To walk around a European City.
To sit in a small cafe, choose a block of cheese in a cheese shop, to pass by a lake, a national museum, a state theater house, through the garden with flowers and rabbits, to eventually find your name in the program of a small theater house.
To walk around a European City. To sit in a small cafe, choose a block of cheese in a cheese shop, to pass by a lake, a national museum, a state theater house, through the garden with flowers and rabbits, to eventually find your name in the program of a small theater house. To be a part of the international artistic community. To travel light and have friends everywhere. To do a master. To do a post-master-pre-phd at the royal academy, because there are still kings and queens in Europe.
To reclaim your identity in institutions. To cringe when they don’t know how to host parties. To laugh as they pretend to know the region you’re coming from, because they visited it once on a holiday. To be polite when they think they understand the complexities of your background. To respect them because they are trying to. To understand that the idiom coming from doesn’t include an arrival. To be, therefore, constantly suspended in time and place. To linger, between, always. As a choice and as an imposition.
The roots - to talk about them all the time.
To make your body and your presence a placeholder for the institutional games of inclusion. To be aware of your own compliance. To be tired. To be ungrateful. To exist here, in the economic center of culture, and also there, where you’re coming from, where people die like flies because of the collapsing health system.
To get ready for the doom, as you’re growing a new limb - a limb for grief. To get to know the absence not as a theoretical concept or an idea, but as a constitutive ingredient of your life. To feel anger popping and cracking in the mouth cavity, making the tongue stiff, like the synthetic fizz candy that children chew for fun.
Not only that you’re absent, but more and more of those you know are becoming absent in more radical ways. They die. They disappear. They go mad. They leave things behind.
To pick up after them. Without courage, or discipline, or ambition.
No fame. No success. Solitude instead. Concealment. Weakness. Slacking. Unmastery. Clumsiness.
'To have the endurance of tramps who travel light, discarding acquisitions like water drops off a dog’. (Fanny Howe)
To witness the occasional moments of clarity, like when the sleeper wakes up in the middle of the night and remembers the whole dream, but turns to the other side, ready to forget it. To drop to the other side. To sink down below. To observe and be in the middle of cracking, opening up. To watch if something is ready to come out of the crack. A hand? An eye? A tail? An ear? A cold breath? A whimper?
Suddenly, the black line on the screen topples to the left causing the black digital ink to spill over the document page. The black stain is pulsing, like a bile, or a stomach of a pregnant cat, blinking, like a glossy eye of a magpie. The words and shapes emerge and begin to float around the screen in murmuration.
Can you hear the squeaking of my bedroom door made by the draft? Or the rattle of the leaves outside? Do I hear you sigh across the water?
Here, below. At the murky river bottom, around the edges of the woodland, slithering through the grass with slowworms, above and under the graves, cobblestones, doorsteps.
(I don’t know how we will find each other there, but it’s how we meet.)
– Tamara Antonijevic