Angela Elizabeth Ramírez Fellowes

[IN BETWEEN] RETURNING THE GAZE

‘It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled ‘
(Julia Kristeva, 1982)

‘It is no longer I’ reflects on what can be called the initial moment of art practice, that of the event of an encounter: the sensing of ‘an other’.

If ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, sensing is recognizing that ‘some-thing’ has become visible to us, ‘participating’ along our side as part of our aesthetic experience.

Yet, if we look at ourselves looking, it may also become evident that some things escape our gaze. Determined as ‘non-worthy of visibility’ or incapable of agency, Matter may nevertheless, make itself visible by causing effects and affects upon us, one of which may be to return our gaze when beholden.

Approached as something that can be seen, felt, touched and therefore thought about, the body of work here presented explores a reciprocal encounter with Matter’s body through sculpture and print, its testimony of presence through video and photography and its mystery through poetry.

By practicing art as a poem, poetry becomes a way of challenging the mandate of language, expanding meaning and reconciling the rational with the personal, a longing for intimacy and attunement [in between] times of alienation.

Moreover, it is through attunement, understood as the sensing and connection with ‘an other’, that we might get closer to accessing the one reality that escapes us: that of Matter experiencing Us.

IT IS NO LONGER I
 
It is no longer I 
who recognizes current time
as a wound:  
a presence that can be felt over the body,
seen,
even touched and carved upon,
and therefore 
thought about.
 
‘It’ hurts, ‘I’ observe.

It is opposition
that which makes us 
infinitely homologous,
yet one could argue
that such an encounter
could never be reciprocal.
 
Can ‘it’ feel us?

And even if it does,
is it condemned to be
unfelt, unnoticed, 
the absent?
 
What pierced me?

I am so numb,
I cannot begin to recall
what was just asked.

Pure affect, no effect.

To feel affect.
The challenge of our frenetic times,
suddenly disrupted by silence.

ON THE NEED OF A POEM 

What is indeed the need of a poem?
Commanding the language erects itself
to verse on what resists to be summoned.

Behold the presence of a word
immediate response to a world,
itself an ungraspable circumstance 
that deems it necessary. 

–Speak– it says.
Speak of the uncanny shadows
that creep towards feeling 
to place themselves under our bodies. 

–Speak!–  it demands.
Since it is by speaking 
that we shall together erect 
our Babel tower of meanings.

What if words refuse 
to determine themselves?
If I call them one by one
and they do come, undoubtedly,
but with the lightness of 
snowflakes on a winter morning?

Fleeting, they stop at my gaze.
Decidedly, they sweep by
towards the end of the street,
lightheartedly changing course 
to chirp among the branches 
of the dormant chestnut. 

And yet, and yet…
I can see the bulk of civilization 
disappearing under their persistent weight. 
Here lies the need of a poem.