2021

J.: a very slow, unelevated fist, spilling without volume to the edge of the face where the face ends. We remember that we rarely feel the skin under our eyes but briefly. That kisses emphasise us. But that's not the cloud that this advance is made of. It's a punch, albeit unannounced. It's a punch without shock, because the limit doesn't close in contrast, but rather opens in continuity. It was summer, a cerulean sky, a white horizon, an open sea. I was sweating.

S.: creating its own wind, the sweat expands after the impact, throwing remnants of the skin into space. The spring in his neck holds the tip of the blade with which each droplet cuts him until it lands in the air, invisible, suspending its former heat. After that, the water becomes tepid, dust, mould and shell. The skin becomes a ruin, it breathes away. We know that touching someone marks another distance in time. The light is so bright that the wind takes becomes a silhouette.

A.: The sculpture is so clear that we don't need to see the wound. 

C.: But it's still surprising that the body is an illusion. But if that's not the case, why think of light as both a harbinger and a solution? Why should pain have something ethical about it, intermittent, almost languid? Gone are the days when we wished we couldn't stop wishing. And yet we want to return to it. We left, we fell silent, we lost track somewhere without realising it, and it is precisely on this intermittence that the future blinds us with the promise of a return. Precisely as if it wasn't the body that stood between us as a border.

F.: The sculpture is so clear that we don't need to see the wound.

E.: I can only remember the August afternoons when we were kept in a room with closed shutters, inside a whitewashed, cool house. Outside, the sun was insurmountable, impenetrable, totally white. Today I realise that we tried to keep the contours of our size, the shadows, the colour. But all that died and what followed was just another instance of a dream becoming bigger and bigger.

D.: Diogo's words the other day brought you back to my memory. Being awake is something tenuous, he told me, laughing with amusement, as if making fun of his own mould. Of course I knew the mould was a mistake. But how could I not start writing again each spring? It was summer, a cerulean sky, a white horizon, an open sea. I was sweating. I couldn't stop writing. In the absence of your presence, the carcass of your departure remains in letters. Diogo laughed again.

Originally written in Portuguese.
Text written in the context of. Read out loud by the artist.