from now on*

*amalgama #8: fernando ancil (brazil) and glaura cardoso vale (brazil)

——-

i always thought house was a place of care

and not an imprisonment

at the same time, i locked doors and drawers out

creating a barrier to prevent

strangers to come in and out

this flawed ideia of security

while fear scares me inside

for a long time house was only a room

where books, clothes, and long plays were gathering

while doors and drawers were still locked

i realized in the cloudy room the possibility to not to fear the world

locked doors and drawers

did not make possible strangers to come in and out

nor writing either

a table*

*amalgam #7: fernando ancil (brazil) and marina tsvetaeva (1933, russia)**

closed landscape*

*amalgama #6: rafael fares (brazil) and virginia yiny (spain)

A savage inside the cave and the man goes out to hunt.

Ripped in two both sexes.

She will be the womb, he will stay in the midst of

There and hither.

A tamed man cooks and the woman picks her children.

They have never been married.

They met each other cuz he was a migrant

He wanted a home, he was tired to be an errant

She wants only a lover, she had life done.

three*

*amalgam #3: bruno vasconcelos (brazil) and ko sakauchi (japan)

—

When I was little, my dad used to say “if you’re lost, I can find you looking for the girl who has three moles like Orion on her thigh and bring back home anywhere you are.” Two out of three are almost gone now and maybe I don’t need them.

of fruits and love*

*amalgam #1: lígia diniz (brazil) and anna volkova (latvia)

So strange, you see,
these windows so wide don’t get a grip of this city’s infinity.
From our room I see trees-with-branches-with-leaves-with-mangos so big
they could fall and smash someone’s head
and yet they are homelike for me.

(Ever since I was little I look up to the sky in terror:
such greatness must be famished for being so long so blue.
And in a city like this – all turquoise sky, no ocean, no woods –
it will surely feed on a lesser woman
like me.)

That is why (you see)
I need those trees-with-branches-with-leaves-with-mangos-so-big:
so I can hold on to them when the ravenous universe finally sends for me.
And that is why
when the sun is high
I ask you to close all the windows
and throw your body both gently and heavily –
I ask you to throw your body over me.

retrospective

my love has no meaning

———————————-

everyday dishes

on my writing desk:

a computer, notebooks, faded pictures, some lists to do.

among them rests a small chinese ball you once offered me

on its surface, a delicate blue painted foliage.

love can be that flimsy.

————————————————————–

Political license

for today, at least for today, i’ll close the windows and turn off lights for the men and children murdered in an indigenous village in brazil.

for today, at least for today, i’ll sing them a song I use to sing to my little boy when he feels threatened. it has no meaning. but i’ll sing it anyway.

(a song to Guarani-Kaiowa)

————————————————————————————–

the theme: drawers, chests and wardrobes

drawers, chests and wardrobes*

For a while we’ve stopped posting here. And we both started wondering why. Yesterday we met by chance on skype and talked about it (a little bit) and life. We always find something potentially interesting when talking about life randomly. It is, probably our method. A fluid, open-ended conversation about minor daily things: my son, your MA, films, books we are reading, and other ordinary situations. We were talking about what to do with our blog, trying to set a new theme and start publishing on it again. What does we have in common, besides “mouse gray” hair, red shoes, accents, photography and books? Our relationship has been marked by such coincidences. And it wasn’t different yesterday.

We were talking about leaving home, about having no more home, at least a traditional home. We are both having to deal with it, in different ways though. How is to live in between two cities and build up a feeling of home on the road, or how to feel at home when you had to leave your home unexpectedly and had no chance do set a new one? And, again, by chance, I wrote you a quotation from Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace. You were reading it as well. So we decided to understand it better. The coincidences but, mostly, what drove us to this book. We both want to understand the idea of intimacy, of the relationship between exterior and interior, personal objects and spaces, the sense of building a home and live in it, or leave it, of home and its poétique.

So we decided to start writing/picturing to each other again, like the first time, when we fist ‘met’ each other, as a diary, as a description of ordinary time and space of life.

* from La poétique de l’espace, by Gaston Bachelard

———————————————————————————-

For this theme, we decided to do each post together: one of us will post an image, another – text. We are going to swap every time who will post what, but without indication on it. We try to build one story told by two people. Let’s see how it works.