“It is the task of art to preserve disappearance.”

Lyn Hejinian

 

“The problems of violence still remain very obscure.”

Georges Sorel

 

“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”

Herman Melville

 

“We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.”

Maggie Nelson

 

“We read: not the flames
but the ruin left
by the conflagration
Not the enormous burning
but the dead (the books
remaining). Let us read .
and digest: the surface
glistens, only the surface.
Dig in—and you have
a nothing, surrounded by
a surface, an inverted
bell resounding, a
white-hot man become
a book, the emptiness of
a cavern resounding”

William Carlos Williams

 

“Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder.”

Werner Herzog

 

“You can burn children without disturbing the night. The night is unmovable around us, who are enclosed in the church. Above us, the stars too are calm. But this calm, this immobility are neither the essence not the symbol of a preferable truth; they are the scandal of nature's ultimate indifference. More than other nights, this night was frightening.”

Robert Antelme

 

“Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued. Desire never concerns the mere possession of something but the changing of something. Desire is a wanting. A wanting now. Freedom does not constitute the fulfilment of that wanting, but the acknowledgement of its supremacy.”

John Berger

 

“Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.”

J.W. Goethe

 

“To try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive…to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”

Georges Perec

 

“This silent explosion that haunts the continent is the infinite history, the scene and its characters. No one said stop for us, but some day the words and the violence will face themselves.”

Nadia Prado

 

“In out continent that has been travel –travel by plural and simultaneous time, travel across languages, between compliance and evasion of its rules, between denominates and its name–, how to evince the hollow left in the heart by our happening?”

Guadalupe Santa Cruz

 

“They asked the gods to grant them their favours and the victory against the Spaniards and their own enemies. But it must have been too late, for they had no further answer from their oracles; then they regarded the gods as mute or as dead.”

Tzvetan Todorov

 

“With the Void, Full Powers.”

Albert Camus

 

“It's Just a Matter of Time.”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

 

“The war never ended and somehow begins again.”

Natalie Diaz

 

“Violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements.”

Hannah Arendt

 

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”

Audre Lorde

 

“You don't make a nail with a nail, but with an iron.”

Fernand Léger

 

“Today that we have no prophets
and barely can handle misfortune
of being neglected,
we hear them
with the awful certainty
that pain is the one language
that will run through history.”

Rosabetty Muñoz

 

“Ages of silence approaches, ages of drought and stones.”

Octavio Paz

 

“How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind.
"I will not cease from mental fight," Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.
That current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians.”

Virginia Woolf

 

“You have seen the sky
so close, so deep.

And I've built above your shoulders
My country-
Where are you?”

Else Lasker-Schüler

 

“And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.”

Robert Haas

 

“Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”

John Berger

 

“Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?”

Frantz Fanon

 

“No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness.”

William Carlos Williams

 

“Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.”

George Oppen

*

The works: black pigment and water on porcelain, from 5 x 6 cm. to 30 x 20 cm., produced during 2020 pandemic lockdown for an editorial project on violence.