Echoes (reading presence)

Renata Cernadas Gaspar and Alia Zapparova

Interruption

- she clears her throat -

A break

Please go on

You were saying...?

I’ve been thinking about vulnerability.

The

vulnerability of a break, an interruption. An opening,

towards

something about freedom, no

something about responsibility, no no

I hesitate again something unspecified perhaps unnameable

I mean, against

a

no

maybe

I want to say something for which I have no words

'Every voyage is the unfolding of a poetic' [Trinh T. Minh-ha]

Every gesture is a response.

'There is no such thing as solid ground' [Otobong Nkanga]

Why am I thinking about voyages? I have not left this city for a year, but I have left within it many times, there are many places within it I have not left for a long time.

'to see what the eye hears, and hear what the ear sees' [Trinh T. Minh-ha]

The folding and unfolding of a life, a sentence, to arrive and to pause

A voice, possibility of possibilities

A grey day, the sky is the same blank white as the page on my screen, it is disorienting to look at one and the other. A day to walk to an office, to fill in a form, to register my place of residence. Presences are stamped and gathered in archives. Absences are absent.

Another grey day of packing. Packing belongings in boxes. Belong - ings. Cardboard boxes containing my belongings. Belong - ings sent in a voyage, through different countries, to another place of residence. Why am I thinking of belonging? I have been in transit for many years, and I have always found residence in the elsewhere.

The absence of belonging has become present.

The absence of belonging, perhaps that is where presence starts. To belong is to be absent from elsewhere.

(Sometimes I want to go home, but I’m not sure where home is. To live in absence. My home is on a bookshelf, I heard someone say. For the first time in years, I have a bookshelf that belongs to me. It’s not very stable. The more stable a life, the more stable the bookshelves, the more they are able to provide a home in the absence of belonging. A solid ground for belong-ings.)

'A map is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves' [Dionne Brand]

The more I try to bring myself back to the present, the more I seem to travel.

(A tendency. A repetition. A tendency to repeat. A direction of sorts).

It might be that I am attempting to retrieve an almost forgotten self which doesn’t want to be found.

(Not an energy-saving mechanism but perhaps a way of inhabiting a body without a place of residence.)

I am not sure who is present - who are the selves that remain, willful enough to continue the conversation.

(A map. A gesture towards self-assembly.)

A gesture towards a genealogy of selves a body without a place a place without memory a voice

perhaps the question is how (and where, and when) to continue. And if continuing is not an option, how to dis-continue and

inhabit everything unformed without waiting (hoping) for the familiar forms to return. And re-inhabit, re-continue, or, erase and start again, or

and repeat endlessly and multiply (selves?) without going anywhere (staying at home)

or

and

shaping and re-shaping possibilities - perhaps a dance of multiple selves - an amorphous amalgamation which can indeed be generative of something else

Something else

Unformed

Something other

A meeting with time A time of re-inhabiting the present

in constant exchange and polyrhythmically together with many other selves

A meeting with time A time for re-inventing what feels present

Body, in transit silence on the page gap pause

Interdependency, reciprocity Otherwise

The future is something that you need to care for in the present Opacity

The present exceeds includes the future that is already here

Refusing control refusing totality

Unruly sensing listening

how, where, when are the voices present?

no answer


we’re (still) in the middle


so we begin again

An echo is an echo of your presence

Text presented at the Nordic Summer University (NSU) Circle 7 – Artistic Research / Performing Heterotopia; Winter (Dis)Symposium / Distant and Dispersed; March 2021; Online