Cartographies, the art of drawing desires

Text and photography by Virginia Mesías

Mi cuerpo es todo lo que yo no, todo lo que siempre tengo beyond. More here I am. It is the only work that one day, perhaps, I will be able to build. He is the one who will live much longer after me. My body is everything I don't have: it is the one that answers me when I speak; when I move, he alerts me where not to go; he gets sick for me, to get me out of danger. He expresses himself before I know what I saw, what surprised me, what is going to seduce me, what am I going to desire when something new catches my skin. And that's when we already let go. Because he lives for me and I can never reach him.

Este es su registro del deseo , the stories he is going to write are not about me, my speech is not reliable, but his language is, he knows. And the stories begin to speak, before time turns and I lose myself, while someone still sleeps in my bed, alone. Because my body is on this side of the doors, writing. For this reason, my body is going to start by marking the paragraphs, to order thoughts in the prose, each indentation is a different state of reflection, a different state of its pulse that breathes with me. As the writing on the paper marks rhythms, tones, pauses —blank spaces that, we already know, are worth as much as what is not said—, someone sleeps alone on the other side of the world; because a fair door in the middle of the home is enough to dimension what is foreign and what is known. Because every daily territory —subtle labyrinth— keeps in its center what we cannot imagine: the treasure and the monster at the same time.

Pensamiento, emoción, prosa: notas sobre el deseo para que, cuando deba react, the writing can be found nearby. Because it is necessary to be wide awake, very alert, everything that has not been done before to know what is correct, but no, he says something else, he is going to let me go and he is going to divert me. Sin to pretend that. And the coffee is ready and he writes, outside of everything. He just writes, master of himself —and of me, of course—. Not to think, he tells me, without lines of will; first lucid, then liberated, never, never blind. The certainty of the indicated action, of the gestures so measured; never pretend that. First, the search; then, the bet, because the arrival is as wide as the possibilities of escape. And be careful with the spirit of constant and consistent desire, it's not safe, it's not. The body knows it and laughs and continues writing, and I look at it and despair because I know I can't stop it, no. And I know it's time to break the habit, to go out and let go. Todo lo que no encaja se limpia. _cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ Porque el lenguaje me oculta, me encierra y tapa todo respite. That's why I'm going to turn the world, I'm going to make it move in my direction, I'm going to look at the dark. And, then, the ink with which my body writes runs out and it is necessary to change tools, instruments and paper. Like paper, my skin; like skin, my room, my most closed zone. Sometimes we look for coincidences, signs of good fortune even in a leaf. None of this helps, not even the dictionary. "Let the movement of things take me," he says.

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Text and photography: Virginia Mesías

anima

Text and photography by Virginia Mesías

I immediately attributed my mistake to tiredness,

to the darkness of the house, and to that desire of mine to

find weird stuff everywhere.

Maria Ines Silva Vila

There is a particular time in that lack of light of the earliest, deepest, most dawning morning. In that last part of the morning, when the faint glow of the sky has not yet reached the limit that the city sets for day. Because dawn is also called the time during which dawn breaks. Alba is also the last room into which the night is divided: in all its rooms and corridors and stairs and roof terraces that we can never see where they call us. If not, dawn is now out of use —like so many other ambiguous or archaic expressions that we forget and lose because we don't know what to do with them—; it was used to respond to those who asked the obvious, the obvious ( disobviate , distrust the obvious, they told me one day). And what is there, then, in that last passage of the night? What traces of the dream, of what was kept so deep inside, is shown when opening the first eye (or was it the third)? Coming out of the sheet that wraps a body that is another, because it is never the same awake as lost in that strangeness of the other space, of the other hole, the one from which, on some occasions, we do not come out.

We don't go out through ties and arms, threads and winds, shadows that remain on us, around us, inside us and capture our spirits. Or the core , which, they say, is something that goes into the hollow of some pieces to give them solidity. Air, spirit, body, bowl, matter, substance. How, then, to get the body out of that state, of that circumstance? How to wear it during the dawn towards the first gray light? Through the black and white that traps us inside. But what sounds hidden in the most open area of consciousness when we wake up? What music? What circular speech? How much do we bring from the darkness of sleep and keep as we begin to see the fuzzy outlines of things that have no form yet? What are we looking for in that hour? What is hidden inside that needs that shadow so different, so transparent, to circulate from us towards that outside of silence without others? Without anything because it manifests itself in a non-time : it is no longer night or dawn, no day has yet begun, only us. Alone. There are also no definite thoughts, they shouldn't. They are smoke, ghosts, our own souls that speak softly during that deaf and glassy course of clarity, which begins to filter and open in just snippets of fragile light. Fragile soul. The feeling of not being anywhere yet. The feeling of not belonging and inhabiting a body that is not yet ours, that does not yet exist; the certainty of another reality that breathes right there, asleep behind the door of that room that we haven't entered yet to open the windows; that other possibility that waits sitting in the same armchair where we go next to the coffee; that other world that begins to watch us in amazement, while we deny waking up and the first bird sounds and the first torn cloud appears. That other myself that I stalk with desire, with restlessness, but I don't risk.

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Everyday Bestiaries

Minimum notes on weaknesses

The Bestiaries are, in medieval literature, collections of stories, descriptions and images of real or fantastic animals; works in which a wide list of animals is presented, to which an allegorical meaning is conferred or they are converted into symbols of a certain virtue. Fidel Sclavo says in “The Elephant and the Ant. A bestiary” that the function of these books was to mark the territory of fears and exorcise them in the following way: gather all the monsters in a book, to lock them up there, like someone who hides their ghosts in a certain place. (...) The passion for the strange, the wonderful, the unusual, the mythical, does not contradict the repulsion generated by the monster... In addition to the anomalous and disgusting, they represent the channel through which dreams of flight circulate.

These are intimate chronicles of a common life, like yours, you who also know that the monsters are there, here. They sit with us when the day closes and the night begins, they hold our hands, they listen to us, they sleep on the same pillow. And in the morning they remain over coffee, while that time lasts without vigil yet, the time in which I write them. In order not to forget dangers, to know what stones are installed in the chest, in the stomach, in the body.

They are notes of the day. Everyday weaknesses. Everything that I cannot save, everything that escapes me and I write so that the dust does not take it away, and me with it, with them. Records of what wakes me up and disperses in the hours, in the habit of living as I was taught: go out, work, be well, have friends, take care of the family, smile. Then they come back. They always come back. They are the threats that surround us. And they do not abandon us. Because we want them, very hidden, we want them.