Saudade
Works while made on a residency in New Delhi, India
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- The joy of listening It's yours!
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- nooo
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- Stress getting to you? Calm down and relax by learning
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- WITH YOU FOR YOU ALWAYS
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- piano piano
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- Keep Distance
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- this sweet sensation of joy
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- glittering, glittering, but never quite
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- eyes glued
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- an oh! of pain
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- Sutra
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- Homemade, homemade! But aren't we all
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- The books I'd read were full of blanks
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- But I felt: you are an I
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- I - we were falling, falling
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- DIVERSION
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- Savtung
Saudade
The text fragments in Saudade originate from the barrage of the visual verbal cosmopolitan environment encountered in travel between Dallas, USA and New Delhi, India. Diverse sources include: corporate marketing, civic signage, hand painted vehicle didactics, personal emails, and Elizabeth Bishop’s last book of poems, Geography III. Subjecting the textual image to a series of material processes, I copy, (re-)draw, trace, machine stitch, dissolve, dry, disentangle, and pin out to the wall the resulting thread webs. Through the various processes I dislocate, assimilate, connect, and translate the textual image into a new language: the groundless thread drawing. Words coalesce at the center but fray into unruly strands at the edges. The phrases retain traces of their origins: font, a relation to scale, and in some instances, color. The context remains only as an association made possible by a person who already has a memory of the source. “WITH YOU FOR YOU ALWAYS” will never be legible for what it was to an audience unfamiliar with the Delhi police slogan, but will certainly sound like a valentine to any citizen of the U.S. New traces fix to the work, the tremoring energy of the sewing machine or elements of awkwardness through the hand drawn translation. The texts convey messages that waver between care and concern or control and manipulation – attentiveness to well-being or its absence – a relation between two subjects (I and you) – suggestions, commands, cautions, exclamations.
