“Everything that acts is a cruelty.”
– Antonin Artaud –
“Separated from each other by the general loss of any language
adequate to describe the facts, in the conspicuous consumption of nothingness.”
– Guy Debord –
We go round and round in big circles just to come back where we started. A narrative sequence with no end, no beginning, lost in an eternal comeback made of silence and bold lines. No words, only sawed off images that leaves breathless. The many stories told in the book are made of distortions for shut eyes. Pages connected as if they were in a sort of accordion of boundless imaginative power. Scenes, connections, power and strength dynamics clash and struggle, fading away and coming to life. Like if dying and living wasn’t enough. A road with no directions to come back home.
The whole book is a palindrome in which the characters are actors on a stage/landscape, frozen in actions that reveal two possible interpretations, they can be read in a way or another. a small installation rather than a book, its pages connected in a visual accordion that goes from the first to the last and goes on the back. To unfold the whole book it’s necessary a big floor where it can be laid, To close it requests the same meticulous skills used to fold maps.
This sequence of scenes – that invade each other without interruption, switching like movie scenes that despite their differences are in the same tracking shot – it’s a silent book. Not only because it has no words in it: it’s silent because silence is the sensitive quality of image, transcends from all its characters, players in stories with clear effects but unknown causes. Silent is the house on which the rails go through, in the image right after the cover, the house that raises in the night showing its wrecked foundations as roots to the indifferent look of a chicken, silent is the farmer on a carpet of eggs or stones keeping a chicken whose neck he just broke, not so far a gas station watching dull nothing, silent are the kids, the families.
Palindromes is a black tale in which nothing is what it seems, a tale in which good and evil mingle and judgement is wiped out.
Dimensions cm. 23x33
26 pages hand screenprinted and handbound.
2012