From the entrance, the gaze finds points of collision and escapes towards the exit. Inverted.
digestivo is permeable insofar as it supports shared processes. The conditions of the practice infiltrate the conditions of the space, depending on other structures. The air continues to find its way even with the doors closed: the smoke vent of the old creamery—which later became a rotisserie—was covered up, but the original ventilation system remains, below the molding that embraces the space, at the entrance—an exit. Only the shell was kept. I tore down the partitions of the cold rooms, stripped the walls, and removed the doors.
In an emptied space where other actions take place, how do we record the layers of information, what other structures can we imagine? The aim is to maintain heat.
The chamber, the throat, the duct, spaces that enable airflow. All of them have obstacles, points of closure that redirect and modulate their circuits—the door, the epiglottis, the rods, the wax that covers and insulates, the protective cover.
The entrance is framed in spaces where a form of care is kept inside. The doormat is the center, the material base for something to happen on top of it. Support is generated so that something else can exist, activate it. Support generates structure. The rubber holds the fibers’ bristles, and when heat is applied, a pattern appears. The floor takes on volume from flatness.
I want to approach space from the notion of a sample. A sample of fabric held in place with a pin. A footnote that moulds itself to a given space, said noela when she came to see me in October.
There is a beforeness and an afterness.
In that interval of time, an interruption occurs in the body: a burst of air travels from the lungs, activated by the unconscious spasms of the diaphragm, passes through the larynx, a cylindrical structure of cartilage and muscles, a protective cavity, a voice box, the air vibrates in the vocal cords —laughter erupts, a lot of laughter, condensed points of the preverbal. Speech is interrupted. Describing laughter may seem deceptively simple or fundamental. Visual materiality has far more precise limits and boundaries than sound materiality. The sound potential of linguistic material forms a kind of score. Performative annotation, transcription. The paper takes a turn, forming a conduit, the cartography of a breath. A passage committed to the single, linear paragraph, an infrastructure that delimits floor with wall, a bas-relief. Out of the corner of the eye, the column of air passes from one entrance to another. It breaks, rises, takes a breath.
Towards the window, another reproduced structure, moved from another place. In the pattern of this ventilation duct, the rods take center stage, two components generating an opening, inserted perpendicularly into the frame of a box, forming a grille, a potential closure. Cardboard and grey cotton jersey. Reminiscing of intimates. The pattern is held in place by pins. Their heads crystallized with nail polish. Other nails, placed in temporary and incisive fixation, share their color. Punctuation and pattern, rhythm point. Material extremes that both support and pierce, framing styles of linkage.
Blowhole has a marine connotation, Adrienne tells us through the screen. Her sound is slightly slower than the speed at which her face moves. I reply, my voice does not travel in time, or rather it overlaps with hers, simultaneous words, asynchronous communication. I resort to gestures, placing the base of my palm on the top of my head, moving and stretching my fingers to open it while filling my mouth with air, puffing out my cheeks and then expelling it upwards. Yes, yes, a vent. Like a whale’s blowhole. I ask her if it has a direct sexual connotation in English. As much as the words hole and blow do, I suppose, smiling. Blow in English acts as a noun, a verb, a modifying noun – specifying the meaning of another main noun—in Spanish it has different meanings, blow, breath, blown, blew (a light bulb). The heat escapes.
Hearing senses extremities of matter, a singularity (subject) in its outer reaches, making a sound which is without anything, a sound beyond links (without object, without power). […] I’ve been thinking about meaning, the way it’s conventionally sounded out, one says X means Y– X points, X is powered. To mean is a transitive verb in this construct. What about an intransitive usage: “X means”. Would this expressed X, incorporating Y, fill meaning to its outer reaches?1
Listening calls into question our ability to generate meaning, as emotions are registered in real time. What is audible does not provide an obvious location for its origin. Approaching what is presented to you in proximity, allowing yourself to be affected by contact, involves at least two bodies, one resonant, the other receptive: circulation and return, reference and referral. An envelope, access to a conduit, to an other time from which to pivot, an intentional, provisional point from which to look, to attend to something else. Reverberating.
Blew throats at the side, through it.2
1 (Hejinian, 2021, p.16)
2 (Scalapino, 2021, p.58)
Hejinian, Lyn and Scalapino, Leslie. Hearing (2021). New York, Litmus Press.
