PICPOETRY

The geometry of bodies: place them carefully on top of each other in a pyramidal formation. Allow the heat to travel up and consume the bodies from within. Once the fire is going, add the surrounding space, including a large chunk of sky. When the bodies become one, lift the whole thing and gently dip it in the water. The sea will turn a soft orange. Serve it immediately.

He found where to stand. His body assumed the right pose. The sea had calmed. But he couldn’t jump.

We ate large platters of light and breeze.

The solitude of the air

The solitude of the planet

They noticed that they could find themselves more easily if, instead of looking straight into their own eyes, they turned their backs and reached behind them pointing in the air at the back of their heads. They then felt their own skin touching them back, familiar like a mother’s caress, but also other, as if they themselves had finally become the ones they were afraid of.

It turned so slowly that no one could tell. Yet it turned. The wall eventually became a field of sunflowers, the tube was replaced by a peacock. If you had stayed, you could have reached out and touched its feathers.

Let me lean on you for just a minute. Only till time ends and we can move again.

From your room, every morning and every evening, you see the end of time. You invite friends to see it together. Every time is different. More or less light, more or less chaos. Yet, despite the festive atmosphere, despite the expectations, despite the mad parties, it ends. Every time.

My skin, your sky. Your touch, my gesture. A rip on the fabric of the invisible and there you are, paper dragon, lucid fountain, night laceration: all that is you disappears in your sky.

Sometimes your light appears ending.

In my room when I was growing up I had a wallpaper that looked like a garden that looked like a wallpaper. At night it was illuminated by a tiny plugged light, instead of a prayer. In the day, birds were skipping from branch to branch, shaking the wall gently. And whenever I touched the garden with my hand or resting my cheeks on it, it remained flat and cool.

I’ve been making jigsaw puzzles all my life. But I’ve always ended up missing a piece. One single piece of sky, window, water, greenery. One single piece of roundness, concavity, host as hostage. And the whole jigsaw puzzle then turns and faces that missing piece.

And when the light of whatever storm pours into the light of whatever room, it and you become a halo floating about headless, unbelonging, unsaintly.

That evening, he said, when everything caught fire, remember? not the fire that burns, he said, not the one that eats up and ingests, but the fire that floods, remember how cold we felt? slow fire spreading in waves thrown out from the open sea, a crackling flood that had us all drenched in anticipation and numbness.

Between what you want, and what others want of you: a hand gesture, a breath of skin, the last dream of the night becoming the taste of a late breakfast. Between what you want for you and what they want for you: the light line of a betrayed dusk curling up on the horizon.

Between all that you wanted, and all that the others wanted of you, the line is as luminous as a vertical dawn, splitting the one thing in a replica of two.

Homage to light

Homage to water

Homage to the air.

Nothing hidden: the landscape bloating with your limbs, the frame measuring your orgasms, the light catching the blushing of your buttocks. All on the window. Yet no one knew.

Une Saison Infinie
Une Saison Inachevée

No one’s air. No one’s light. I just want you to see me, posed as I am away from you, pretending not to see you but the back of my head a vast waiting vessel, the ark with only one caress in its cargo.

The first line of the first letter to oneself: nothing dear nothing gentle. On the mirrors, I trace only the veins that run through the maps. On the whiteness, i trace only the remnants of the coal lines.

That unearthy scent, ground but no soil, mounts but no falls, light but no day - you could only smell it when it rolled away from you. Or did you kick it, a short-maned night made you do it.

Here, the solstice sigh, the space that fills with in between, the one that takes over the other that blooms, Here, don’t walk over that frailty, let it wall your eyelids like charcoal breath.
#anselmkiefer

Artist in Residence 2023/24
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The Westminster Law & Theory is looking for its 2023/24 Artist in Residence.
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We are looking for someone interested in working along legal and interdisciplinary scholars at the Westminster Law School and The Westminster Law & Theory Lab in particular. We welcome expressions of interest from artists working in the intersection between law and art; or who use law as an artistic medium/base/inspiration; or whose practice can benefit from thinking along legal parameters; or whose work can be described as political and engaged.

We understand law in its broader possible manifestation as normativity (of social rules, of artistic practices, of spatiality and temporality) and not just in its textual manifestation as statutes and caselaw.

You will collaborate with the staff of the Westminster Law & Theory Lab as well as the Law School staff in general, depending on your project and its demands. You will work alongside final year students preparing their projects for the Final Year Law School Degree Show (we are the only Law School globally that has a Degree Show, where all students are expected to present an artefact/performance/poem/prose in a material form that reflects on their connection to the law). You will be offered the opportunity to showcase your work alongside the Degree Show at Ambika P3 in March 2024. You will be offered a working space, access to library and other university resources. There is no salary as such but there will be opportunities to get involved in teaching and other paid aspects of the School’s activities.

The appointment is scheduled to start in September 2023 and last for one year.

Please send an email to (me:) Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos at andreaspm@westminster.ac.uk
by Friday 30th of June, explaining your practice and how it will fit in the law school, the project you are envisaging to complete while resident with us, and a brief portfolio/website/instagram with examples of relevant work.

The shade protects the future when no tree will be. My distance protects us when no other will be. And the sign, word and symbol and rhythm and fear, protects nothing but a reclining earth.

The stories I was told were stories no one else had ever heard. They dropped in my hands like slices of air, glistening with weather and saliva. That’s the way in, I thought. It must be. I lifted my arms and let them carry me upwards. I was afraid they might drop me. But I had to trust them.

There is an image of an outside that never leaves us. (There is no outside, sings Zarathustra)

Nothing without its other nothing, in its turn a nothing that spreads into the other nothing, and perhaps at some point this other nothing becomes the green lake of eternity where little chunks of nothing dip and soak.

Lines underline, accents float overhead, hooks keep us grounded, slashes unite us. You sang the grammar of the city as if it were an aria.

It’s raining men on crosses, my food is getting too salty, all that sweat, semen and saliva landing on my gnocchi, what kind of umbrella can protect me from the divine deluge?

Why can’t I have a large head like him? Why can’t my body look as perfect as his? Why can’t I smile eternally?
Why can’t I belong to the earth?
Why can’t I be finally found?

1, 2, 3 jump on one foot
4, 5, 6 jump on the other
7 jump but don’t land, carry on floating
8 there’s nothing down here
9 there’s nothing up there either
10 but the air is gentler

On another planet, flowers are made of water and water is made of thoughts.

Now that your fragments are scattered all over me, I miss the lake of oil, deep still soundless, we used to swim in when we were whole. But now that your fragments are scattered all over me, no desire is left for me but the false: the one about the whole.

But you were showered with the graces of your city, jasmine, petroleum and slavery, and you drove the other side of the walls looking around you like an unfettered child. And then there was no city and then there was no you.

In this city of the marble body perfect and dead, Byzantine red crumbles alive.

The real law is me (posting live as part of the performance The Real Law at the 23rd International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law, Rome) on Legal Narcissism.

The Real Law - a performance lecture on narcissism.

This Thursday, 13:00-13:45, Antonianum Rome. Free to attend.

“There is no outside. Yet we forget this. How lovely it is that we forget.” (bis)

The screen that became the forest.

And you thought, why is this me? And you took the first step, how do I walk? And you found yourself elsewhere, when do I return?

At points the whole sky was sailing away, leaving behind the face of the beloved looking down at me without recognising me.

Art as a way out.
Art as out.
Art as without.
How to inhabit that space of forever taking leave?

He wrote till he reached the end of the text. He then took a walk on the passing breeze. When he returned, the pages were blank, just as he left them. His skin outlasted his writing.

She exhaled. One long exhalation and everything was removed: the tourists, the locals, the ones that belonged and the ones that didn’t. But she couldn’t get rid of herself, taking picture after picture of her reflection on the screen.

All cities are bodies that dance with ours as if there were no skin between us.

All cities are drapes. We wrap them around us like shawls on a chilly evening. We hide behind them when the light is too glaring. We let our faces take the colour of its insignia.

The well has no depth
the water pours no end
but something about my thirst
exhausts the world

Allow the government to do what it does best (snap from anti-monarchy protests today)

You know, he said, all things have the wind in them. Sometimes they bloat with it, sometimes they move in odd ways as if something pushes them from within. But it also happens a few times that things themselves become the wind, stretching and opening from within, lines of flight full of internal chatty happy gossip. Listen, he said, how the wind opens us.

Reposted @daniellearnaudgallery Join artists Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Robert Cervera, together with trumpeter and electronic musician Alex Bonney, this Saturday 29 April 4-6pm for the closing event of ‘A constellation of conduits was channelled between us, and our distance became water’.

The finissage will include performances featuring readings by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and music produced by the sprawling tube installation in the show, activated by Cervera and Bonney. Music and words will interweave in a polyphonic exchange.

@robertcervera @picpoet @albonney #daniellearnaudgallery

Find yourself and let him sleep.

There’s drama in every box, because every box threatens to open when it’s closed and promises to close when it’s open, wound and mouth and flower and underground, I was never really sensitive to draughts he thought, the world was always invited in, he thought, the world has always been in here gilded and tremulous, and I its sleeping guardian. And he shut the lid.

the bodies will sleep only when the stepladders are drowned in the water

Berlin in my mouth

The white cover of the once-white pages. Our Distance Became Water is my novel published by Eris as a catalogue for my current exhibition. The story is about a city that has flooded and how two lovers are coping with it. These two lovers, genderless, fluid and full of conflicting emotions, had invited the water into their relationship even before the flood. So the water has always been part of their physical and metaphysical reality. And then there is the voice of the water itself, tetchy, narcissistic, angry even. But fun to write and even more fun to sing ;)

On sale at the gallery for £25 or by emailing danielle@daniellearnaud.com for the limited numbered and signed edition with three photographs by @robertcervera

“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

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.

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