The Tail Project
When instants align
This morning, before the blazing heat settled, the light was so soft and perfect. With the sandglass in hand, I waited for the tea to infuse completely, which in itself is no easy task, since tea requires both patience and precision….
I love tea and its sense of time.
At one point, the light reflected off the sandglass onto the opposite wall, creating a sparkling effect of almost dazzling whiteness.
At that moment, I began to turn the sandglass around me as a circle of light formed, and the eyes were following this motion all the way to the end of the gaze, only to catch it again on the other side of the other shoulder.
It was a simple gesture that had no ambition and no concrete impact other than the gesture itself, in a moment of emptiness and waiting.
These gestures are barely describable, as they are so subtly inserted into the flâneur’s quotidian and this contributes to the fragility of their very existence as an artistic act. In this way, like a continuous cycle, gestures intermingle and punctuate time, with no hierarchy of importance, and with complete attention to each instance, be it artistic or otherwise…And it's exactly in this interstice that the tail project takes on its meaning; a sinuous interstice that passes from invisible gestures to more recognizable ones without any order of preference or importance.
Following the road of the interval and the gestures elaborated in private at the heart of this society of the spectacle (which exhibits absolutely everything as a pride of the visible and the glittering), is a road of doubts and uncertainties, but for the flâneur it is perhaps the only possible option of counter-balancing....
Unknown Piece
Lose yourself in the crowd.
Don’t look back.
Withholding words when it's time to speak, showing nothing when it's time to show something - in short, omitting the most obvious information - is a way of circumventing the spectacle of the self, of tricking the self somehow. In this altered state of the ma, reverberations echo each other, opening up the flâneur's mental space for greater insight into the NOW.
Thus, standing motionless on different sites can itself be what is activated; the flâneur's body blending with the different contexts, making the action almost indistinguishable from its surroundings.
3 stages of moons
In a garden in the city of Barcelona, far from the main boulevards and traffic, the blackbirds were singing strongly. I had brought a circle in my bag, and it seemed appropriate to move the moons in three stages:
1- Max held the circle in his hands at arm's length and gently turned it over his head in a fluid motion, as if to catch the air and the echoes of the blackbird's sounds.
2- Taking the circle, I lowered it onto myself and moved my body inside it until I reached the foot, where I was able to exit the circle.
3- We each drew a circle around the other on the ground and left.
There was no one else in the park….
I like to imagine that people found the circles and reflected on the moon and its various cycles and its impact on our actions and thought processes.I also like to imagine that actions taken in private can have a certain influence on the whole, that this can lead us to consider everything that is unseen as a secret potential to undertake.
In this sense, the flâneur recognizes that these actions do not change anything, and that is not the fundamental nature of this practice. Like the tail, it involves a constantly shifting motion that opens up the interstices of time. During this interval, the flâneur makes a point and withdraws without necessarily having a complete response. This can continue later, elsewhere, or end without resolution in an open circle that will transform at an unexpected moment, without preamble and without expectation of concrete realization....
Completeness can come months or even years after the furtive instant, at which point the flâneur can claim it as an act of art, but above all, this instant must develop over a sufficient period of time to be claimed or not; if not, it remains nonetheless an experience, a note of importance for a possible future attempt. One could say that this kind of approach requires a profound abandonment of any desire to make an impact.
There is no spectacle, no demonstration, just a simple act that expresses one point of view among many others.
Infiniti
on one hand
perspectives, gold and silver, was once a place of departure; I still think about it now.
