Dopo Oracle
Approximations.
free speech, ramble, locked formats. splattered mouth, lipliner
sidestroke, lip tuck, liquid bypass, eyeliner
backstroke, upward fall,
muscles looking organised
identical twins hired as makeup models for a competition, so there’s something of a level playing field. judges whispering to each other in the foreground a commentary to the make up artists working on twins in the background, and then the faces are foregrounded again.
and the crew is watching from above as they shoot something like B reel for the voiceover analysis of the twins' made up faces. their faces are the same because the makeup task of the perfect black lip was the same and now they’re like, jumping on the trampoline, faces always looking up. their faces have an additional layer that is supposed to differentiate them. it’s not easy to prepare your face for a beauty shot as you hurtle against a trampoline, tongue lightly between teeth so you’re not overclenching and so the face stays soft and the black lip you’re modelling remains supple and plump. the crew tracks the focus of the twins as they bounce closer and fall away. doubles, doubles, doubles,
I’m throwing my voice from under the bleachers,
the tourists park their cars or unload from the bus and take their seats, bleacher benches pep rally, schooled spirit, we’ll look between their legs as they gasp and mist rises from the lower dam, everything becoming like kelp or seaweed under the brunt of the mistmaker.
my twin body in front of you. look between legs
and not at each other, I won’t even glance at you
the moment I decide to steal a bag from beside feet
hoping that they’re not looking down, that they’re looking
out at my body, and the plan is that we run, okay?
I grab the bag with what seems like the most value or
a wallet full of cash and you run with me, because they’ll
look for us. let’s retreat into shadow, and then I can stare at you
with the constellation of new wealth.
This is the boring sexy bit. Two men in the cinema bathroom
are wiping down their puffer jackets, a raucous split stream of piss
shattered off the urinal wall onto their coats. Foreskin rubbed a little raw
from wool trouser, swelling on the urethra. Paper towel mostly smears the piss
across the gore-tex that covers the goose down slash nike fluff, oh, yeah, the word
I was looking for was splatter, physics and force and stuff. You watch them through
hidden streaming camera, always on these cameras are.
and the text begins: free speech.
.
according to the bulletin board, there’s a new clinic with a physical therapist who doesn’t talk about bones or muscles as the thing to move in rehabilition, but emphasises the flows of blood instead. direct the focus, the therapist says. the blood flows closer to the bone there. warm it up.
you don’t understand writing but it’s on the wall.
the bulletin board also has a flier which advertises the opening of two floodgates. there is a panoramic lookout that you can sit on and watch the water forcefully fall and push up to a mist. it will go on your face. the lookout is the back patio of a trampoline centre, the type where you’d go and jump all day until your calves shake.
slackening / most injuries with trampoline use are due to jumpers bumping into each other, trying to do stunts, rebound energy of the trampoline into the lower extremity, falling off the trampoline or falling onto the frame or springs of the trampoline /
gravity, which has held you for so long and held you in your body, and the elastic not had kept you buoyed for so long, you’ve never been hurt. I’ve never been hurt, I don’t comprehend the risk, I’ll tell you about the limit of where I see us falling, our bracket, soft impact bubble,
you don’t understand writing but it’s on the wall. you don’t understand but it’s written. parrhesia, the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom. Foucault observed in a lecture that he wrote and spoke that the practice of parrhesia necessarily entailed an asymmetry of power, hence a “contract” between the audience, who pledged to tolerate any offense, and the speaker, who agreed to tell them the truth and risk the consequences. but then, there’s that non sequitur of claiming the right to free speech if you’re doing it in the wrong forum. constitutional rights. non sequiturs quickly arise when you’re not speaking the same language.
free speech.
loose waistline means leather belt, bought with a voucher from a job and a giftcard from a family friend, it’s essentially free but paid for by other things, which isn’t that free after all.
buckle is the heaviest part of belt, at least in relation to the density per section of the belt, and it scrapes a long line up thigh as you spiral up from seated to standing to pushing the flush button. (flushing sound) maybe it’s a cut, scene over, but that’s more like the scraping of a gel tip against the skin, meaning, not a gouge, but the fly’s done up, the button, then the buckle. flushed cheeks, flushed face.
you had broccoli for lunch, just boiled, not steamed, you’re trying to reduce the amount of sodium you’ve eaten today. through your grey trousers blobs of blood form… thigh skin was thicker in some parts than others, probably, and then so, which is why some more blood comes out from this belt graze.
according to the bulletin board, there’s a new clinic with a physical therapist who doesn’t talk about bones or muscles as the thing to move in rehabilition, but emphasises the flows of blood instead. direct the focus, the therapist says. the blood flows closer to the bone there. warm it up.
I owe mail to a man whose facebook statuses I read a lot. The last one was about thickly painted roadsigns, the status I mean, the refreshment of seeing that hand in the city, it’s like street art in a way, some loose punky vibe in established order. It’s been years of intending to write to him, but I still haven’t mailed him, haven’t sent it. We think so differently in terms of social awareness. He is intertwined with civic life in Chicago. Are you ever embarrassed of always thinking about another place? topical opinions, thinkpieces, bandwagons that I only want to be a ribbon of or for and flutter behind in the wind as, breeze aloft not falling. I wrote this a long time ago and found it in a notebook, I never sent it: I pin it to a bulletin board.
Dear M
sit down with me and tell me about the largest cigarette you’ve ever smoked, the largest one that you’ve ever seen rolled. the tobacco is dried separately before being gathered together, a bushel gathered, laid in a crisper. wish I could be with you so you could nod affirmative or crease your brow at that tobacco thing. Imagine smoking something the size of a flute, it, laid like a stem between your thighs, comparable to a wrist, two hands, thumbrests and fingers. Have had really tender moments in the last few weeks with friends telling about time passing and people telling them to stop smoking seeping in as though it was an oil on the skin which is penetrating, so they’re really trying, they’re really trying to stop smoking and they’re feeling insane because of it. it’s funny that there’s the conception that smoke is taken in through the lungs directly when so much is passively absorbed by the body around the mouth and more.
In a dream I recently had I got, um, a dog, and they brought it in and I said look at my dog and the more I looked at it the bigger it got and the uglier it got it got so crazy, I started from you’re so cute and then it was like you’re so big and then I was like you’re a crazy looking dog, like why are you so werewolf looking and then it was licking my shoulder, near where you get a vaccine, but teeth marks didn’t concern me so much. I wondered what would enter my blood stream, saliva or poison or alkaline, it’s too much to say that I don’t have intimacy in my life, but I can sometimes really feel phantom bites on different limbs, and that’s my favourite type of interior feeling, invisible, private, inarticulable. do you have your vaccines in? do you have health insurance in Chicago? maybe from that job you have in the library. I’m sorry to have read about your mother passing, I was in a rehearsal the other day when I saw your sad post and I had just got told by a technician that I was maybe flirting with that ‘the director is always right’, in a kind of sardonic, sarcastic way that implied they had other thoughts of their own, which would probably align with mine. we could form a resistance together, notionally against the director, that’s what felt in that moment, which I guess I already had understood. If we lived in LA we’d spend all this time together in homes, I guess we’re just spending time together in this other way. in rehearsal The way I’d describe the technician’s speech is like, intoning, like there’s no inhale or exhale, that it’s of their whole body. anyway, I think I do really want a dog.
I’m writing to you while sitting in a truck that’s been converted into a bus, so excuse my handwriting. the truckbus, it doesn’t feel totally safe, but I guess a bus never really does either. I think I could like the idea of a holiday a lot more if I didn’t consider myself so broke, but when I stop doing that, when I remove that mental cheesecloth, I spend money I literally don’t have, which is maybe punk and cool too. I’ve been thinking a lot about lineages and communities, that I come from this conservatory training and really honour virtuosities and time, but then, I grew so much through this diy punk thing which had already become so anodyne by the time I went through it, also kinda institutional, but the scene values the experimental or the vanguard or at least fetishes the idea of the interruption or disturbance or shift of modality, or at least, I do, fuck, so many qualifiers and disclaimers cos that’s where I know you from, I guess, but yeah, I think I formally really value interruption or disturbance and then I guess we’re all engaged with cultures which focus on community in a way that confrontation is considered violent but the punk-esque desire in me really wants to push at something because I’m angry, we’re so angry at so much stuff, obviously, and I’m so rude and dismissive when I see these care structures in place, it’s easy to say and maybe not totally true but I’ve never felt safe there because they were always closed spaces to me or at least, spaces where I felt I could shut off people, and I received some distorted idea of where the public, the audience is located. in relation to us. fighting for freedom. I think sometimes I’m a spoiled brat who never experienced any difficulty so in order to find some kind of true connection I will always invoke some kind of affective violence. sometimes I’m certain people don’t know how uncomfortable I am in my body, and other times know, yeah, of course they do.
but this bus trip is on the way to the gorge, which I’m so excited to see, wish you could be here with me. I always think about how things can become flooded. I keep a pair of goggles in my backpack now, and swim with them so my eyes are open, I see how murky the water sand seaweed pebbles fishery is,
and then at that point I stop writing the letter, because it’s doing a few things at once as though my mind deems it impossible to isolate that single thing to focus on, a full story to recount. I’m only writing lists, like calling out all the shades of colour I can remember from a sunset. violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red
photos from letter reading Kristoffer Zeiner
STILL MAKING ART
VOLUME 03
Opening Friday 17th January, 19:00 – 22:30
Jan Tooropstraat 537
Featuring
Josefin Arnell
Ivan Cheng
Alban Karsten
Tom Kemp
Aaron McLaughlin
Aaro Murphy
Kitty Maria
Wieland Schönfelder
Additional viewing hours:
Saturday and Sunday 12:00 – 17:00.
Still Making Art (2013–present) is an art franchise and community development scheme founded by artists Simon Boase and Aaron McLaughlin. Still Making Art has materialised as sculpture (Stijl Making Art), a club night (Still Making Art International Music Services), an exhibition platform (Still Making Art) and an unassembled independent support structure (the Still Making Art Foundation).
This event is kindly sponsored by Brouwerij ’t IJ.