It’s always time for not having time; for what could have been; for how good it would have been if we had had the time to discover things, to be together, to see noon come and not try to profit from time. People die, phone apps keep vibrating and we are considerably sadder. I have lost people from where you are and that makes me not want to go back: a desire to stand still. Nobody ever told me anything that alleviated this bad thing of denying your origins. Denying is an overstatement, but trying to forget is something else. I think about how good it must feel to have the beach on your way home. I really wanted to read your diary, to get a letter, to write another. And all this time I have given myself the excuse of being exhausted from life’s things. It’s almost always like this when the day is ending and the end of the year comes back and I have no more excuses for avoiding this place. Sometimes I fill myself with the hope that giving-up gives me. It’s just a visit, a distraction, as if it was just popping by and coming back, almost as if I wasn’t even there. This could be the obvious choice for me, barely there and already back. But it’s never like this. “An airplane is leaving yourself and seeing your own fires”. The other day I tried to explain that I don’t have many reasons for going. I was accused of being ungrateful. “Guilt is really a bag of rocks I can’t put down”. That’s it, leaving here is a suffering in advance that lasts too long, just like a passion that isn’t fulfilled – it’s definitely there, laid for you and for another, but always remains in refusal or absence. A mouth filled with no. Life could be doing nothing, from time to time, and just being simple, without much effort, much pain, much abyss. It could be a succession of simple episodes, with no scares, like a place in the shadow. “A landscape portrait”. But there is this persistence in always producing new things and meeting people who are now in the places I used to like so much. I know, some of them don’t even exist anymore. That's that. “I am looking at the back of the Esplanada Hotel, its solid structures would, years later, be transformed into somewhere else”. Nothing lasts for long. But I like to think that the Domínio and the Pertinho do céu still exist, that the Pátio da Comunicação is still yellow and “prosperous”, and that I could still climb the Alpendre stairs. “Sculpture per kilo”. The tendency is to become a parking lot. “Errant adventure ornament”. I used this as justification. That’s why I ignite with the nonconforming voices from your generation. We had to leave; we didn’t create other noises. And I don’t know what really goes on there. I see the city in your eyes, in your drawings and in the countless photos you sent me. I try to get closer and see how you enter and inhabit the Serviluz, the Praia de Iracema, the Farol, the Aterro. I’m jealous of the Praia dos Crush. I feel other people’s desires, but I don’t quite understand how they happen there. “your perfume, mini-knives in my chest”. I see a demand for courage; a claim for engagement. I must go, I think, and soon. The landscape and the place are almost disappearing in me. A day without sun. Yes, I’ll go. And anyone who looks at me will see the grooves from the time I wasn’t there, and maybe almost none of the unconditional courage it took to be back. “I am like a desert, where no one wants to live”. Going back is a self-destructive gesture of solitude. I don’t know how to live like before anymore, I’m rigid, don’t fit here nor there. A large island wandering on the fringes, while there’s life and failure. Facing this, there are no reasons not take risks, whichever they are. Just go. “pra que tanta indecisão?/ se o sol está aí para nos assar/ pra quê tanta indecisão?/ se a chuva invade e alaga, como um grande mar”. The rumor of everything they’re doing freed the border. I go in without whining. A flame takes me by the hand. Who are you? “But we are too young”. The wind howled again tonight. Continuity method resistance: poem formula. “I am the backseat acrobat and only you can see me”. And so, an image is revealed in opposition, in combat, in uprising. A little closer, an uncontrollable flood of answers for a deviating image. And they were all there, like a tear in the city. Not aimlessly, but a word being a thing, being an action, being the turn to reverse the false time in between. In this word, it occurred to me that to look up and see the place. See the writing of a different city in the thriving cut of your text. I really needed to come back and be here again. “Praia do Futuro”. People were killed. I think: I need to be here again. They are going to build an aquarium – I need to be here again. “Hurricane – savage response”: be here. We are sitting on the curb, under the shade, and I ask you about the colorful drawings on your arm. We think about writing something down, but soon give up. Bureaucratic writing and preliminary projects don’t concern us anymore – formulating a strategy for bing in the city seems like something an artist would do, a rehearsed scene, a place made into research subject. We must say no. “Ordinary Questions in Existential Pathways”. Let’s. The beach is always a north, I always located myself in the city by the beach. Me, a petit bourgeois. The city’s outline is still like this and entering it definitely means to lose focus. And I keep trying to search myself to find the last places I’ve been to, as if a demand about these places came from me, you see. This is the time I have and I spend it in this awkward way, it’s what I can do. Let’s go, stop that. The sun came out and drove us away from the curb; a haze. Yeah, let’s go. The balance between going and staying. Here, everything is always going. “The successful block in the city”. Why didn’t I ever come here with you? To backwater. Is that a verb? Let’s backwater here by the sea we never call coast. No, you don’t want to be clobbered with sand. Nah, let’s go, inside, we’ll see the city and the edge of the harbor. If you have the guts, we can still catch the sunset from inside the water. And David? We become silent. “Everything is loose, while I slept history ends here. We are all thrown”. Giving a testimony seems to require a foolish effort for truth. To him, it wasn’t possible. More than reality and fiction, yes, still this game… we cannot fall in a sterile relativity. I think that all that indeed traverses us, touches us, molds us, demands an account. Because this isn’t an unrelated event and, therefore, this summons us to record ourselves in it. It is listening and saying, where possible, it’s not just about the subject, but also about the place, the surroundings close to the skin, the people in the community, and the material itself that becomes the voice for someone else. Have you read it? Historically articulating the past doesn't mean knowing it “as it actually was”, but it means: “appropriating a reminiscence” of that experience, like a lightning bolt. I never told you this before, it’s new. Because I’m diving into so much of what you have done and about you taking the here there. It will never be domesticated. I’m glad you’re concerned. Danger is important. You put yourself in a condition of storytelling, at the same time in which the exercise was happening. Firstly, you forgot the story, forgot what was coming next. You were there. To forget the notebook, to leave without the camera. Go and listen. I insisted, do you remember? You were insisting on thinking of yourself with the place, and almost as the place, which appeared to you so you could inhabit it and remain there, dealing with present time and place, getting to know your position and the place’s position, in a clash with what came from others, reaffirming yourself as a desiring subject. It was while being the place, allowing yourself to be with the place that, in this stand taking, you constituted yourself. “What Fortaleza devours you?”. See, I’m still trying to elaborate, while everything seems to sink. Recounting is a discursive act in which the body vibrates before the enunciation of remembering and effectively speaking. It wouldn’t be enough to just live the situation, you needed to be with other so that it happened in a different ‘here’. Narrating is inventing your experience. “When all accidents happen”. Resisting and remaining are your procedures. There’s still some chance to visit the field of your gestures – effort, fear, risk, limit, exhaustion, and the tide: high-tide, low-tide and the city you want to make visible. “Scape plan”. I have always been afraid of the sea. Your mother can’t swim. And you, on the stringer.
Galciani Neves
Fernanda Porto; Adriana Gurgel; Vitor Cesar; Natércia Pontes; Eduardo Frota; Aline Albuquerque; Simone Barreto; Raimundo Fagner; Cidadão Instigado; Ronaldo Salgado; Carlos Augusto Lima; Alumbramento; Patrícia Araujo; Enrico Rocha; Marília Borges; Manoel Ricardo de Lima; Companhia de Arte Andanças; Alexandre Veras, Waléria Américo