PICPOETRY

Picpoetry: unedited mobile photography and rapidly, almost automatic unedited poetic prose writing, ideally on the spot in order to capture the atmospherics of the specific time and space. I upload all my picpoetry on Instagram under the name picpoet – one of the oldest poets of Instagram combining visual and poetic prose. Picpoetry is a method I invented in 2009 in order to explore an ontology of presence without falling into the standard trappings of visual and textual phenomenology. There have been two waves of picpoetry. The first one, with about 600 picpoems, ended in July 2013 were all except for the very last picpoem were ceremoniously deleted for picpoet’s suicide. The second one, since 2014 and still ongoing, counts more than 1000 picpoems and can be found below and on Instagram.

“And our distance became water” 185x230x10cm Oil, acrylic, geso, ground spices and VCAG1 scent composition by @marina_barcenilla on nine layers of soaked corrugated cardboard sheets. 

This is one of my central pieces of @robertcervera and my current show at Danielle Arnaud, illuminated by natural light coming through a half-opened shutter. An altar (as a friend called it) to the impossible promise of escaping. Water everywhere. 

Open Thu-Sat 2-6pm and by appointment till the 29th of April
Becoming Water: A performance for tubes, water, breath, two bodies and one book. 

This was part of the last out of four performances @robertcervera and I did during our opening last week. The adrenalin was as high as the fatigue and the emotional depth of the sounds and movements produced in this one were markedly different to the previous ones. 

A Constellation of conduits was channeled between us, and our distance became water is on at @daniellearnaudgallery till the 29th of April.

Video by @__._.dg._.__
Reposted • @daniellearnaudgallery 𝔹𝕖𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕕 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕔𝕖𝕟𝕖𝕤

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos rehearsing ‘Becoming water’, a performance which will take place tomorrow Friday 24

‘A constellation of conduits was channelled between us, and our distance became water’

Robert Cervera and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Due to the nature of the exhibition it is essential to book a viewing slot: either 4pm, 5pm, 6pm or 7pm.
Please contact danielle@daniellearnaud.com
A constellation of conduits was channeled between us, and our distance became water. 

Working on the LP cover @robertcervera and I are producing for our exhibition (merch, innit), customising his photograph of tubes with more more more canal water.
And it’s here! My new novel Our Distance Became Water that will be the catalogue for my upcoming exhibition. Now PAINT!
The flatness of home, embrace that turns the folds inside out, but all these pages write the same thing, one stentorian sentence was strewn across all terraces.
and you wore the whole sea in one gesture
Valentine’s revenge
BOOK LAUNCH! We are launching the Book of Water on Wed 22nd of Feb 6pm at @daniellearnaudgallery The aquiferous @iforduncan and I will be in conversation :) Plus sneak preview readings of my forthcoming novel Our Distance Became Water, which is the main textual base for @robertcervera and my upcoming solo exhibition, always at Danielle Arnaud, end of March (but more on this later).
RSVP for the book launch at danielle@daniellearnaud.com
Take a seat. Become one with the planet. Forget yourself.
The waiting would never reach my face. It is just a question of angle. But I remained, transfixed by the possibilities of a square escape.
You climb in the forest of your day and you encounter the evening of your brain. You sit together and touch skins. It feels warm and alien. You are not ready yet. You climb out again.
Inlet surrounded by my White Sea,
of a fragile self-reliance, 
delusional but kind, 
let me float, 
let me hide where I come from, 
cut that lore.
Ceci n’est pas Venise
Never choose 
between 
light and dark
Break something 
before you break down
I could never be painted the way you would want me to be. And that’s what the end is. But I crawl and under the duvet of your skin I find your beginning.
Two turns to the right, three and a half turns to the left, soft rolling till you hear the click, repeat the whole process twice, and you’re finally out.
Careful. The last step is always the one that floats away. If you’re not careful enough, your body might slide deep in the veiled green of that parallel dream. If you’re lucky though, the step will float away with you on it, surfing your life from above like Phaethon.
He knew that eventually he would become part of the geometry. Nothing changed. Maybe just one thing: the breeze felt different on his body, as if mini cyclones nestled in its alcoves, making everything just a little bit draughtier.
The worldly loneliness of the selfie-taker
This just found a new and beautiful home. The vegetal waves of Sinking Cities VII conversing with the plant rounds of the host’s pots. The work and I couldn’t be happier!
You don’t step on the red plaque. You don’t step on the cracks of the pavement. You don’t step on the doorstep. You don’t step where that furious angel just took off. You don’t step where your life starts. You don’t step where this moment leaks. You don’t step on the one who becomes you. You don’t step on your own steps. You never never return.
A touch on your skin reaching you from the past, you are always where you left behind, that Christmas was all you ever lived and all you will ever become. Get on with that set now, it’s not long till the morning comes when everything same begins anew.
Celebrate! Because we are privileged to be alive, privileged to be growing older, privilege to be with people. And above all, privileged to have chocolate!
Until then, 
We’ll have to muddle through. 
Somehow.
Somehow.
There was a song between those walls, whistled by a colour gone and a colour arriving, that’s when the trees started moving towards the edge of a beautiful cliff, with my body a measure of distances and gentle kinks.
#venice #venezia
Collecting airs, collecting lights, collecting dust. Interior decoration with a recent triptych of mine.
#venice #christmasinvenice #christmaslights #reflection #venezia #thenight
Diving Breathing Forgetting Forgiving
Because you felt that there was an end to this universe. Because you sensed a breath of an ocean that wasn’t meant for crossing. Because you woke up in my skin, swallowing my lake, extending my body. Because you are no longer you, I am pinning the sun for you.
“The stories of Book of Water are so condensed and beautifully nuanced they can be read almost as a sequence of prose poems linked by a series of ‘liquid bridges’. The Book of Water will haunt you with the resonance of its poetic undoing long after it has slipped from your hands.”

—Alisson Smith, THE LINCOLN REVIEW

Out on Monday! Think Xmas gifts : we’ve got to make this a best seller so that we get a second edition quickly (life goals haha)

https://eris.press/The-Book-of-Water
And just like that, you dropped out of the painting and into my world.
Squeeze your world into the brackets 
but keep a piece that releases sky.
Our water is better than the one outside. We lock the door and seal the glass. Nothing mixes. We are so afraid, we drown. But our bowl is cut glass, our water limpid, our sky diffracted.
Super excited: the Book of Water is finally coming out in English on a translation by Sakis Kyratzis with three new stories in addition to the Greek publication by Thines almost 5 years ago. This time, the publisher is Eris, an extraordinary independent publisher that has already published works by Giorgio Agamben, the new biography of Francis Bacon by Peppiatt, Saatchi's autobiography, Edith Warton, Dora Malech, and oh my god, me too! Preorder for the 6th of December on the link below.

(And the reviews so far are humbling
"You don’t so much read The Book of Water, you float in it. These haunting little fictions heighten some senses while softening others, to an effect that is curiously hallucinatory. Never have words felt so liquid, or stories so cool and refreshing.
—Robert Shearman")

PREORDER with free postage at:
eris.press/The-Book-of-Water
You pay and you pay and you pay and you owe and you don’t own and you pay to own and you own not even your own but you pay and you pay and you pay to pay what you owe but what you owe is why you are never your own
New Yorking it. And yet, gladly, not fitting in. Remaining a Londoner in aesthetics, accent, and sense of personal space. Something, however, might have rubbed off.
This evening had no light of its own. It borrowed the light of past evenings. It touched it without claiming it. It allowed it to bathe its surfaces. And then it turned towards the future.
Posted @withrepost • @artemisherber Playing and exploring ideas with my friend and fellow artist Andreas with “Wearables” for performance. We had such an energetic and creative time. In the last days we approached my sculptures made of corrugated cardboard as coats and covers exploring states of the human and posthuman condition such as conflict, confluence, confidence, and confinement  #performance #cardboardart #sculpture #studiowork #collaboration
Performing Conflict/Confluence with @artemisherber and her sculptures at a haunted Baltimore mansion
For there never was an end that tied to an end. It was all middles tying up to other middles, all concave homes of our bird-eye dreams, warm nests of tropical returns where we slept with boas and hymens, because that’s what our humanity needed.
Performing The Real Law at Cardozo School of Law, New York, the conclusion to the Post-Critical Perspectives on Critical Legal Studies. Photo by @evamuellerart
The Real Law (On Narcissism) performing / being performed now in the Moot Court at Cardozo Law School
This Sunday at around 16:00 US/20:00 GMT/21:00 CET I am giving the closing performance lecture for this extraordinary event with the most humblingly stellar participants at Cardozo Law School NYC. Come along if in town and if not, there’s a zoom link you can join. I may or may not be undressing for the camera 😉
 
Link:
https://yeshiva-university.zoom.us/j/98678687325
Tokyo in New York
The Ptolemean Epoch
Public displays of affection outside my studio in Venice. Love it.
She was trapped in a flock of identical constellations, binary glass rooms floating in the abyss, not looking not reflecting, just one gigantic moment of choice endlessly repeated. In time she developed a technique where she also split into two and became other to herself. Now, she only needed to deal with that nagging sense of seeking. Because she knew, or one of them knew, that she didn’t want to be found.
And he was grateful. He led the life he couldn’t even dream of. He saw himself parading on this world like a galley of joy. He saw himself shine, a gentle moment of armature arching a small planet of scented flowers opening in the late evening. But he was still not inhabiting that planet. He was still one body sliding along his own dream life, curating it from a distance.
every archipelago was a continent
But whatever you, never look behind you.
To begin with a question: has the balance ever been found? To carry on with a fear: we are perched on the edge always and in ways that we cannot even see. To end with a promise: eventually, even the edge will drop us.
There was that moment, everyone remembers it still, when the verticality we so carefully built finally abandoned us, and we had to learn to survive on a flat horizontality. All our steps led to yet another horizon. None of our steps could ever lead higher or lower. We were finally one with the planet.
A wave knocked on the door. The door half-opened. Nothing moved. The wave stayed a wave, no leak or flattening. The space the other side of the door remained dry. But the door never shut again.
Come towards me but don’t turn to look at me. Walk backwards, never stop showing me your back, there’s your history nestled between your shoulders, here’s me waiting to read it all and then softly recite it back to you.
Which one, he wondered. They both go up, slow elegance round the sun. They both go down, controlled gravity in spite of the call. He picked one of them randomly and started climbing down. The air was different down there, denser with jasmine scent and peacocks’ screams. He didn’t stay long. He is now climbing up towards rarity. But this time he picked the other one.
Here. No indication other than Here. Here is Here. The only thing you were ever truly looking for. Here hasn’t left. You can always find it Here. You remember the way, don’t you? You remember the smell of Here? And how it feels when it touches you?
I kept on inviting you in, tea and cake and entrails all lovingly laid out for you to enjoy, the house becoming a moment of tender exile for both of us. You would walk past and peer through the window, you could see the waiting from outside. Could you see me though, or did your reflection blur it? You never walked in anyway.
I will never recognise me from the back. Is that me? is that skin mine, gently turning autumnal in the London sun? Is that hair mine, a sea of chiaroscuro waves? I always look elsewhere, I never see me. I will never see me.
I will always be there, lifting you up, showing you the future. My promise to you - a performative utterance: I promise myself to you, my future to us, my language to your dreams, my elevation to our heaven. This is the promise of a future, because the future of my promise is already here.
Ready ready ready. Launch and then look behind. Still ready ready ready. Feel your body leaving you. Again ready ready ready. Listen to your voice becoming that of another. Ready. Stop being ready. It’s done.
She was caressed by the weather: a breeze of light that made her breathe more slowly, the city entering her lungs in large swaths of belonging. She knew that with each step, another weather was opening, like a mirror reflecting her slightly stooped back. But she will remain forever caressed.
There’s no ‘this way up’ sign and we often get confused and look down instead. We keep on moving ahead with the nagging doubt, is this truly ahead?, touching our head lightly from behind. The sign about where the deep end is must have fallen off, and so we’ve learned to walk on water. We are moving dots on a signless aether, never able to see us from above.
And she was off. Not walking not climbing. Her body one with the metal rising, breathing in an air of levels foreign to her own oxygen, but what a length she got what new heights she ingested!
Footage by @shredosaurusrex
These are the waters of return. The veins and the lake have taken up all surface, the veins pulsing the lake emptying. You invited me to swim but where.
We drew the thick black curtains to keep time out and movement in. We danced on the eyelids of eternity. We became space unfolded, doubled, withdrawn.
Last time I am performing Oceans of Eternity this Tuesday at the stunning @k.u.k_ungkunst gallery in Trondheim with the support of Narrating Sustainability, NTNU Oceans, TransLit, and K-U-K to mark the start of my residency. This is a very demanding performance emotionally and technically and while I come out infinitely richer out of the four times I have performed its different versions so far, I will be glad to leave it behind. So this Tuesday 6pm followed by panel discussion with Kari Nixon, Hanna Musiol, Ferne Edwards, Parissa Chokrai, Ysabel Muñoz. Wish me luck.
If your time changed all of a sudden, your body felt thrown, and your eyes turned upwards like an arm thrust towards a familiar star; from the eternity of options, choose this: stop breathe become grass
And that late summer evening, in the middle of the quiet city emptied during the weekend, the buildings lifted as if all by themselves, divers of the skies, flailing terraces and splashing antennas in their mad escape towards the waters above the clouds.
The space that folds and holds you, aggression and tenderness, because where could the pure space open, and how quickly would we shut it down. 

Still from Verdens Verste Menneske
he dived. he breathed water. he felt.
Mark the world with your mismatching.
Mark the world with your silence.