Correspondence 2
Janaina Behling, 2019
In Portuguese, contemporary thinking about gesture in linguistic studies is almost restricted to the teaching of sign languages. It is possible that this limitation is reminiscent of the Greeks and Romans, when speakers such as Pluto and Horace each defend, each in their own time and manner, the subterfuges and benefits of silent reading and writing. This is not at all extraordinary, although it may be inferred that there is a split relationship between body and language in which the unsaid has gone unnoticed or ignored by Classical Rhetoric since Antiquity, draining gesture into interface fields such as Education and the Arts.
When we met at “Linha de Fuga”, what most moved me was exactly remembering these things. That gesture is something for the deaf. That even Plautus and Horace may sometimes have wished to be deaf. That this kind of desire departs from what has been lost between body and language as a human legacy. And the human, we agreed together, one afternoon during the festival, is the home where language lives.
From then on, the idea of the documentation started being tracking down lost links in the silent-speaking body from gesture's underground inheritances. I understood that this would be our secret agreement as documentalists. In each other’s fortune or misfortune, the idea became in fact to strip - not of garments or modesty, but of the reflective action within those subterraneans – each one’s sole gesture and that could perhaps lead us to the full genesis of all gestures in space, of all present bodies, the atomization, the decimation, the compendium, the synthesis, the summary, zero. The morphology of gesture. The writing of the body. Tracing the morphology of gesture would be like submerging from the Dantesque hells where the deaf laugh at us with our grammars. And building, perhaps, an almost unique understanding of the body as it was born in an ephemeral performative festival that will not happen this way again. Because gesture is what gives meaning to movement when it is nothing. From then on, I think I understood what happened to Linguistics. It tried to hide from us that the Tower of Babel was not made of many languages, but of many gestures. And that would be the end of the vernacular. There would be no Iliad nor Odyssey. Nor the Bible. Camões would have been born blind in both eyes.
I may be mistaken. Or I may not. We may. The knack is to ask the Lab participants and let them tell you what from the traditions of their gestures builds the humans which they are. Artists, we know. We want to document the not knowing of simple answers from the participants whose questions don't say a thing and don’t even make sense: what memory has marked you? What incident? What is the morphology of gesture?
When you explained to me the relationship between participants' framing plans, I understood that there was a first clue. Not every part of the body would correspond to a whole saying and if gesture is what gives meaning to a movement, what would be the whole saying of a gesture by repeating itself in the body without repeating, by deceiving even the camera and its framings?
This is how I watch Saeed Pezeshki's presentation, the first living proof of this hypothesis that Babel was made up, that gesture is multilingual and came before the body to become an idea. He speaks Spanish and is of Arabic origin, loving what he remembers and remembering what he loves by quoting Agamben, but warning us, in that quest for the possible zero of the gesture, that there will be an axis, an axis by which the body belongs, standing up by gravity itself. And it spins. And it spins. And it spins. And it spins. At each complete circle I see a manifest of love for the centre. Perhaps the form of gesture being more than a clockwise process.
At Pátio da Inquisição we didn't know yet, but we were already talking about a documentation plan which was totally different from our initial proposals, when you talked of the blind and I of the deaf or, in some way, in a kind of a search for abstraction within so many reading and writing possibilities that use bodies in the spaces of the city of Coimbra. I said we were at a level of understanding of this abstraction, we too immersed, as documenters, in the creative potential of people who write gesture from dance, from the visual arts and from poetry. There are several possibilities of writing, of the materialization of the gesture, or this appropriation of space that was created as a result of reading, speaking and of silence in motion. In this case, the gesture would be a way or a link to the connection between the real and the surreal life of the city. Nevertheless, it wasn’t possible to imagine this connection when you, trapped in a convent room, with the windows hermetically sealed in nineteenth-century landscapes, had to say the minimum. Though you had the most precious source of all interpretation possibilities left: your funny and destructive look. In that case, it made perfect sense having “Linha de Fuga” take place in Coimbra and occupying these places of non-texts with the bodies of a not there, from there, theirs. Especially because, when this occupation increasingly happens, Coimbra will be able to rid itself of itself and be so much more beautiful and absurd in its own abstractions that it will arrive - like you in your workshop with Luciana Fina, - to the caricature of the youths in black and their humiliating rites - whose memory of a passage from Vittorio de Sica's “Miracle in Milan” beautifully suggests - that they could disappear on flying brooms and leave us in an abstraction in peace, trying to talk to the city as the graffiti on the walls does: unique, changing from accusations of infantilization of fascism and its musty freshness.
When we met at “Linha de Fuga”, what most moved me was exactly remembering these things. That gesture is something for the deaf. That even Plautus and Horace may sometimes have wished to be deaf. That this kind of desire departs from what has been lost between body and language as a human legacy. And the human, we agreed together, one afternoon during the festival, is the home where language lives.
From then on, the idea of the documentation started being tracking down lost links in the silent-speaking body from gesture's underground inheritances. I understood that this would be our secret agreement as documentalists. In each other’s fortune or misfortune, the idea became in fact to strip - not of garments or modesty, but of the reflective action within those subterraneans – each one’s sole gesture and that could perhaps lead us to the full genesis of all gestures in space, of all present bodies, the atomization, the decimation, the compendium, the synthesis, the summary, zero. The morphology of gesture. The writing of the body. Tracing the morphology of gesture would be like submerging from the Dantesque hells where the deaf laugh at us with our grammars. And building, perhaps, an almost unique understanding of the body as it was born in an ephemeral performative festival that will not happen this way again. Because gesture is what gives meaning to movement when it is nothing. From then on, I think I understood what happened to Linguistics. It tried to hide from us that the Tower of Babel was not made of many languages, but of many gestures. And that would be the end of the vernacular. There would be no Iliad nor Odyssey. Nor the Bible. Camões would have been born blind in both eyes.
I may be mistaken. Or I may not. We may. The knack is to ask the Lab participants and let them tell you what from the traditions of their gestures builds the humans which they are. Artists, we know. We want to document the not knowing of simple answers from the participants whose questions don't say a thing and don’t even make sense: what memory has marked you? What incident? What is the morphology of gesture?
When you explained to me the relationship between participants' framing plans, I understood that there was a first clue. Not every part of the body would correspond to a whole saying and if gesture is what gives meaning to a movement, what would be the whole saying of a gesture by repeating itself in the body without repeating, by deceiving even the camera and its framings?
This is how I watch Saeed Pezeshki's presentation, the first living proof of this hypothesis that Babel was made up, that gesture is multilingual and came before the body to become an idea. He speaks Spanish and is of Arabic origin, loving what he remembers and remembering what he loves by quoting Agamben, but warning us, in that quest for the possible zero of the gesture, that there will be an axis, an axis by which the body belongs, standing up by gravity itself. And it spins. And it spins. And it spins. And it spins. At each complete circle I see a manifest of love for the centre. Perhaps the form of gesture being more than a clockwise process.
At Pátio da Inquisição we didn't know yet, but we were already talking about a documentation plan which was totally different from our initial proposals, when you talked of the blind and I of the deaf or, in some way, in a kind of a search for abstraction within so many reading and writing possibilities that use bodies in the spaces of the city of Coimbra. I said we were at a level of understanding of this abstraction, we too immersed, as documenters, in the creative potential of people who write gesture from dance, from the visual arts and from poetry. There are several possibilities of writing, of the materialization of the gesture, or this appropriation of space that was created as a result of reading, speaking and of silence in motion. In this case, the gesture would be a way or a link to the connection between the real and the surreal life of the city. Nevertheless, it wasn’t possible to imagine this connection when you, trapped in a convent room, with the windows hermetically sealed in nineteenth-century landscapes, had to say the minimum. Though you had the most precious source of all interpretation possibilities left: your funny and destructive look. In that case, it made perfect sense having “Linha de Fuga” take place in Coimbra and occupying these places of non-texts with the bodies of a not there, from there, theirs. Especially because, when this occupation increasingly happens, Coimbra will be able to rid itself of itself and be so much more beautiful and absurd in its own abstractions that it will arrive - like you in your workshop with Luciana Fina, - to the caricature of the youths in black and their humiliating rites - whose memory of a passage from Vittorio de Sica's “Miracle in Milan” beautifully suggests - that they could disappear on flying brooms and leave us in an abstraction in peace, trying to talk to the city as the graffiti on the walls does: unique, changing from accusations of infantilization of fascism and its musty freshness.
.svg){kind=small}
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
