The Indians Yanomami from Brasil have a very interesting approach to language. I learned about it in the book “The falling sky” written by Devi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. For Yanomamis all knowledge must be shared and learned from a master, to write or take notes is not their way of doing things. Devi Kopenawa agreed to write the book so that he can communicate with his dear white fellows.
Devi says they ‘ve never needed to put “words or images on skin” and that maybe that is the reason white men have never taken them seriously. He says “ we don’t need to draw, everything remains inside. Our memory is long and strong”.
He continues: “even when we speak with xapiri (entities of the forest), their words should remain always new to each shaman that they want to communicate with, to put them on skin is not useful if you want the words to be yours.”
In the end he says: “I understand that if my words want to be heard outside of the forest I have to draw them.”
It is a point of view that interests me very much. I love the idea that somehow talk, personal interpretation, as well as conversation are more valuable than the written word, and somehow knowledge and stories come by this means and don’t need to pass through paper. Paper sets everything still. Somehow no discussions are allowed, it is on paper.
My experience is that if I take notes on a subject, I forget everything about’em right away. If I just listen to my mentor or my professor, knowledge stays in my head for many years if the subject interests me.
The source of most of my work is generally literary, the images and ideas are brought by reading in almost every piece I have created, it is my interpretation on a subject or a spark of idea that I will develop. In the work
They say a book is different for every reader, and I find a relation with the vision of Yanomami tribes.
Somehow we are always taught to search for the meaning of the words we’ve read. “ What the author means…”
As the Yanomamis I take written words and make them mine.
Here I started reading Carlos Fuentes’s book “La region mas transparente” because of this wonderful title ( “The most transparent region”, «unpoetically» translated to English as “Where the air is clear”)
It seems that when Alexander Von Humboldt was welcome into the Tenochtitlan region (now Mexico DF) they told him: “ Welcome to the region where the air is more transparent …” Carlos Fuentes used the words ironically since DF is one of the most polluted cities in Latin America.
But this first novel by Fuentes written in 1958 involves so many themes and so many characters are developed in it that one could say that it is Fuentes first attempt to depict Mexico’s ( and by there all Latin America’s) richness and ambivalent extremes.
For me, the book speaks about the thin line between very different worlds that communicate because they share the same space and time, otherwise they have very little in common.
The ¨most transparent region¨ relates to many different realities that interact in the same space and time.
The extract I chose is from Macauelli . The Macauelli, was the word for the less privileged class in indigenous times. Here it is one day in the life of the ones that have to go and work in the USA to earn a decent life.
I decided to sublimate the text in a fabric and then unweave it.
To unweave was for me to make disappear these frontiers, but also to create this “most transparent region”, to give it a tangible space, for the words to become a presence, to give life to the mental space of reading that is otherwise only in our heads.
The work of De-theorizing is the development of a personal interest in the literary genre of Theoretical Essay. I think that theorizing about unfathomable concepts is an act very similar to contemporary art, almost more than literature in my opinion. The theoretical essay is a work of reflection dealing with diverse topics, exposed in a personal way and usually subjective. We know that a scientific essay has ways of being tested and thereby approved or discarded, while the theoretical essay can´t. It tries to cover topics such as love, such as art, thought … It generates guidelines, considered by the author, to observe this topic.
I print the texts I choose lengthwise on fabric. As they would appear in the PDF of a computer where one moves forward with a cursor, from there I am stripping them thread by thread leaving the warp free.
Writing and weaving have a common past that comes out in the lexicon they share. «The warp and weft (or woof) of a story, a plot is woven, the stories of the characters are interwoven»
Before the invention of writing most traditional societies communicated through weaving and I find it particularly interesting to return to the possibility where everything is yet to be explored, to leave the warp inviting new threads to fill the weft. I unweave fundamental ideas, I’m interested in the unweaving gesture and what is left.
I relate to how these warps (left after unweaving the readings) are interwoven: in thought and in space. I love the possibilities they evoke.
In this first part I propose warps that compose my own character. The idea is to continue with more extensive concepts such as the idea of country, the idea of Latin America…
