Caress Me Into Clay

List of Ingredients

Wood covered in clay - clay collected from the cliffs & diluted into rain water. Dirt, Beetle, a Numerous Amont of Essential Untouched and Unnoticed Elements

Day 3 - Eros-ions

Wood

We live the seasons of plants, but the geological seasons of the Earth are wider. It seems that trees, holding the rocks into ground and the light into matter, are the bridges between the time of chlorophyll beings and the rhythm of fossil’s dance. Wood grows from a plant’s seed and petrifies into gems stones. Wood held by golden sap, feeding like a plant whilst remembering all the secrets of the rocks. Wood speaking the language of the heavens and the whispers of the underworld. Wood pulling up and pulling down, wood, the bridge mirroring the poles of bright air and solid darkness. Wood, Persephone’s arms pushing to the center, carrying mountains above the seas whilst feeding from solar clouds.

Forests of bridges between undergrounds currents of memories and futures spelt out by the stars.

Forests turning light into matter and matter into light again, living wider seasons through seasons, living several times at the same time.

Day 2 - Geting Clayin the Baranco

One after the other they would turn into little dust bins.

A dust bin? A bag of cosmic dust, blowing up blowing up blowing up.

- So, Here we are, turning twisting hearts and wrists into other forms of breathing.

It all trans-forms, that, we know. Nothing ends or begins, it be-comes. Death and Life as fixed states are unreal and morbid, para-lyzing and dry. We shall add the -ing to all that we are be-ing. As a pre-sent action continuing for ever, trans-forming into another, on and on, again and again. Eros-ion, in spanish, is a cosmic « Meteor-izacion ». Mr Oxford Dictionary of English, could we have your light on this word?

- Yes indeed. Eros-ion is the gradual de-struction or diminution of some-thing.

the eros-ion of the cliffs | the eros-ion of democratic freedoms: wearing away, abrasion, scraping away, grinding down, crumbling, wear and tear, weathering, dissolving, dissolution; eating away, gnawing away, chipping away, corrosion, corroding, attrition; wasting away, rotting, decay; undermining, weakening, sapping, deterioration, disintegration, destruction, spoiling; rare : detrition.

- Thank you indeed Mr Oxford. Well, I have just found the right back leg of a beetle. The rest of the beast was lost when I encountered boars. You know, I was interested in this Greek Goddess of the dead… Persephone… She circles be-tween and through all of life and death at the same time. Same - Time. Yes, for there are different times. A time for death, a time for life, a time for what is in be-tween. A time to ex-hale, a time to in-hale, a time to be a flesh bag of bones and a time to be a strange bird singing to the lady birds genitals. Even a time to be a foreign metal confusingly finding its way through empty space, captured by its own lack of orbit, looking at Jupiter for in-spiration. Persephone, she is captured by time. It is time that stretches her states of being, time that structures her identity, her becomings. Her existence is her passages, transgressing, trans-forming, traversing, trans-cending. Her agency and her voice are caught in a beautifully spinning wheel. Waxing and Waning have become the foundations of her lungs’ architecture. She erodes, undergoes abra-sion, grinds down, crumbles. It all slides down, limestone and clay, slide down when Demeter cries her daughter’s void, down the mountain into the sea. And up again from the chest of the Earth, from Hades’ bed, rising hills into cliffs and peaks, limbs of flowing fire reaching for the mothering clouds again. Another time, a time that sees us pass faster than a ridge’s blink. When Humans tell her story, Persephone speaks through flowers, fruits and fait. She feeds the life and death of women’s wombs and men’s desire. For the sierras, her seasons string along with eros-ion, the dissolution of rocks, boulders’ decay. Her wider season en-compass billions of years of fossilized onyx stone, turning them into fire or gas, into clouds again.- what is the opposite of erosion ?

- I don’t know… Well, maybe soar, growth, expansion, mount up. Fountaining up!

- Fountain! From her cave, from the center, she pulls out and pulls in. She is magnetic, she is the poles, she opposes and unites. I am here, in my time. I’m attempting a temporary fixation. I make milky ways of ephemeral embodiments. It is all I can do, really. Clay is sensitive to tears and tears. It erodes easily. Its sea-sons are faster than embodied carbon’s break down. For clay dissolves. Water opens transformation, transmogrification. This last word is of unknown origin, ironically it means « transform in a surprising or magical manner ». When it magically becomes, the origin gets lost in the surprise. Magic is only about forgetting how transformation has occurred. Persephone is not a magician. She works slowly and adapts to all of life’s sea-sons. She moves in different times at the same time, she is the erosion and the rising. She didn’t magically disappear when she was a little girl, she was taken by death who had fallen in love with her. Death had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of life. Death knows it needs life, de-sperately needs life. Death needs life, and with death, life can start its course around the sun, dawn and dusk. Life is no longer fixed, time stretches into motion and the movement mutates, eats the mutes and sings itself into being, morning choir. Persephone tells the origin and the becoming, she generously offers a present. Hade’s hands or Demeter’s lament, they might not be love, but rather a pull of the tantalized heart, suffering from an excruciating lack. And in the motion set by the desire for the absent object, trans-formation births, opposes morbid paralysis. Even in sterile drought, Demeter walks. Persephone is the desired object, the invisible force between two magnetic poles, the unknown, silent yet central dark matter enfolding and sustaining space. It is never about having her, but rather the tides her absence and presence create, the libidinal force of desire itself, orbiting poles into solar systems, milky ways of ephemeral embodiments. Seasons wider than our imagination.

I SHOOT U

eyes like this

O O IIIIIIIIIIIIII I II I I I Ii i i

give me your splendid screen mask i project on my projectiles shooting your screen scream for creamy pixels

Erode her ode to woods of clay apple crumble tasty sweet sand skin of light

BOOM

I miss my puddings of pixels just as much as i miss cables of your absence

The Return of the Hunter's Antlers

List of Ingredients

Sculpture: Wood covered in clay, Almeria’s Almonds Trees

Performance: Body, Wood covered in clay, Walk Through Almeria's Hills and Barrancos

Day 10 - Field trip : The Clayed Pine Antlers and Almeria’s Almonds

A new specimen has been found

An eroding yet stubborn form of resilient and wandering life has erected from the ground of clay.

Sometimes it believes to be a tree, sometimes it is game. Its confusion is a wonderful gift, for it doesn't know which trail to identify with.

It is free to wander through fields or woods, speak different languages and love many homes.

Day 7 - Circling Boars : Encounters and Separations

At the autumn of the day

I walk through mountains towards the sunset, on boars territory, sniffing their air, smelling their hair, their wild skin. I look out for them, but somehow I’m looking for them too. I want to see and not be seen. I keep my eyes and ears out. Boars reign over the several peaks of the mountains surrounding our valley. On the top, where you can watch the early sunrise and embrace with your pupils what feels like thousands of kilometers, cliffs rise in a perfect vertical spring of rocks, surrounded by a wall of strong boar scent, a fortress of solid and invisible ramparts. Ancient human made circles of stones silently lay by the side of their castle, a hunter’s hiding. The territory is not mine.

I smell the sweat around my face, from my hair, a sweet smell of childhood. I remember being five and holding my baby brother drenched from the warm summer evening. A sweet and thick scent, flowers fermenting into ambrosial sirup, seeking to be held.

Sometimes I can smell it coming from me. I like to think it’s in our blood, a fraternal scent.

When I walk the mountains fearing a second encounter with the regal creatures, I wonder if they can smell me, my fear, or my joy.

I imagined being covered in dirt, waiting in the stone circle for a herd to come back home, I am trying to see them, feel and smell their presence.

There is no middle ground or taming. They sound like visitors from the underworld. I’ve heard them for a second time today as I was walking across the eroding cliffs of clay. I was holding a piece of wood I had found and taken with me for a sculpture. It is shaped like two long antlers. It reminds me of union and separation, encounters and heartbreaks, attachment and defensiveness, holding and keeping at large. I fell in love with it the second I laid my eyes on it. It was like recognizing a friend, met in a dream, who knows my heart, a close ally that will never fail. The piece is quite large and odd to carry around. When I ran from the boars, I felt like a vulnerable flailing creature, a small fleshy new born to the wild, a naked forest baby that has grown horns before knowing how to use them. So I ran and slipped on my left hip for the third time today. I could smell the sweet fraternal scent around my face, and see the boars footsteps on the wet ground of clay. My father used to take my brother and I track animals in the woods. Today I was playing the hunted hunter, holding a new friend and old memories, smelling like sweet home in an un-familiar family of crumbling ravins, eroding mountains and cackling pines. The heart doesn’t break here, it only slows, accelerates or stops.

25 Steel Swords

February - May 2105

“The qualities of transformation embodied in forged metalwork - from rock, through fire, into cultural artefact - perhaps helps to explain why it is often used as a medium through which to communicate with the ancestors and the spirit world in many parts of Africa”

"Among the Lele of the Democratic Republic of Congo, finely crafted iron arrow-heads were not simply a means of acquiring game. In a sense they acted as emisssaries passing from the cultured world of men to the spirit world of the forest during the highly ritualised act of hunting. The axes and knives of Shona spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, although not representing the ancestor in any litteral sense, are used as pouthpieces through which they can be contacted." (British Museum)

Alchemy/ Transformation/ Rite of Passage

Mothers and Fathers is a year long experiment attempting to craft symbols and a structure for a personal rite of passage.

Structuraly inspired by the key elements found in most rites of passages from childhood to adulthood :

Invoke the ancestors

Leaving childhood by killing-transforming-marking / psychologically and physically / the child through an experience that will shape the adult into what is expected of him/her by his/her cultural group - and giving him/her the necessary symbolic language to psychologicaly achieve a passage from childhood to adulthood.

MOTHERS AND FATHERS

Through a ritualised making process that becomes the ritual of passage itself, the piece - 25 handcrafted steal blades - adresses themes such as breaking with transgenerational transgression, becoming an individual freed from the rotten ties of a lineage.

Reclaiming a voice amongst the familial structure, the piece is also inspired by an imaginary ending to Persephone's myth. Daughter of Demeter and Zeus, niece and wife of Hades, Persephone's voice is unheard. Objectified, controlled and yet not protected by her family members, her only mean of revolt is to cry and refuse to eat the food of the underworld (which she even fails to do, leading to her permanent incestuous union with Hades ).

For another ending -

Queen of the underworld, she is at the source of life and death, where fertile cycles start and end. Persephone learns that living force can be pulled out of void.

Having cried enough, she finds resources in the underworld, metal and fire, into which she breathes her strenght and desire for freedom. An army reclaiming her voice, with which she leaves the incestuous cave and the blind father and the overbearing mother pearched on Olympius.

She leaves and become a woman, changing her name for the third time.