Page 105 - Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!

I found a cave under your armpit - she had a mysterious sound that made me put my ears close to her skin.
Janaína Moraes
Sentir-se à beira. Entre o falar e o escutar. Entre o mover e o entender. Escutar a escuta de quem escuta e não entende, ou desentende, ou quase entende, ou tende. Entendimento.
Estendimento. Intendere.
Understand.
Tender.
Entender tiene sus raíces en el latín intendere ‘extender, dirigir hacia algo’, aplicado a la mente ‘llevar la atención hacia’, como consecuencia, ‘comprender’; derivado de tendere ‘tender, desplegar’. De la familia etimológica de tender (V.). In English, to understand. In an association of words, we understand, by standing under a common atmosphere, container, envelope.
alys and Max may have started Sobre/Envelope through the desire to resist tangible and invisible boundaries by misunderstanding to co-stand, co-attend, co-‘intentionate’, even when language seems too fragile to grasp the intricacies of sustaining with-ness. Refining the tensions of ‘being with’ despite the danger of falling apart. Can we make sense of apartness? May we sense a -ness as part of the making? Sensing making with our parts - whichever we find on the very location we are right now-here.
Even if scattered by geography, time, politics, health and safety protocols, language, alys, Max and 60 artists (and counting) across the world have been re-imagining art as a material practice. In a way, what alys and Max invite us to, is to witness a process of testing and tasting which are our binding capacities within the boundaries we find ourselves in. ¿Cuáles son los límites entre el cuidado y la violencia? The envelopes initiated by alys and Max talk about (as they embody) time and desire. Time as a condition and a gift. Time as a trace of being smaller to be bigger. Being smaller than a germ, in response to alys’ daughter, might be what we just need to be in order to be bigger in our capacities of relating, connecting, trusting and challenging, as we are challenged by, the notions of allyship in unstable times.
Precarious bridges, absent presence, visceral territorialisation of time... Being small, residual, slow and attentive, the envelopes are turned into maps, or rather, counter-maps. Visceral and concrete responses to a world that craves connectedness despite all the governmental urge to categorise what’s essential enough to bend the rules of self distancing. As this project proposed art as an essential business, postal offices, houses, hospital beds across the world became the very stage for performance that happens at a micro scale. Time is made seen through the stamps of an envelope or the stories of the missing parts, for which an unexpected arrival one may only hope.
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