UNAUTHENTIC ANGELS

Foto de Miguel Lopes — Performance Autorithies by João Garcia Miguel — How nature writes in the body of the artist

UNAUTHENTIC ANGELS 

1999

Stories of people living in a city on the brink of an attack

Water and oil sludge

I'm lucky enough to work in a place by the river. Sometimes I get lost watching the oil blots that spread between the waters and the sky, dragging other impurities, sticking them to each other. The colors that oil reflects when mixed with the waters are slippery. The instantaneous reflections are always happening. A labyrinth of doors to open. The doors of the sky are always open and you just go in. It's the smoke that bothers us so much that it confuses us and lets us fall into temptation. This text has been appearing like a blur of oil that has been spreading, making and breaking down over the last few days. I see it as a kind of travel journal. Journeys between scenes of plays, loose ideas or for building characters; simple notes mixed with stories from different origins, dreams or childhood memories; loose sentences only. It ended up being a bit fragmented and here or there oily, unfinished or even a bit incomprehensible. When the time for sharing has come, I give you what I have received.

During the trial periods my sensitivity changes a little. We always start in the dark and then we crawl. It's as if I don't decide to talk or as if I've suddenly forgotten. What I say, I say in various voices, gesturing in various ways, and even in various languages. The strategy is to live as if we were in a city at war, always on the move, almost always hiding, and then make quick exits to the light looking for something. Spoils. Other times, one assaults the royal palaces and spends the whole summer there sunbathing and living on contradictions. The fear. Fear, for example, is used to get us closer. Whether it's the beating or the need to seek comfort in each other's arms.

The city is what you think of me. To talk about people who put their lives at risk for nothing, people who get hurt, people who die, souls who find themselves at high speed, smiles that escape on corners, windows that let you see things, walks in the field among the stars, animals on fire, men who walk with trees under their arms, giant rabbits. But what I really wanted was a garden right in the middle of town. Even if I was little enough to plant some cabbages and maybe some roses. But I know I'll never have the patience to pick them because of traffic jams.

I almost always work with ideas or situations that make me suffer, that make me afraid, or that I don't like, or that I don't understand. I need a certain physical sensation - so strong that I can identify it somewhere in my body - to be able to say that this is how I want things to stay. I see this as a necessity, a kind of physical contamination that confirms contact with other worlds. Whatever they may be or however they may never give up this feeling.

Coincidences

There are days when this side of the planet that has no light of its own - which we sometimes miss so much - things happen that wake me up from my almost permanent distraction.

The guy who used to sell me poems used to find him as if he had gone out under rocks, looking like he had been on the run in the middle of the war for a long time. The first time I bought him a poem was out of romanticism and because I thought he had a sense of humor. He moved slightly away from me and with his eyes blurred fixed a point on the horizon. He had meanwhile removed a tiny sheet of white paper and a black ballpoint pen from inside a huge black cardboard folder. After writing the poem with his back to me as if he were talking to himself, he handed it to me, asked for the money and a cigarette and left. I confess I didn't pay much attention to the poem. The second time I bought him another poem was out of faith. This situation was repeated for some months, always with the same ritual. The white leaf that had been previously cut, the same black paste, and the pen always the same. He would move away a little, fix his eyes somewhere on the horizon, and write. He would raise his eyes again as if he were waiting for some inspiration or as if he were doing head counts. From the seventh poem on, it became a habit. The night I bought her the twelfth poem, when I got home, I happened to find one of the other eleven poems. I compared them. They looked the same. I looked for others and they were all the same at first sight. After rereading them more carefully I realized that they all had exactly the same words. They had exactly the same words and the same orthographic signs. They were all arranged in a different organization.

The man looking very old, with a beard and huge hair that barely let him see his face, was sitting outside a church with a hat in front. His right hand was always in the air as if it balanced. He'd look at people on their sides and whistle. He would immediately look away whenever someone looked him in the eye. Every once in a while he seemed to recognize someone and called insistently. When one of the people approached him, he would offer him coins, so that he would never keep any coins in his hat. The next day I passed that same place again and there was a small crowd around the same man. There was a strange energy in the air. Some people were holding out their hands to give him coins. He would open his small mouth under his big beard and put them on his tongue with a kind of mystical delight; he would close his eyes and swallow them in an afflicting gasp, as if he lacked breath. The crowd would let out expressions of admiration and the same scene would be repeated when someone gave them more coins. Until, suddenly, the old man stood up and left with his arms raised to the sky. Some people still followed him, but he turned back with blood in his eyes and started throwing up holes. Millions of holes, dark, round and very small, spread quickly across the ground and advanced against the crowd surrounding it. The holes were growing rapidly, increasing in size, and there were holes everywhere that people could now enter. Heads lurking, arms and legs passing from one side to the other, in and out of them and into them. And the delighted crowd laughed and talked loudly without knowing why, just because it was good. Just because it's good to feel how your tongue rolls when you do it. And people started ripping off their own arms and exchanging them with each other. All this without the slightest sign of pain. They'd replace their arms with each other like they were changing clothes. And it turned them on so much that they started exchanging their feet for their hands, their legs for their heads. Their speed increased so much that they fell apart into bones, dust and white.

The black man who saw my aura was spending whole afternoons by my side. He found me by chance or simply entered the place where I was working. He looked at me in a way that frightened me and left me full of anxiety and sometimes a fear so great that I almost paralyzed and had to calm down by controlling my breathing. With my eyes wide open, fixed, with sharp teeth slightly out of my lips, I whispered constantly. I never immediately understood what I was saying because I was beginning to tremble and I could not stop images of men at war, with their mutilated bodies, all full of blood, screaming. I just understand that he tells me that I have a very luminous aura, a great energy, he clicks with his tongue and shuts up. A giant mass is again at my side, completely absent, as if it were lurking there to tell me something else. It has a huge head. Not long ago I learned that he does and says the same to other people who also know him. And we all agreed that that black guy, who created the same feeling of fear in all of us, could project the same images into our thoughts. Just as if his head were a projection machine and we were the screen where he projected whatever he wanted. Terrible accidents. Mass murders with blood flowing very slowly like slugs. Ruins, unfinished buildings, boat cemeteries. Landscapes gone mad.

The guy who wanted to sell me some famous 20th-century trial books had very elegant hands. You could almost look into his hands and get lost in his repetitive movements while catching tiny bugs and crushing them with all the elegance of the world, between his thumb and middle finger. According to him, the bugs appeared from under his skin as if watching his distractions, and jumped out. So he had to be very careful to catch them before they ran away or got back into his body. That didn't seem to bother him much. It was just a task to which he applied himself with a calm abnegation. No savagery. With each little dead insect he made a roll that he joined to the previous ones by weaving a thread. As he hunted insects, he covered himself with the thread. As the night passed his movements became more and more difficult, until he could hardly move. I gave him cigarettes and bought him some beers and he gave up trying to sell me the books. He still read me part of one of the books. To my amazement he read singing. Little by little the string became cocooned and he stopped listening to me and I stopped listening to him.

Simultaneity or premonitions

On the other days, when I'm only interested in the flowers in the sky and what you say with your mouth shut, I really like to change my mind and undress anywhere. At least I get tired of imagining myself naked in the street and at home and in the middle of the country and under the stairs and imagining that other people have the same thing on their minds. I have asked strangers in the street to undress, and I have even offered them money. But in this city where I live no one ever takes their clothes off just because they are asked to. You have to ask them in a very special way. And I'm glad. Artists shouldn't wear clothes! Or objects! They should all be naked! They should spend their time singing and saying poems and other things on top of trees, especially at night. And they should always walk with a rock on their head to be easily recognizable, even in the dark.

For me the future is all in the rain, an Asian looking guy told me the other day when I was reading a newspaper I read almost every day, and I kept looking at him thinking. Everything always falling apart and feeling a certain comfort in it. I remembered living in a house where it was raining inside. Some nights I had to get up and get the water off the floor. I had to spread buckets and pans all over the house so it wouldn't get flooded. One night I woke up with the rain wetting my face. I had a huge feeling of anger mixed with a terrible fear that the world would end at that moment. I felt like I wasn't ready for it yet. Since it was impossible to move the bed, I ended up having to sleep cowered in the middle of pans and plastic buckets scattered around the bed. That night I dreamed I'd kill a man who'd come up to me outside my house. I don't know why, I was carrying a big gun with me. The very moment I shot him, I realized that man was my brother. And the next moment as the bullet hit him he was turning into a deer. Wounded bleeding from his chest. There was nothing I could do. My heart was bursting with worry. I stood there, eyes wide open, shrunken. Between me and outside there was a huge black chasm with no bridge. I got completely lost.

Tragedy

Huge tragedies that end and begin in attacks of stubbornness.

Not to be intimidated by anything and that's a big lie.

The lie is good, just like everything that's fake is stupid.

The snapshot is always failing.

Animals that always end up dying.

Disasters, accidents, frontal shocks.

Men who stand in front of trains.

The flowers are coming back to the trees. No, they're butterflies.

Partial paralysis or collapsing walls.

The girl who fell to pieces.

Screams

There were five or six of them and they were walking in a line next to each other. In the distance it seemed that they were of the same family and that they were all angry. They went forward and backward, and ended up always in the same place. Every now and then, for no apparent reason, one of them would kneel down and start screaming. The others would imitate him, and everyone squatted as much as they could. Then they would get up and fall down again as they screamed. Until they started to get tired and stopped shouting. They started walking again, always in a line back and forth, faster and faster, bumping and tripping over each other. Again one of them would kneel down and start shouting and the others would follow him. And these situations repeated themselves until it started raining. Soon after they left the stage.

Topics and other fragments

Act like sponges Steal things from each other Satisfied betrayals

Sixty seconds of accelerated circular motion

Farts and burps like wicked children wanting to piss off daddies

Drugs friends the people are with you

Hot chicks who never fuck with me

Provocations? To whom how and why? To myself? To the spectators? Disorganization? Lack of money? People starving to death? Going back and forth?

The drunk who kissed the pole until his wife came for him

The memory defect

Absolutely compulsive

I'm here

You don't love me

The construction of a kind of cocoon

Every once in a while I get to the foot of a phone

To die and rise again

That's very good

You don't stand a chance

The floor is a wall

Useless Angels

The end or the mirror scene

It's the war. It's the war. A giant child gives orders in a room with the walls painted black. Sometimes you can hardly hear what he says. Suddenly he's agitating. The room is full of electricity. He takes notes so when he grows up he doesn't forget what it's like to be a child. You can go for hours without saying anything. You sit or lie down without falling asleep and stare. He often speaks loudly, with a decided, even authoritarian tone. From time to time he screams. Disruptions. And he calms down abruptly. You never really know what he's capable of saying. He's a child. He spends hours building abstract hypotheses. Puzzles. He turns off and lights up. He always walks with a notepad under his arm made of sheets of different kinds of metal where he keeps reflected images.

Everything happens in space. Selfishness, greed and the instinct for possession. Everything mixed with fear. A space that is being filled in all directions. Everything always and at the same time. From time to time we synchronize, make some discovery, take note of coincidences or decide something. Some directions are gaining more weight. They infiltrate with more force. The different weights of space attract me. Like a magnet drags me. I let myself go after a sense of melody, looking for a resemblance or an enchantment.

With a sense of disgust at what I see, I change what I see into what I glimpse or suspect. I experiment. I open the door to see if I can find a place that provokes me anything. Tickle for example. I like contradictions. I like my bad mood and feeling completely lost. Challenges. The floor is so steep I can't get out of this corner. Then I choose the most unpleasant place and start all over again.

Prejudice. Working with prejudice. What you do next can have no connection with the previous scene. Or each scene can have no more or less than three minutes. Or what you say has lost its meaning, but we continue to make an effort to find a secret way out. Mismatched ideas only. Or just don't want to say anything and say it.

The threads that bind us

In the end, I think I just want to entertain people. Distract them. Get their attention. Eat them and be eaten by them. And talk. Talk non-stop. Talking about the anguish of separating and ending things. And how far I am from being happy. And for a moment, so close that I can barely stand it. And that I don't have any special strategy. Which turns out to be a strategy.

Sometimes when working on a play, I chase an idea or a form obsessively. Other times, I let myself go with the times. Other pieces are created based on geometric assumptions only. Total abstractions. Sometimes several directions are mixed up. It irritates me sometimes the repetition, as well as at other times it enchants me.

The stories. I like to hear people talking. Even if I'm not paying attention. Or that I don't understand what they're saying. Just mentally rearrange the sounds I hear. The sound distracts me. It's for lack of courage that we order things. There are so many of them that we get tangled up. Like wires that bind us. If we pull too hard, we'll get bits of flesh. From our own flesh. The rest is confusion and it's eternal.