the sociability of publishing. A project that stages all the social aesthetics of Belleza y Felicidad was Ceci y Fer, a magazine made of their email exchange after having a fallout. By the end of the edition, the poets had made up. Several reasons for their quarrel have been suggested by themselves in different texts, such as in Durazno Reverdeciente, a short story by Dalia Rosetti—Fernanda's lesbian heteronym for when she writes fiction.
8. Words have a way of coming back, and the word cluster when I say “memory seems to work in clusters” comes from reading about the US decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. Especially when writing in a language in which my relationship with the words is more incipient and the attention and need for new words are therefore higher, words have a way of coming back. On Wednesday, I had a long meeting with Mafe (M). I invited her to write a column (or what a column could be) for/in Betraying Gestures, and since then we’ve been speculating what this invitation will become. It seems that it will be a monthly column about language, noting her relationship with English as a foreign speaker of the language, working between languages: cinema and writing.