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Documentation
Sirenes Errantes: Servicio de Escuchasión [Listening Service]
Saturday, 25.7.2020– Sunday, 1.11.2020
www.escuchasion.space
Langauges: English, French, German, Portuguese, Quechua, Spanish
“Monday, May 4, 2020. I read and N drew, then I drew and N read. My feeling when reading was one of infinite intimacy and love, even though M was walking around. It was a moment that could be compared to making love to someone very dear and desired. Reading also took me back to the times when I read to M at night before going to sleep. It was wonderful.
I chose a story from Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women named So Long, and I wanted to describe everything she wrote about: her lover, her children, her sister, New York, Mexico City.
Then, there were fifteen beautiful minutes of sounds, noises, silences, speaking an invented language, whispering, striking a tempo.
We finished … and dancing, I started cooking a big pumpkin bought at the UTT market, we talked with M, I roasted the seeds. I felt alive, happy, light.
When it was my turn to draw, I arranged an X-ray of my lungs as a surface, the bag of coarse salt, and a cushion. N read and I drew. Letting myself be impregnated by her voice, the words, the story. I was moving the salt, letting myself be touched by the voice. It was in a loud voice. I let myself go. Roads, forks, spirals appeared. Then the different noises appeared, little paper noises, objects. And I kept moving the image. Towards the end, I stopped and looked at it from different perspectives, and they all interested me. It was a magical moment. N told me that he took me for a walk around his house through the sounds.”
—From a Sirene Errante’s listening service logbook.
The Sirenes Errantes [Errant Mermaids] become a body with their voices, listening between breaths to allow feelings to emerge. We are a group that, since 2019, has carried out a genealogy of practices, actions, and encounters where salt, the body, the notion of mermaids, and a village of collective emotionality are deepened to find paths leading to the emergence of sensibilities in the social body.
In the present context, we are inventing along with the virus. Human distance is crossed by a re-encounter with technology as a bridge or digital patch of closeness. Time in quarantine interrupts chrononormality. We invented a Servicio de Escuchasión [Listening Service] that uses the power of the voice as a means of awareness, of fracturing time, and accompaniment. Will we be able to touch each other with words? We will become tongues of affective contagion, available to earthlings in need of it in these very special circumstances.
Servicio de Escuchasión offers a one-hour practice that combines a reading with drawing in coarse salt. It contemplates moments of silent perception and the production of textbooks. It is a service of affectionate voices among strangers, voices that whisper in the ear, that affect each other. Voices in search of finding a (un)determined closeness, a new lightness.
A little piece of land on the web, www.escuchasion.space, was launched on July 25, 2020. On this platform, it is possible to take turns accessing the service for free. We invite you to enter this site and the Servicio de Escuchasión. A Collective Sensitive Archive, which will create a record of these practices for the year 2020, will also be made available.
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