A song as always:
This piece initiates a series of studies and technical exercises that explore the various material expressions of words. Words are multidimensional beings. They exist as sound, sight, vision, vibration and gesture. Each mode or multimode of their occurrence highlights different features of verbality. Here I started to work with the visual exploration of words through collage and recomposition.
I started with collaging by chance. I had always been a miserable cutter as I child. I loved crayons, glue and glitter. But I could never get myself motivated enough to puncture holes through paper and remove shapes from their homes. I would attempt to twirl around the minute and sharp edges of figures and designs but I would end up with decapitated heads and sore fingers in twisted knots.
But this is not solely a technical exercise in the name of innovation. I have had to put my childhood preferences aside and start cutting again because of a great itch I needed to scratch. This is the first piece of a series dedicated to the exploration of how I have loved. Writing about love is not easy. It's an easy slip-and-slide into airport romances and 50 Shades of Grey. I tried for months. It pained me that I had explored the crevasses of my psychosis, unravelled abuse and spun the story of suicide. But I couldn't conjure one sentence, evoke one image about how deeply I had loved. I still can't and it still pains me.
I tried to run away, I ran 1/3 of northern Spain. It rained for 11 days. I thought that after my escape I would be okay. I wasn't. I could not get rid of your ghostly appearances and traces in my day-to-day life. You were in crossword puzzles, in the dregs of wine glasses, in the faces of mountains. You would appear in strings of words. And that is where I tried to find you.
This is one study. One of many.
I tried to say something about you. Anything. I couldn't. But that doesn't mean that there aren't words out there that can. So I have set out to find them. In these past months, this technique has helped me find all the ways in which you appear in the words of others. So I cut them out and try to piece together the displaced pieces of me, of what was left of me after loving you. This series is the fruit of newspaper cutouts and recomposition on translucid tracing paper. I chose the double-sided support to emphasise how my story and my love remain solely mine. That nothing you see, not one word made it to the other side. Because maybe in your eyes this may have never been a story at all.
Fun fact "You" on the Side A corresponds to "Anyone" on Side B.
Enjoy <3
Side A
Side B
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