Dialogous Sensing Maria Luisa Acuña Braun/elZa Museum of Cd. Querétaro, .
Dialogous Sensing
Ma. Luisa Acuña-Braun / elZa
Elsa checked on the list the telephone numbers of those interested in the course, in order to make the corresponding calls.
They agreed to meet on Sunday at 7 p.m. when the museum would be closed and they could use the space they had lent her.
When they both entered through the door, they immediately recognized each other,
-The first room on the right is the one we are going to work in," she turned off almost all the lights, closed the door and spread two white wool blankets on the floor.
After some hesitation, with which topic and how they would begin. His hoarse voice echoed throughout the room, the shape of the vault made the sounds move in very different ways, they were louder but less clear because the voice was distorted.
I asked her to go to the opposite corner of the room and listen to how the voice was heard perfectly. These rooms were made with this intention of hearing each other without seeing each other to attend to the murmurs to the secrets.
I don't know how exactly but we started the session. I closed my eyes, tried to calm down, to breathe, just breathe. And wait to let happen what had to happen. Suddenly I felt that I had a lot of strength so much that could make the work difficult, so I tried to calm down as much as possible so she could work without any obstacle.
She began to spin around the room producing a series of very varied sounds that I followed very carefully, trying not to get distracted and not to imagine things that would distract me. Each time it was increasing the volume and the intention of complaint, pain, laments, accumulated for centuries. I did not want to connect with any of those sounds, the movements and more sounds continued and things began to happen that I do not remember very well because I was no longer trying to control or register what was happening there but rather I was going to focus on what was happening to me.
I got into one of those vibrations and I started to let a voice come out of my chest, a very long vowel resonating inside and outside of me with a force that I liked. If I liked the sounds that my throat and lungs produced, they were long, strong and very deep, they seemed to come from the caves of the heart and the bowels of the earth. Surprised I stayed playing with the voices for a while and I thought that those vaults were magic because they made the voice a song and I could verify that later throughout the session where their bitter lament generated the necessary movement for things to happen.
At one point I stood up, I told her it is here in my throat where the knot is, it hurts, I can't breathe. I am allergic to wool and its particles float all over the room, but I can handle it I am already handling it because I know what is happening to me.
So I got out of the wool blanket I was standing on, it was an itch I have been feeling since I was a girl for a long time and maybe I have the key to it in my memory. It's nothing we can continue although on second thought I could have stayed stuck there for a long time untangling those balls of wool that get stuck in my throat.
I sat down on the floor, closed my eyes again and we resumed the work. She at her own pace, setting the rhythm of the session with the sounds. You're a crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy, you know that? we're a couple of total crazies installed in the madness in the great of course. Being is different from being, you know that, don't you? If you're crazy you enjoy it, if you're crazy you suffer it, but don't mind me, it doesn't matter.
It's m a r a v i l l o s o . I began to have fun to play, I lengthened the sounds and the vowels dragging the consonants, I raised and lowered the tone or the timbre and eternalized the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, that filled the space I cut or lengthened syllables of words, at my whim I stole some of their sounds and made them mine and stuck them on the walls.
The snail records the sounds that are deposited inside it, they stick to its walls and form a paste and I repeated it several times The snail takes out its horns to the sun. The snail records all the voices. And so I kept playing with the voice and the words in a theatrical way reciting parliaments enjoying enormously my newly invented parliament.
Then I do not know when or how the hell I also came to say that my life has always been the same having to play roles that do not interest me that I do not like. As being a mom the mamamamamamaas are horrible we are horrible, my mom was by the way guauguaupissssima and my dad was not. Nothing like that but, he loved me very much. And I am also a very ugly mother. And I don't love me at all because I'm ugly.
As blood-sucking bats she asked me
-No, we are horrible birds, we don't suck blood, we peck here and there.
the best of all is that we fly very high because we know how to fly very high, we are also an endangered species, we rarely scare people away but it doesn't matter because we can fly very high.
And I felt like standing up and flying but I was afraid of hitting the walls and I just stood there and did nothing.
These walls, I told her are full of drowned out voices of pain that's why they are so wide This room is full of presences, do you feel them, I asked her without waiting for her answer she kept spinning around the room with her own music moving like a dancer while from her mouth came wild sounds of wounded animals of hurt creatures, I felt what she felt at this point. I too have felt mortally wounded like a panther walking the deserted streets dragging my love, my pain, but I won't talk about that story right now.
Now I don't want to do anything or be anyone. Nothing nobody, no, no, no and no. Swim just swim in the nothingness in the water I like to swim. I'm going to be you and you're going to be me in front of a mirror like Alice going in and out, what I say is for you, for me for both of us.
Quickly the representations of two seated clay figures in the pure bones came to my mind, like the one in the anthropology museum reflected in the glass.
I sat down, almost in front of her, almost in the same position and answered her previous question. That I didn't like myself, nor my body, nor what was around me, nor what I was going through, I was very afraid. And you know... I am sad very sad and I know you are sad too and I am sorry for your pain.
I knew that from that moment on, the game of mirrors that let me and her in and out, could make the session go down a drain, but as I was crying I really cried and let the emotions take their course I did nothing to stop them or control them, the only thing that was going to go down the drain were the tears.
Yes, I had a huge sadness. I had come to find out who I could be, what other role more to my liking I could play and .....
I find that the theater season is closed, the stage is gone, there are no seats, no roles to play, no budget, of course. What's more, today the theater is declared dead, today is the last performance.
And the tears kept rolling sweetly, oh what a relief.
He asked me again where the pain was. I answered, I don't know what hurts or where. What I do know is that I am short of breath, I have always been short of breath. Many nights I wake up feeling that I am suffocating, that I can no longer breathe and that these are the rehearsals of what will or may happen to me, well it already happens to me but I am still here.
I can't see myself through the mirror. But the other day I received an email from a dear and remote friend and what I read in her email amazed me, I could not believe it but I liked it so much that when I went to sleep that night I thought that the one I was taking to bed was another person, another me.
So mirrors do have something, someone inside that we do not know very well or we cannot recognize, because they are fogged, or determined not to let themselves be seen.
Mirror or mirage I could not say...tea, say...melo.
No more ideas, no more words or explanations. The body has already spoken, manifested itself.
It already cried, laughed, shuddered.
We continued exploring, some special part, she asked me.
Suddenly, as I started a second part, while my body was in movement, the monkeys came to my mind,
the nuns came to my mind, the Capuchin nuns cloistered in that convent hidden under meters and meters of heavy cloths and their opposite congeners, the nudists in front of the sea. You know that, no matter how much they hide or exhibit their bodies, we have no certainty about what the body is, who inhabits it, who loves it or despises it, who knows it or does not know it.
How conscious we really are of our bodies and what they represent or have represented for centuries and centuries.
The air and throat thing I already knew because I have never lacked treatments for respiratory ailments. The limbs I like, and my head I kept seeing her dancing and howling like women who "dance with wolves".
I like to danzon my trunk, my thorax and my hips and my most intimate parts.... Some day they were denied, disdained, abandoned, forgotten.....by whom, why?
By myself, I thought it was he, who abandoned them. They abandoned them. To whom? when? where? There were mirrors everywhere, forces were unleashed and their presences flitted around the room. Birds of ill omen, caged pigeons, carrion birds, between 4 walls, in 4 courtyards, in 4 directions, in 4 dimensions.
-No, we are horrible birds, we don't suck blood, we peck here and there.
the best of all is that we fly very high because we know how to fly very high, we are also an endangered species, we rarely scare people away but it doesn't matter because we can fly very high.
And I felt like standing up and flying but I was afraid of hitting the walls and I just stood there and did nothing.
These walls, I told her are full of drowned out voices of pain that's why they are so wide This room is full of presences, do you feel them, I asked her without waiting for her answer she kept spinning around the room with her own music moving like a dancer while from her mouth came wild sounds of wounded animals of hurt creatures, I felt what she felt at this point. I too have felt mortally wounded like a panther walking the deserted streets dragging my love, my pain, but I won't talk about that story right now.
Now I don't want to do anything or be anyone. Nothing nobody, no, no, no and no. Swim just swim in the nothingness in the water I like to swim. I'm going to be you and you're going to be me in front of a mirror like Alice going in and out, what I say is for you, for me for both of us.
Quickly the representations of two seated clay figures in the pure bones came to my mind, like the one in the anthropology museum reflected in the glass.
I sat down, almost in front of her, almost in the same position and answered her previous question. That I didn't like myself, nor my body, nor what was around me, nor what I was going through, I was very afraid. And you know... I am sad very sad and I know you are sad too and I am sorry for your pain.
I knew that from that moment on, the game of mirrors that let me and her in and out, could make the session go down a drain, but as I was crying I really cried and let the emotions take their course I did nothing to stop them or control them, the only thing that was going to go down the drain were the tears.
Yes, I had a huge sadness. I had come to find out who I could be, what other role more to my liking I could play and .....
I find that the theater season is closed, the stage is gone, there are no seats, no roles to play, no budget, of course. What's more, today the theater is declared dead, today is the last performance.
And the tears kept rolling sweetly, oh what a relief.
He asked me again where the pain was. I answered, I don't know what hurts or where. What I do know is that I am short of breath, I have always been short of breath. Many nights I wake up feeling that I am suffocating, that I can no longer breathe and that these are the rehearsals of what will or may happen to me, well it already happens to me but I am still here.
I can't see myself through the mirror. But the other day I received an email from a dear and remote friend and what I read in her email amazed me, I could not believe it but I liked it so much that when I went to sleep that night I thought that the one I was taking to bed was another person, another me.
So mirrors do have something, someone inside that we do not know very well or we cannot recognize, because they are fogged, or determined not to let themselves be seen.
Mirror or mirage I could not say...tea, say...melo.
No more ideas, no more words or explanations. The body has already spoken, manifested itself.
It already cried, laughed, shuddered.
We continued exploring, some special part, she asked me.
Suddenly, as I started a second part, while my body was in movement, the monkeys came to my mind,
the nuns came to my mind, the Capuchin nuns cloistered in that convent hidden under meters and meters of heavy cloths and their opposite congeners, the nudists in front of the sea. You know that, no matter how much they hide or exhibit their bodies, we have no certainty about what the body is, who inhabits it, who loves it or despises it, who knows it or does not know it.
How conscious we really are of our bodies and what they represent or have represented for centuries and centuries.
The air and throat thing I already knew because I have never lacked treatments for respiratory ailments. The limbs I like, and my head I kept seeing her dancing and howling like women who "dance with wolves".
I like to danzon my trunk, my thorax and my hips and my most intimate parts.... Some day they were denied, disdained, abandoned, forgotten.....by whom, why?
By myself, I thought it was he, who abandoned them. They abandoned them. To whom? when? where? There were mirrors everywhere, forces were unleashed and their presences flitted around the room. Birds of ill omen, caged pigeons, carrion birds, between 4 walls, in 4 courtyards, in 4 directions, in 4 dimensions.
. Here they are, we are, we are them and they are us.
Their wailing could be heard throughout the room, they had conjured them that night, in that place, that's why she cries, howls in pain, a millenary pain.
Don't cry shhh shhhh. Please don't cry anymore. Why are you crying so much, for whom?
Sleep now. It will pass, you'll get used to it.
Y..... Before the curtain fell, they thanked each other and hugged.
F I N
Their wailing could be heard throughout the room, they had conjured them that night, in that place, that's why she cries, howls in pain, a millenary pain.
Don't cry shhh shhhh. Please don't cry anymore. Why are you crying so much, for whom?
Sleep now. It will pass, you'll get used to it.
Y..... Before the curtain fell, they thanked each other and hugged.
F I N
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