The weight of air is the breath of a stone.
The coast at Carvoeiro has a soft and porous edge, a muddled cocktail, where elemental tides exchange breath in abrasive conversations:
Fire is unrested from a long hot night.
Sea takes its morning stroll along the beach.
Stone watches, carelessly losing a little change.
Wind comes hurrying through, carrying news.
To Wind: Does it matter which handful of dust we choose for your lungs? All dust finds you eventually, every past will pass through your breath.
I hear you’re heavy now, bloated by thick smoke, helping Fire do their work. Indifferent to which fool hired you, which idiot stoked you, which bastard expected to gain from feeding you, you diligently stripped the land for next year’s growth. How were you to know that nothing new was being planted?
Pink: My body has no opinion. I am just exploring the rocks, breathing life into still water whilst the sea is busy.
Coiled in a carved shell of sandstone, a pink creature unwraps its limbs and traces the curly shapes. It scoops together brittle flotsam with curious tenderness. The body of tongues probes every crevice to taste and be tasted.
My tongue flaps, vibrates, and tries to shape the air into a message for Wind. It really could be good to have one working language, if you don’t mind losing the details. A universal language of gesture understood by human, non-human, the lived and the unlived. Big gestures could be enough. I try and fail to skim a stone across the water.
“I like the big gestures.” Ana says.
“I prefer the details.” Elisabetta says.
Back in our blank workspace Ana is drawing. Each page is quickly covered in symbols, at such pace yet with high-purposed adrenalin. Occasionally, holes are cut in the paper so that the next page can begin before the current one expires. Scratches and fields of charcoal, settlements of solid pink, Ana’s printer fingers shred and collage the day’s bits into releases of glyphs; messages for Wind and Fire to breathe.
The people here live in geological obscurity, willfully. The countless shells buried in the sandstone are testament to this granulated life. At a chapel we saw the skulls of monks embedded in the walls, uniform as tiles, devalued to aggregate, just like those shells.
As you walk along the torn edge of the cliff the conversation between Fire, Stone, Sea and Wind continues. The path winds its erratic way, up and down. The Sun, distracted by the haze, keeps a lazy eye on you.
I’m not sure if you notice the tide change.
I can’t be sure if you feel the change in temperature.
As I slip below your feet and the cliff moves, gently unsettled, you don’t feel a thing. Your grave licks its dry lips.
All material is reproduced by kind permission of the credited artists and remains their intellectual property. For more information contact elisabetta.antonucci@gmail.com.