How can you be beast and brute at the same time, if beast means an untameable wild animal and brute a rough animal with a violent temper?
They are beasts.
They are brutes.
They are perfect.
They are sculptures sculpted with piss. The hidden face of kidneys. Healthy kidneys filter about a half cup of blood every minute, removing wastes and extra water to make urine. Each kidney is made up of about a million filtering units.
They are filtrations of water in plaster, of plaster in branch, of current in fibre, of substance in form, of inspiration in tongue.
They are unsayable little girls, headstrong in a happy and obstinately childlike life. On the plain, life has been given to these little girls as a power once exercised inside spheres. In the river, they have come out of the egg, pissing in the shell. They have spawned on the shore and frogs croak from the jelly surrounding the eggs. The substance of the world has been torn apart.
If you do not wish to be a fallen branch that comes and goes and sinks under the current, then you have to be the stream itself, everything from its source to the estuary flowing into the sea.
They are patches for a pool. Bewitchments of subjection. Patched up subtle rips and tears that separate the pure life of the branches and human life, nature and language.
Don’t lift an oar. Lounge in the middle of the stream.
They are the loss of hope, in other words, the irremediable destruction of paradise, which they now celebrate like the discovery of hidden treasure: a treasure hidden in plain sight, in the absolute,tragic and comic nonexistence of any secret.
They are adverbs because they are not a why, just simply a how. They are irrevocably what they are. They are ways. They are manners.
They are little girls with whimsical manners, always multiple and in never-ending vagrancy and also arrogance, like an infernal yet pacific legion of members, like angels or like common people.
They are waste, garbage.
They are plebeian and republican. They do not act but rather interrupt, they do not lift an oar and ask you to laugh in the terrifying certainty of knowing yourself to be just one more among the other living.
They are fragments of bodies and of plants that inhabit a geography between reality and dream.Tenuous tenderness.
They are a collection of spells, a compendium of images channelled through a load of lock and key.
They are a collection of spells, a compendium of voices channelled through a load of heads and tails. Now mystery, now energy.
They are a collection of spells, a compendium of forms channelled through a load of carrot and stick. Now pull, now push.
They are environmental hands that mobilize the air, while at once seeking forms, holding sticks and typing ropes, moulding plaster and modelling fabrics like punctuated melodies.
They are loudspeakers of low voices of strange names.
They are charms of the form, because if you really want to change one thing into another, it must be named and named again as long as there is breath.
They are a sequence of gestures of the sculptor’s body and the material of the sculpted that invoke energies like light and heat, the force that attracts the magnet and others that are perceived as weight, form, colour and sound.
They are ways of fighting and fighters at the top of their form.
They are charms of mooring. If the substance of the river has been torn apart, the sound of the voice and the movements of the thorax and of the hands must immediately join together in a long dance.
They are a tripartite of emotion, a government in opposition, between hands, eyes and hearts.The kidneys in opposition.
They are foul visions, mild belches, eruptions of ancient love. They are decoys of other lives,those still to come.
They are what they are, outcries, the exchange of value between what costs an arm and a leg and what costs a kidney.
They are the score for a dance of recently born dragons. The fire still faltering and the wings newly fledged.
When you lift a stone, the earth becomes lightened and the hand grows heavier.
They are the coupling of many hands, many, many hands, which, like sandstone in the wind refuse to stop being hands, to stop grabbing, holding and grasping.
They are fists and handjobs.
They are the coupling of the sternum and the throat. They are throat-supports and collarbone-rests. Elbows are left exposed, above the turban.
They are disturbances. Mechanical disturbances.
They are appendixes and pancreas. They purify, purify, purify.
They are apprentice Gargantuas who quit their studies to dedicate themselves to dance. And to hands. And to oars. And to barricades.
In turbulent flow, vortexes of different scales appear, interacting with each other. The drag force then increases as a result of the friction in the outer layer.
Row an oar in the water or how to give the oar to the river.
I too am a dancer and one day Elena invited me to dance with her and with her sculptures. And how we laughed, because one of us could not stop opening her mouth and contracting her breast and the other could not stop stretching her arms, extending her pelvis and sticking out her ass, the other grinded her teeth and elongated her neck, while the other banged her heel on the ground and the other poured and poured and poured, so much laughter that she poured out her whole waist in whistles.
Idoia Zabaleta
