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.
PICPOETRY
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, 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 ... 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. 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... 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 ... 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! 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. Collecting airs, collecting lights, collecting dust. Interior decoration with a recent triptych of mine. Two trees reflecting the character of the two houses. Gold for Venice, silver for London, smaller yet cute in Venice, big and brash in london, with Virgin Mary on a ballpen for top in Venice, with GI Joe climbing the last branch in London. For to be ... 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 ... The visit to @davidwest_studio was a treasure trove of wonders and tender inspiration. Posing for this was a genuinely therapeutic moment. Mille merci mon vieux. (23x28, pastel and charcoal on sand paper, 2022) “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 ... 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 ... 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 ... The inspiration and energy of the last few days here in Rainbow Hill Mansion where the studio is, and the crazy collaborative atmosphere with @artemisherber all ended up on this painting with its deep reversed perspective cuts on piles of cardboard. ... 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 ... The bizarre performances of Mr APM - or at least what’s left of it after the event. This time at Cardozo Law School NYC. Because PowerPoint is no longer enough. 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 ... 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... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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! Oceans of Eternity V: Contract unto Extinction at @k.u.k_ungkunst Trondheim. Final version of this super demanding emotionally and technically performance fittingly done in a beautiful space in front of one of the most committed audiences I’ve ever... 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 ... 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 ... All these homes, my body split into several, one quiet yet fierce where I place my left hand, one dark in the storm clouds for my eyes, one round and shaking for my feet, and one infinte hollow for my severed hearts. 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. I’d rather you be ok than be mine. I’d rather dwell in the waters their surface rippled by your signing voice, than occupy the terraferma of another continent. I’d rather you swim in my lakes than my rivers corrode your banks. But let me, let ... Nothing but the other side. But to see it, you must let it through. This side. And to see it, you must occlude it. Lift your hand, shade the light, and there it is, a visitation, a planetary caress, a dappled morning. Free floating ladders filled our city. They climbed up the walls of our homes, a new breed of locusts promising eternal promises, eternal eternity, eternal duplication. And we all started climbing like insects sniffing the pollen. He waited for that knock on his door And this, she said, is how I’ve learned to live my life. Scared that I won’t be able to escape, never here always in the posture of someone taking leave. We wrapped up the exhibition Our Distance Became Water and send the works on the water to float. Some go to Greece, some to Washington, some to new homes in other counties and continents. And some came back home, sliding noiselessly in the Venice ... Art Attack! Sometimes I feel I need to attack the work, madly spread myself on it, because I can feel it moving away from me. At other times I feel I need to draw it closer to me, slowly and patiently, because I can feel it moving away from me. ... In less than a week we take down And Our Distance Became Water, my Venice solo show of paintings and sculptures. I called them ‘painted surfaces’ - I am still so interested in the surface, the way it emerges from the water like a floating ... Even in those moments that you were certain you knew you could feel the hand touching your head, you knew it, it was there, the warmth the attachment the direction, even in those moments that your head rose up to meet it, you knew, in fact you also ... Not just us (a skin of folded skins), not just the other of us (air breathed by slant surfaces), but all of it: us and other of us and other than us, all of it cuts and opens, spreads and sighs, refracts and multiplies. Firework meditation. Or the world is revealed bigger than you, and you drink it like a spectacle. Something sounded astern, something that brought into our sleep the sussuration of waking stars and surprised starfish. We were forgiven for thinking that something might have been wrong with the world. We were forgiven when we declared our dreams ...
of a fragile self-reliance,
delusional but kind,
let me float,
let me hide where I come from,
cut that lore.
Still from Verdens Verste Menneske
#leighfermor ...
That’s why he never did much. All his activities were conditioned by the hypothesis - will it happen now? Halfway through cleaning the bathroom or writing that email or watching that series. He was always ...
#redentore #redentore2022 #venice