November Chronicle by Celeste Perret and Sille Kima.

| tag: Arnhem

Between the lines of polarity, gestures of the radical thinking & learning with the weight of unsettled histories and published material, we stroke down on a carpet in the middle of Walter's bookstore. These words, published goods, are soft echoes of shifting postures. 

A cool handle opens the door to a picnic. If you sit long enough and do not attach yourself to anything for a while, one begins to notice an unease. 

If I can't see what I am looking at, how can I know it? 

If I can't know it, how am I to understand it? 

If I don't understand, how am I to notice? 

If I don't notice, do I see it? 

So sit with the unease. Close your eyes. Walk in the darkness. Hear, feel. Your heart is here with you. Ask yourself: "Do you want to be led?"

With diverse backgrounds and relations to publishing at play: how can we gently acquaint each of our differences instead of pushing them to the footnotes? To hold or to sit with unease. Here, the "I" is a thread of weft in our fabric instead of a threat to the warp of consistency.

What do you consider the center of your cartography? 

It it the place you grew up in or the place where you live now? 

Is it a language? 

Or perhaps an area where that language comes from? 

Is it a social status, something you are proud of in your lineage? 

Is it something or some place you feel entitled to? 

How is your identity tied to geography? 

How often do you think of it?       

  • I mean really think of it. 

How often do you benefit from it? Yes, be honest. Do you feel revolutionary fervor? 

How does it influence the way you think of yourself placed on the Earth? Where you come form, where you hope to go. 

What does connection to a place mean for you? 

Where is home? 

Do you feel more powerful than someone you know? 

Can you recognize violence in yourself? 

If yes, 

what do you do with it? 

Do you accept it as a part of you? Or?

Soap. 

Slippery soap on a carpet with too many threads to count in earnest. 

In a folk tale, a bowlful of dried peas have to be picked up one by one from the dirt floor before dusky blues. Kneeling on dried peas used to be a method of punishment for undisciplined youth, so watch where you put your knees. When there is a carpet on the floor, you can collect the peas in one swoop but I'm not sure if that's something to want.

Apart from listening to the rythmetic of tongues, sharing our unraveling monologues and practicing our colliding language: the body responds to the un-nerving too. The carpet beneath our bodies will read, and respond to our different postures. 

White violet blue green yellow orange red. The colors of chakras mirror the colors of a rainbow but try not to forget, your stars are not the same as mine. An exchange of energy can feel like a dent being slowly pushed into your shell. The heavier you get, the more the dented spot will bend the fibers of the carpet underneath you. These emotions, caused by the unsettling, are so heavy they might tear the carpet. We wonder what is underneath. As the fringe bleeds the edge, can the carpet indeed tear? Or will it cleave apart? Should we respond? Can it be by mending? Or patching? Falling through, or making anew? It whispers: "come closer I'd like to hold stronger this time".