2023-09-10 17:51:00
A mesh of autobiographical filaments is woven with the enveloping and clear writing, like a whirlpool of clear water through which you can see the bottom, which Ana Longoni gives to the minimal stories of Giving birth/departing.
They are stories that tell ways of returning home, ways of leaving and saying goodbye, encounters and endings.
Essayist and art historian specialized in the Argentine avant-garde and the intersections with politics, author of The silhouette, From Di Tella to “Tucumán Arde” e Transfeminist incitements, among other titles, the researcher explores here a vein of intimate, fragile narration, of open-hearted exposition of emotions. That vein, in turn, remains attached to a speculation of a subtle tone, which sinks its roots in social history and once once more affirms that the personal is political.
The story through which one enters Giving birth/departing It’s a domestic scene. In the kitchen of her apartment, the writer discovers that she has no sense of smell, a symptom of coronavirus.
About that time of withdrawal that was beginning, he writes: “Today I woke up thinking that losing my sense of smell was another form of confinement. We have already lost the possibility of touching each other’s skin and sinking our fingers, of talking to each other and listening to each other live, of touching each other, of looking at each other’s faces. And now I can’t smell others or myself, or know if I deserve a shower or if I’m starting a fire. The body absorbed, lethargic, reduced. Without papillae ready for delight or danger. Without outside.”
The text circulated on social networks and was published as a chronicle in the magazine Amphibian. At that time, April 2020, Ana Longoni was in Madrid, where she lived for almost five years and where she served as director of Public Activities of the Reina Sofía museum.
The book is full of mourning and can be understood in part as a collection of funeral rites, made of words, for those who might not have it. But not everything is pain: “It is not amoral to be happy in times of death,” he quotes the Argentine anthropologist Mercedes Villaba. We have the right to exist, to defend our lives, to make resistance an ethical issue. It is key to defend our joy, and for that we may be forced to make bubbles. Air pockets and exceptional spaces, hiding places where you can go to nourish yourself and rest.”
Brushing once morest death with writing and restoring the presence of the Cuban curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973-2022), portrayed in her professional performance as an art historian and activist, but more than anything as a weaver of emotional networks. Retain the life that bubbles in the form of sexual friction. Taking care of a garden on a Madrid balcony. Make a rational mind believe healing magic. Saying goodbye to women and twisting into the loops of regret that come and go. Circumvent borders and make the loving desires that became clandestine during the pandemic flicker. Return to Buenos Aires. In those writing rituals, everything mixed, expands Giving birth/departing, a book to treasure. How to treasure a talisman.
- Birth/Depart. Ana Longoni. Train in motion. 102 pages. $ 3,200.
1694368407
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