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“The environment is the soul of things. Each thing has its own expression and this expression comes from outside it. Each thing is the intersection of three lines, and these three lines form the thing: a certain quantity of material, the way in which we interpret it, and the environment it’s in. This table on which I’m writing is a block of wood, it’s the table, and it’s a piece of furniture among others in the room. My impression of this table, if I wish to transcribe it, will be composed of the notions that it is made of wood, that I call it a table and attribute certain uses to it, and that it receives, reflects and is transformed by the objects placed on top of it, in whose juxtaposition it has an external soul. And its very colour, the fading of that colour, its spots and cracks – all came from outside it, and this (more than its wooden essence) is what gives it its soul. And the core of that soul, its being a table, also came from the outside, which is its personality. I consider it neither a human nor a literary error to attribute a soul to the things we call inanimate. To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn’t have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it’s every bit as erroneous to attribute beauty to things. It’s every bit as erroneous to say that things possess colour, form, perhaps even being. This ocean is saltwater. This sunset is the initial diminishing of sunlight in this particular latitude and longitude. This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature. Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that’s the body. In these considerations there may be an entire philosophy for someone with the strength to draw conclusions. It won’t be me. Lucid vague thoughts and logical possibilities occur to me, but they all dim in the vision of a ray of sunlight that gilds a pile of dung like wetly squished dark straw, on the almost black soil next to a stone wall. That’s how I am. When I want to think, I look. When I want to descend into my soul, I suddenly freeze, oblivious, at the top of the long spiral staircase, looking through the upper-storey window at the sun that bathes the sprawling mass of rooftops in a tawny farewell.” Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa; Edited and Translated by Richard Zenith. Penguin Books, 2002. 58,58

The process of writing this document was established through its making. Acts that led me nose first, leaving thoughts for the second plane. Plans previously made went away once it was understood what I set myself to do, was a re-embodiment of myself. Now, looking at the work, I see it grew legs to continue and hold my hand through what it gives.

I believe the results of my investigation show themselves as not more than what they are. They are attempts of self-insertion, of recognizing my body as such and as belonging to our shared world. This became apparent after starting the outlining practice. I want to belong to myself almost more than I do to the world, and it ends up meaning the same. So, I speak of agency. Power over one's body. And a need for interaction. I give you examples of this in outside environments. Landscapes are not just outside. My body is to be seen as one as well. Bodies, objects, landscapes, all the same. I give you interpretations, varied, with my body. My body that I use at my own right.

Sometimes having strange ways to make it seen to me, but I do it nonetheless, and I do it on cotton, pretending I am flat, transmutable, capable of flatness. I urge, inch myself more towards flatness every day, hoping I can see me as you see me. And proving I leave marks.

I've been told by my father, since a child I learned of the world through its aestheticization. I live an aestheticized life, we all cope in one way or another. My ways of perceiving are what has brought me here. What makes me ask questions, often left unanswered through the over analysis of my steps, my breaths. My space. And because of this, then the color of cement, how many people are filling a bus, is someone having a hard time breathing today? A sense of awareness I curse often. So, I must tell you, I feel at times responsible for my weirdly heightened senses, with a will for themselves. And things stop making sense, they do at a certain point, and then once accepted, the absurdity of all gives more peace of mind than when it was supposed to be concrete and clear. I believe clearness lies sometimes, as water does when it is blue.




I am now at the airport. Waiting for my turn to be some sardine. I see those in that condition, leaving their plane. Lines, many heads becoming one, different colours, become undistinguishable, as they are many. This document made me want to take a step towards people and become aligned as well. I must let myself hug and be hugged so I can hug myself.

Seems fair. I hope you understand what I urge you to do. The document is almost as a plea for contact, for touch. And this that I tell you comes when seeing the contradictions I practice so well. I told you of interconnectedness and interaction. But I focus on my experience as a closed space. My movements stays still here.

And it is as a personal struggle heightened by these results I show you that come to tell me it is time I consider people as an integrant part of my work and myself, even if not depicted. My peers, friends, family, and people that pass by all that teach me to interact if I let them.

In the same way I am a stone, I am you.

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