a book with two covers and a certain number of pages
‘a book with two covers and a certain number of pages’, 2022, single edition hardcover book. A collaboration with Joana Cifre Cerda and shown as part of May Show, our co-curated exhibition at x-church, Gainsborough in May 2022.
The book is compiled of images and words from our past decade of collaborative works alongside fragments of text from Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable.
is there a single word of mine in anything I say?
it is this voice which has often, always, mingled with mine, and sometimes drowned it completely …
perhaps that is how it began
the ‘I’dea is never ‘mine’
‘I’ ing
the subject
most blameless thing that divides the world in two,
as thin as foil,
the partition,
two surfaces
and no thickness
the knot which ties the seams
between who seems
between the ‘I’ and the (k)not ‘I’
(bending, binding, bonding)
a wordless thing
a picture, a circle,
broken at its lowest point …
a point, or dot …
… a circle and its centre in search of each other,
a centre and a circle
and a centre not its centre in
… in boundless space,
in endless time …
perhaps that is how it began?
I must have mixed them up, these nameless images,
these imageless names,
and this word which is perhaps not the right one for the thing I see when I hear it
oh
I am far … far from my subject
let’s go back to it
it’s gone …
… where was I?
oh yes, my subject, no longer there, or no longer the same
joining but jumbling
boundaries continually altering
the inside becomes the outside and vice versa
like the emergence of another world, these marks, these traits, irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random, non-representative, non-illustrative, non-narrative no longer either significant or signifiers: a-signifying traits, traits of sensation, but of confused sensations (the confused sensations that we bring with us at birth), manual traits with a rag stick brush or sponge; throws with his hands as if the hand assumed an independence and began to be guided by other forces, making marks that no longer depend on either will or sight, almost blindmanual
where was I?
drowned in a sea of subjects and objects
all interchangeable