proyecto f (2017-2023)
instalación site-specific | estructura arquitectónica de treintaicuatro paneles en seda cruda, compilación 35mm fototransferidas a mano sobre textil, textos inéditos y objetos
este proyecto es una bitácora y reflexión multimedial, una instalación “site-specific” en la casa de cultura
ruth hernández torres, acerca de un individuo con quien estuve relacionándome intensamente por
más de un año en el extranjero. comprende compilaciones de textos inéditos, fotografías, sonidos,
objetos y una estructura arquitectónica cuasi laberinto construida con textiles mediante un sistema de
rieles.
de manera muy escueta, porque no sé cómo más contarlo, la casa de cultura ruth hernández se torna en una casa que, en primer lugar, alberga los primeros momentos de una relación y, cinco años más tarde los consolida y reivindica a modo de despojo. una casa anfitriona que invita a sus huéspedes a encontrar cobijo en algún rincón de lo ajeno y, a quedarse, pasada la hora de la siesta, en un tiempo detenido.
una f de fragmentos y fracasos.
26 songs | 1hr 45min
_____
133. i have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.
184. writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. i could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; i could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. but now that they have been shuffled around countless times –now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river– how could either of us tell the difference?
191. on the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. "if anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days," goethe wrote. "boyle relates an image of ten years." and who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. it is the oxygen of the air that blues it.
199. for to wish to forget how much you loved someone and then, to actually forget-can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. i have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." this acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. often i feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).
202. for the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable "memory fragment—often called a "trace" or an “engram"—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new "trace" to house the thought. and since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, i see mickey mouse in fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.
203. i remember, in the eighties, when crack first hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system forever, and you would thus never again be able to be content without it. i have no idea if this is true, but i will admit that it scared me off the drug.in the years since, i have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms—if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. in which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? how to recover?
204. lately i have been trying to learn something about "the fundamental impermanence of all things" from my collection of blue amulets, which i have placed on a ledge in my house that is, for a good half of the day, drenched in sunlight. the placement is intentional-i like to see the sun pass through the blue glass, the bottle of blue ink, the translucent blue stones. but the light is clearly destroying some of the objects, or at least bleaching out their blues. daily i think about moving the most vulnerable objects to a "cool, dark place," but the truth is that i have little to no instinct for protection. out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty-if one can be cruel to objects-i have given them up to their diminishment.
229. i am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.
232. perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you.
236. do not be overly troubled by this fact. "nine days out of ten," wrote merleau-ponty of cezanne, "all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration."
238. i want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when i would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; i would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
239. but now you are talking as if love were a consolation. simone weil warned otherwise. "love is not consolation," she wrote. "it is light."
240. all right then, let me try to rephrase. when i was alive, i aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.
bluets
maggie nelson
_____
un vuelo errático
como la paz a nuestra saciedad, le brotaron los hongos a la tierra mojada y se siguió ondulando la pampa y supe así que lo ondulado parece mecerse aunque esté quieto y que tiene más colores que lo llano: era el lomo de un perro desperezándose la tierra entera y la pelambre de sus alturas desparejas se parecía al agua cuando el viento le agota los reflejos. si antes la vida del camino me había sido celestial, ahora variaba del violeta intenso al pálido, al amarillo y al naranja, al blanco, al verde claro y al oscuro para dejar ver, de a ratos, los marrones, que eran pocos. era como si la pata que le faltaba al arcoiris hubiera estado derramándose en el suelo y así siguió, cada vez con más fuerza, con más precisión, como si los colores se definieran a medida que avanzábamos y la tierra misma volara ya no hecha polvo sino flores en el aire; las mariposas, con sus aleteos impulsivos, se mueven como si tomaran impulso, se les fuera gastando hasta casi detenerse y entonces, cuando podrían ser apenas un objeto del viento, empiezan otra vez. es un vuelo errático comparado con el de los pájaros, que, como brotados de las cuchillas, empezaron a abundar. la mayor parte de los pájaros planea. no aletean constantemente: comparten la intermitencia de las mariposas, detienen sus alas, las dejan abiertas, pero a diferencia de ellas, mantienen una trayectoria armoniosa, como si no les significara ningún esfuerzo; los picaflores están en el medio, entre los pájaros y las mariposas, por los colores, sí, pero también por su modo de volar, eléctrico incesante. tal vez están más cerca de los insectos. el aire era una masa viva de animales, el zumbido de las abejas y las moscas y los barigüí y los mosquitos era su respiración y yo empecé a respirar con ellos, me dejé estar en ese ruido grave que a la noche aumentaba por otro más irregular, el del croar de tanto bicho barroso. estábamos en zona de lagunas: el agua duplica la felicidad como duplica todo lo que espeja. y lo llena de vidas. […].
las aventuras de la china iron
gabriela cabezón cámara
_____
53
on golden ghosts, the teddy bear is gray, partially overlapping claire so that it blocks her gilded right arm. when young, perry's mother left his father for their milkman, who likewise left his wife and another lover to be with her. perry retreated into his bedroom to hide from the violent man, inventing a world with his teddy bear, alan measles. the beauty of having a room is that, while hidden there, we can imagine ourselves to be anywhere. the world not around us, any world might be around us, and any version of us in it. if you retreated into the hollow with me, the mountains could be our walls and the branches boughs of tomorrow. there would be no reason to imagine us apart. perry filled his room with very small airplanes. "i don't know what my mother's motivation was for marrying my father:" he later said, "perhaps she fell in love."
80
i demand that you make those postcard illustrations of your fingers to send into the world, appeasing your enraged admirers. they will tack them to their nightstands and tape them to their cupboards. when we are together, i will know that someone else is enthralled by the small white calluses of your palm. you are always going to have been with your boyfriend three years longer than you have been with me. and i, single i, will always have been with you longer than any new person i fall for. choreography is one way to articulate time, your body moving us forward. a finger tapping.
86
this is what it's about again, joy from someone else. it may rise from inside my red, red body, but i need a witness, a splinter that lets my hand know it can hold. the camera makes of time an audience, while dance makes of time a dying fish. to choreograph our story, i mimic the bonds of water, i imagine the weight of another moon. when i was very young, i would sing the highest notes i could reach, my eyes closed as i pictured the beauty of a woman on a stage. eventually, reaching higher, my singing would become a scream. and you, how happy you must be, telling me about him and him about me. over whiskey, i answer my friend that i get to see you monthly.
96
i want a scene like in the movies, you arriving home and me at the window, tossing your golf clubs out. "i'll be at my mother's! don't even think of calling!" all the while wishing i could stay. but you'll need to marry me, before the divorce. you'll need to dab red wine off my lips before i meet your family, and i'll need to crush glass in a napkin. today, the only reason we have to leave each other is each other, all the pretenses washed away in the flood of our maturity. what nerve, to engage me with open and honest conversation. what nerve, to touch my cheek. "however trite and dilettante the images i put on clay," perry says, "the material would bring it, literally, down to earth."
100
look how easy it is to hate someone for being gorgeous. you in your mink! with your eyelashes, too! i want to find dinner parties and bring you there so people know that we are together, that i must have quite the personality. had the earth the view of a different celestial plane, we would hace a different cosmology, too. the myths we splay on the sky, the beliefs to which we must adhere. with a second sun to compare our star to, we would have known the holy is flawed and dependent. instead, we circled the same white light and wrote it poems. i can't handle it anymore, all the boys who try to pick you up, never knowing that you leave tabs unpaid and rarely compost. your boyfriend is all as a duck in a pond, like he has always known the sun and its wavering reflection.
101
and how, then, do i tell if you love me? your sigh is sharp again, as though that's a reply. in one moment of meat joy, the bodies' movement reads as joy, while the next, they wrestle one another without script. these moments are no different, an ecstasy emphasizing how pain is sacred. this is why the molecules of ice lose each other and drift apart. the most available recording of schneeman's performance is actually three recordings spliced together, as one is always so many versions of itself. the while when we felt the same of one another, think of me as that person again, please, and i will think of you and your boyfriend as a tousle. it is impossible to track each dancer's motivation through the edits. at the end, while they toss themselves in paper trash, a girl group sings, "that's the way boys are."
105
how many of us are there? how many times is something performed before there is a very real consistency to it, and how many times more? no one is naked in the film, just thin briefs and bras. it is an empty act to reveal everything. "it just seems so feminist," you say, "like in the 90s." but still i want a three-person bed some nights, enough space to sleep alone. still i want us to be always slipping together in blue paint, everyone off-screen and the camera's steady focus. at the trail's dead end, i'll consider the brush before turning and heading back. if we ever finish performing, i'll look again at our bodies and surely something will have been accomplished.
110
in physics, mach's principle states that the movements closest to our bodies are controlled by all the mass of the universe. absent the distant cosmos, i would reach for you with new motion. the neutrinos would float undetected through us in a different way than they float undetected through us now. think of all our forgotten pasts, the trees we climbed that are still standing or that have fallen. so many people taking the fruit of the field into their growing bodies. and here i am, near a house in the mountains, ignorant of so much that pulls on us. illustrating the principle, textbooks usually describe a person spinning in a field, their arms lifting from their body as they watch the sky turn. see? i want to say. none of it was my fault.
syzygy, beauty
t fleischmann
Este proyecto es apoyado en parte por la Asociación Nacional de Artes y Cultura Latina (NALAC) y la Fundación Flamboyán a través de una subvención del Programa de Becas NALAC del Fondo para las Artes.
Gracias a Casa Ruth y a la Junta Comunitaria de Río Piedras, a Plataforma Eje y a Beta-Local. Gracias a todas las personas que dieron de su tiempo y sus manos.
