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Scale of Gaze: drawn conversation to knot silences, breaths, pulsions

Lila Insúa Lintridis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Angelica Maria Cardona Zorrilla, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This is a text born from a conversation that opens and unfolds a space-time for an encounter –in-between– the drawn and the written. An encounter that embraces the divisions of space: what results when coming from different contexts and inhabiting different places, recognizing that drawing is the meeting point that allows us to continue exploring, as we both find ourselves in a state of permanent estrangement. It is a text that seeks to reveal an experience, to make experience, stroke by stroke, bringing forward statements that perform an action (to draw), that performative sense in the manner of Erika Fischer-Lichte.

This text splits time into several times: a meeting of words and images, a weaving of stroke and breath that, in the manner of a kipu, enables us to lay lines and address what we do not want to let escape; traces, marks, inscriptions of a ritual nature that help us to articulate a cosmos, to interrelate reading and writing experiences in an attempt to make them vibrate, to hum “the lines of wandering with beautiful delight”. A drawn conversation is a system of exchange, a midday kipu* where lines serve as poetic and mnemotechnical matter, as propitiatory inscriptions of our capacity of invocation by vibration.

The experience of drawing allows the encounter through small instants of the present, either diachronically when it is with others that the encounter takes place, or synchronically when it is the body itself that becomes both the trace and the tool or surface. Through drawing, the power of the fragment as a unit and the scale of the gaze becomes apparent, which, in its multiple dimensions, never ceases to open up spaces of possibility for life, for it is in itself a horizon. It is in the fragment, but also in the drift, where we place these lines of wandering that go from the language to the journey, from the experience that is derived to its graphic translation, now drawing, now looking for words that are actions, saying them we are “transforming” a state of things in the world.

* A name made up of two parts, one from the Andes and one from the Mediterranean, both at the same time so contradictory and so much in conflict. A fabric that unites the different places where the south can be situated: geographically, symbolically, metaphorically, politically. A name that conjures the system developed by the ancient people of the Andes with the thought of Benumeya, a mixture of melancholy and wonder that speaks of origins only imagined.

Keywords: experience, in between, subjectivity, performativity, writing