From the Grapevines

March 9th, 2013

At an acres-wide industrial dumpsite of hills made of obsolete machine parts, steel and other metal fragments ready to be molten for reuse. Some pieces from there will be taken integrally to create a sculpture.

– Shall we use the magnet or the hook?

– Would there be a difference?

– Both pick them up just fine. It’s just that the hook would leave a mark. The magnet doesn’t.

They’re on their way somewhere, waiting for someone. They’ve paused at the steps of a theatre that’s closed. It’s in the city center, and surrounding them is the jeer of a school recess nearby and the buzz of bureaucrats on their way to lunch.

– You can send any message telepathically, but for it to be actually communicated, reach, experienced, for that you need a willing receptor.

– You mean trust?

Prancing around, and overdressed for the occasion, an insect wears an aqua-litmus bugle-bead dress and a pair of Bolivian jet-black pompom earning in its delicately elongated mandarin antennas. They’ve met this elegant being in a fruit farm in the outskirts of the city. They’re in between rows of trees that move to the hiss of touching leaves provoked by the day’s breeze.

– Who would have thought that kiwi-tree branches were so entangled?

– Much more than a grapevine.

– And the eucalyptus skyscrapers there?

– They’re the farm’s walls, there to buffer the sound of the outside, you know, the highway, the cars, all that visual noise—they all however know they are in fact outside, but no one admits otherwise—you know—complicity called, begging understanding and for a more extended silence—to protect this environment.

Work brings the messmates together. Other possible affinities could be discovered as they speak, they seem to feel. It’s late in the evening, after dinner. Confessing experiences, sharing views.

– Attraction is different. It’s magnetic, a natural coming together.

– The other story is a condition of being taken, picked-up, apprehended.

– Unknowingly?

– Perhaps willingly.

– But what I like about sculpture is negative space.

– A modernist.

– Imaginably.

– That’s voluntarily, too.

– I mean the voids, that is what gives the contours to the thing, shapes what you see, discovering it, whatever it is, as you move.

Image: Capturing the winds of Osorio.

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