PICPOETRY

This Friday 22nd of Nov, I have been kindly invited to give a keynote performance at @ahra_2024 Architectural Humanities Research Association organised by @teresastoppani @_parasight and @elliemisty at @norwichuni_architecture. The theme of the conference (but can we really talk about conference in this expansive and madly rich festival of practices and ideas?) is Body Matters. For my performance I return to my two fiction books about water, The Book of Water (eris.press/The-Book-of-Water) and Our Distance Became Water (eris.press/Our-Distance-Became-Water) published by ERIS in 2023 and 2024 respectively, to draw connections between the body of law and the body of water.

The connections are silent but hopefully making waves. Oh and there will be a lot of narcissism too (you know, narcissus looking into water and falling in love with his reflection - all metaphorical of course :) Stay tuned for some silly selfies live from the stage.

There never was an outside. All you did was decorate your inside with fields and open skies, hanging gardens and smells of waves. But then, a lightbulb will switch on and your illusion will become your dream.

Like fireworks on the other side of the planet, we see a slice of illuminated heavens, but only a slice, and we hope, we want to believe, that the other side is seen at the same time by our dreams, the people who never pick up when we run towards the beach that holds the lights. Because deep down we and the world remain platonic.

This year’s Venice Biennale was full of text. Manifestos, genealogies, broken words, text as installation, and so on. This can only mean one thing: that artists want to be understood, their political and ontological messages need to come across crystal clear, the urgency of the situation to be appreciated even by the casual viewer.

The article is free to download. Link on today’s story and on my profile.

I stopped at the entrance.
In front of me, a fear of a god.
On my back, a fear of the world.
Which draught does my exhale feed?

Dress me in my best. Treat me as I need you: eternally promising to be as fleeting as the earth under your feet. Be who I need you: my breath my waste my waiting. Leave when I need you: of that distance you fill with perfume I have but dreams.

Whichever door you open, you find a mirror.

If you could, what would you choose? Be light, be air and let me fly in you, let me be held by you? Or be wood, be turf and let me lie down on you, let me hold you? If you could, would you choose at all?

He had no words. Just images. He lived in a chain of visuals linked up in a syntax of colours. He dreamt of landscapes as portraits and books of open swimming pools. His language was shapes. And then he heard a sound.

Oh we waited for the large one to come and save us from ourselves.

Your dollhouses burn from within. Little fires of domestic desire consuming the sugarwalls of your safety, oh if only my inbreath could break all windows open, maybe then we could all flow and gather around the fire.

The fall of the father. No pedestal left of course. From floor to floor, smiling inanely to the kindness of strangers. A pocket of fragility, broken clay spread on the dead grass; a fold of mortality, hold the mirror but narrower; a gift of the abject, frothy milk on your moustache. Oh and a short branch of honeysuckle that hasn’t flowered yet.

The air between the skins between the pores between the dreams between the sheets between the nights between the names between the futures.

and when finally
they tired of carrying the light,
they became light.

Become tap become kitchen sink become glass become mirror become your own reflection become the plant that looks at himself before it becomes the plant become water and pour out of the tap become tap become

That was a random meeting.

Thank you for what you said. Thank you for listening. Thank you for making the space. No, thank you for stepping into the space. Thank you for not echoing me. Thank you for not taking my words for granted. Thank you for holding the sentences. Thank you for letting them unfold in the evening breeze. Thank you for being a wave. No, thank you for being water.

And once your secret touches the light, your body will ache for the shadow so amply offered. But you must let it hold you up, buoyant prince of other breezes. You must learn how to levitate in the other side of the light.

Nothing to say. The palimpsest on the walls talks of a silence that floods your sentences. No, I am still interested. No, I really want to listen to you. But there is simply no time. I suggest we wrap the whispers around our shoulders and fix our eyes ahead.

We had stopped waiting, our knees melted, our minds dipped in crackdry stupor, and just then, the rain of charcoal stars finally fell on us, a song it was, upside down angels it was, an echo of the world without up there it was. And we were dissolved.

What was the thing you said? I remember you repeated it too. It kept resonating in my mind, an echo across the narrow beds, a deed cast into the water, round the globe and back, it returned to me like a wave, no bottle just words. But the words are now gone and I only have the sense of wetness on my lips.

Whatever the dam, the green will come.

That door never shuts. And the water sits with us for tea while the evening fails to rise. What was this constant awakening, remember?, the never ending beginning that had us breathing in spasms of vorfreude, children whose mothers have gone to bed before them.

Protect me from the rain of those busy wet gods pouring down wrath and wrong, but turn that umbrella upside down so that it gathers the moisture to bathe into once I wake up.

You were lighting them one by one, wish or no wish, and the others waited till you finished your work to start singing. But you carried on perhaps for too long and the lighting took you perhaps too far, so far that the stage opened and became next day’s sky. And they still waited to sing.

We are standing still, breath arrested movement arrayed, on the surface of a vortex.

The tempest. Or how to point at the weather and become elemental. Or how to insert yourself softly into the air. Or how to taste the globe. Or how to begin falling like rain.

While he was cooking, smells and love were coming out of the kitchen windows forming clouds of promise in the neighbourhood. This the flesh of the dinner party, he announced with a certain joyful hesitation. People started coming in, crossing the shallow waters with a large slurping gait. They knew that the dinner would be another success.

Remember when you played with cardboard cities, all hard edges hiding a home you never had but always made perfect, teacosy and puffed up sofa cushions? That city exists and you live in it, but now you know that you need to open the window and let the water surge in, drench your cardboard city into a flatness.

It only lights once an evening, in that space between the departing back and the softness of the arriving step, a slipper or a walking stick touching hesitantly the stones, the gaze down so that the light always comes unexpected, a borrowed moon, a dying star.

Felt cute. I hereby promise I shall never delete, annul, or cancel it. Neither later nor ever. I solemnly embrace my narcissism and my pseudogioconda smirk in a random bathroom toilet because, oh you know, it’s Sunday and the breaths can be a bit more open.

Down and you run away, up and you swallow me whole, down and you only show your departing back not even a wave on your hair, up and you move in with me eating my walls and spitting my past. Or just sit here next to me, tenth step up eleventh down, the sun feels warm this afternoon.

On lapping gently, my hand my soul, I touch your moisture, my surface my reflection, and feel your wave, my other my other, lapping back.

Trace me that part of my body that fits like a jigsaw puzzle the sky that is yours. And lift me from the root of my slumber, get my whole afternoon trembling with a horizon of evening. And stay but don’t complete the picture. This is not our work. The table is large and many years long, and pieces will be flown away by the birds below.

The #australiapavilion with the work of #archiemoore won the golden Lion at #venicebiennale biennale. I was underwhelmed when I visited it despite being very interested in the concept. The space was flooded by a spectacular textuality (genealogy, legality, provenance) but the content remained entirely inaccessible. The text was either scribbled high up on the wall or on redacted documents behind a water moat. So it was a text not to be read: the signified (if one read the blurb) without the signifier (to paraphrase Barthes).

I am currently writing a text report on the Venice biennale and I’m focusing on the uses of text which were many, varied and often disturbing. I might therefore change my mind while I think of the issues. But as it stands, the visual and aesthetic impact on me was insignificant (and dare I say, not just me: in this madly packed preopening, with the longest queues for every pavilion I’ve ever seen, the Australian pavilion had no queues whatsoever). (Signifiers without signifieds perhaps but hey)

The outfit seemed to work when I left home that day.
Pic @tiquetone

You will always wonder, is this the corridor?, you will never cease wondering even when your feet will be tangled in the green mane of your city and your gaze will be fixed in the shallows, is this the corridor I am looking for, you will always wonder, because amongst all the corridors of all the cities, you still think there is only one that will lead you home, and you will never cease wondering, even though you know you’ve walked countless corridors in countless cities and they have all led you home.

This might be my favourite pic (as Ifor said, Prada wrap up) shot by @corruptnegatives of the finale of this year’s Westminster Law School Degree Show, the culmination of a year of hard work by students, colleagues and artists in residence.

This year the students created artefacts on their moment of encounter with the law or justice or injustice that made them realise their political responsibility as law students. We had paintings, installations, sculptures, photography, collages, videos, performances and above all we had vast emotions, strong political positions and some exceptional creativity. We have also had the privilege of showing the poetic film PROGRESS (1968) on racism and the windrush generation directed by our alumna and now artist and filmmaker @adacotton together with @de_archive and coproduced with @africanstreetstyle

Thanks to this year’s @lawtheorylab artists in residence @jules.rochielle @danaetheo10 @__b.13.r__ @marsoriviere and Yue Ang. Huge thanks also to the dream team @jchryssostalis @__._.dg._.__ Anna Chronopoulou and Uche Ani, as well as @waltzandwendt and the sweet volunteers facilitated by @marloesspreeuw for installing in a battle against time!
Huge thanks to @westminster.law.school for all the love and support and of course to the @uniwestminster for providing the freedom and space to bring art and law together at Ambika P3.

Already planning 2025!

glitches in the service of collective freedom

@lalou_zone meditative political project of dialogue beyond the machine.

Reposted from @lawtheorylab Join us for this year’s Westminster Law School Degree Show! We are the only Law school globally with a final year Degree Show where all final year students produce an artefact reflecting on their encounter with law, justice and injustice. Personal, moving, often incredibly traumatic and therapeutic.

This Thursday 21st of March at Ambika P3, Marylebone Building, University of Westminster, from 4 till 7pm.

Ceremonies and Film Show by our alumna turned ethnomusicologist, artist and filmmaker @adacotton will commence at around 5pm. We will also have a special iftar moment at around 6:15.

Let @op27ewaart know if you’d like to attend so we add you to the list.

#westminsterlawschool #universityofwestminster #law #art #lawandtheory #exhibition #london #marylebone

REMINDER: All invited! I want a party! No need to RSVP, just show up.

Top floor, Hatchard’s Piccadilly, this Wed 6pm with David Cunningham, Polly Gould and me launching this most floatable of books.

Our Distance Became Water, Eris 2024.

Preorder at
eris.press/Our-Distance-Became-Water

In the rush of the evening, the doubles become one and the depths emerge onto the surface. Here we all are, flat and full of breath, waiting for the end of water.

My novel is OUT! And you’re invited to our Grand Launch on Wednesday 13th of March, 6-8pm, at Hatchard’s Piccadilly - only the oldest, chicest, cosiest bookshop in Britain patronised by the Royal family and republicans alike (like me ;)

I will be reading from the book and discussing it with David Cunningham, Professor of English and Editor of Radical Philosophy, and Polly Gould, Artist, Author and Lecturer at Bartlett School of Architecture UCL

OUR DISTANCE BECAME WATER “A visual, philosophical novel about a world filled with water. An arresting vision of the wages of ecological disaster, Our Distance Became Water is at once lyrical, moving, and psychologically acute. Endlessly inventive in both its style and its substance, this is a singularly powerful literary response to environmental change.”

No need to RSVP - just put it in your calendar and bring friends too! I want a PARTYYYYY!!

More info at andreaspm.com

Please answer the poll: Is this… (please choose only one answer):

Elogio a Rio VIII : when your hand doesn’t like your father

Elogio a Rio VII : when your flesh becomes a love letter between forests

Elogio a Rio VI : when your light is expected and feared

Elogio a Rio V: when your flesh writes parallel lines

Elogio a Rio IV : o melhor do Rio

Elogio a Rio III : when your history is not your own

Elogio a Rio II : when the curve of your thinking listens to the sky

Elogio a Rio I : when your flesh spreads on the curve of the planet

Nothing prepares for scale.

@carnavaldorio2024

Balanced act.
But time doesn’t abide.
In case of life, break the glass.

We have no choice. Touch is all there is, yet touch hurls us forward, a mad sail across mad seas, a swerve and a turn, and just like that, we sink and sink; yet, just like that, scathed and drenched, we reach the edge of our horizon.

Your lines meet, I’m sure. On this space-amongst that the round stays round, your words end up in a phrase that hugs the water edge.

The space-amongst us, a different country a different season, we hold on to it like a dove in prestidigitating hands, no right to it just nestling it gently.