The outside of the hand stems from a fiction around a loving couple who is facing a crisis situation, a narrative that fueled the project Light of September (2021 - … ). Due to the illness of one of them, their comunication became increasingly difficult. As a form of reaction to this setback, the other element takes the role of a caretaker and persists in repeating the same everyday gestores, as if these were forms of maintenance, declarations of compromisse to the loving project.

 

The outside of the hand is a set of readings of the material that was discarded during the development of the 30 sonnets that would become the artist book Os Fogos da Casa [The Home Fires] (2022).

Far from the constraints imposed by the sonnet structure, this unedited text is composed of errors, doubts, annotations, erasures, loose words, rejected sketches, in an exposition of fragility that, at times, resembles a stream of consciousness. On one hand, it alludes to the moment when the character wrote the poems in the first time, to the work time involved in each one of them. On the other hand, through the cadence of reading and the persistence in its repetitions, the text and the physical gesture of saying it becomes a kind of mantra, a ritual of dedication, a daily prayer that the caring character offers to the beloved figure.

 

In a symbolic allusion to the title from which this project arises, these readings will only be accessible during the window frame of September, as if only with that gap of light could one peek the character in its daily routine, repeating them, thus opening up the intimate ritual to a public display.

 

From the launching of this edition of Interact Magazine, on the 16th of September, until the 30th September, every day, starting at 21h30, the body and its voice could be found carrying out their reading routine via live streaming. No caption nor recording was made and there will be no possibility of later accessing either the readings or the texts that originated them. The archive is dispensed for the need of being present. Or rather, in the absence of an external archive, its existence resides solely in the body of the character performing the text, as some oral experience.

 

Only the performance ensures the existence of the text. In this way, the text acquires a specific time to exist, to be heard. Being ephemeral is its inevitable condition. To recover it, the body only has to repeat itself, to disappear in this work, to be just a voice of a prayer, to persist, to find in these gestures the breath that allows to reinforce a commitment. Daily. I tis the body’s presence and its dedication to the task of reading that transforms this moment into a confidence, into a sharing of intimacy.  

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