Raumdeuter Radio: Göteborg

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(SE)
We start in an image of ochre and deep turquoise. Eyes, pale against tanned skin – wet, as if they’re just about to flood. We pan horizontally, from left to right. This means nothing. Some plateaus are stacked on top of the horizon and we dwell on the mirage, as if to be reminded of something, as if to underline that we’re now limited to fiction. Or the opposite, that it’s out of reach to us and that we are unable to devote ourselves to the imaginary. Drops from the silo hit a piece of tin, the sound is clear and rhythmic. Their dial. Then he reaches for the revolver, puts the palm of his hand on top of the brass covered grip – a dirty finger on the trigger, shaking. An arm leans to a hip – a shoe of brown leather, slightly buried in the sand, set. And those of us who are watching, know – everyone knows, that before the cigarette burns out – there’ll be a sound – of the signal.

(EN)
Midnight. Seventeen words on page one hundred and twenty seven, ‘A breath of life ́ published after her death, in nineteen seventy seven “I know one thing: I am not my name. My name belongs to those who call me”.

(AR)
Its a cruelty to write about a human being as if they were a wild tulip. A miniature hell of separation and definitions, saying little about birth, the state of being or death.

(SE)
Tulipa Sylvestris; reduced to everything except its inherent potential. Recognisable by its color, its height and its surrounding grounds, but never for its thoughts of the sky or the ever present anxiety of being crushed. Not respected for it’s patience and all of those days of waiting, deep inside the dark soil.

(EN)
I believe sometimes, the act of naming is confused with that of creation – as if our name would somehow – cause our existence – and as if the word we ‘call out’ animates life, in its referred ‘being’. That language makes the world appear and not the other way around. In a sense I think that’s what she’s getting at, that her name circulates around her, without actually being her, that she can’t be reduced to that.

(AR)
The Tulip crossbreeds easily, it has been refined and hybridised in botanical labs – grown and changed color under the human scalpel. It has served as a political symbol. A red and white Semper Augustus, can make a whole economy fall. The tulip, is much more than its name.

(SE)
In November, 1974, beneath the Ethiopian sun, an American Paleo- anthropologist and his assistant, discover a series of white bones in the sand. A skull, femurs and a pelvic bone from a ‘female’ – supposedly moving upright, which automatically recategorises her as ‘woman’ and consequently the, up to that point, earliest example of what we define as human. AL 288-1, is given the name Lucy the following night, after Beatles ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’, rumoured to have been playing on repeat, during the work teams celebrations. And, as in 2008, when sent to space in direction of the pole star, Beatles were made representatives of our species.

(EN)
Organising the mind and thought, language also restricts us somehow, and, I’ve thought about how the word ́Parole ́ as well as ‘Sentence’ are components of the lingual, but they also appear in law and courtrooms, like in ‘released on Parole’ or to ‘sentence someone’ when articulating the verdict..and I just find it interesting that the basic features of language connects with justice or righteousness – – also underlining, perhaps, that language is our ultimate judge – and that the non-lingual or non- verbal in such case, would reflect the outlaw or aberration of civilised life. Making the foreign language, what exactly?

(AR)
There is an observatory out here, with parabolic plates, gold extracted from the heart of a mountain, but by the white mans hand, now leading our gaze away from humanity. Directed towards the perforated dark cloak, signals echo eternally – in a space that, he claims, appeared out of nowhere and without any ‘God’. The cowboy contaminates any secret and myth with his acclaimed ‘wisdom’ – conquering nothing but the wind in this wasteland, he gives every star its own name, as if he was the first to ever have them witnessed. A pure insanity.

(EN)
Each dawn, the cowboy reenters the world, having been away over night – dwelling on the other side in sleep, in thought or delirium. When the sun returns, he gets dressed for wherever expected or for made up duties. Leaving the secret conversation and that which belongs to the night behind, to be with his horse in the wide, open canyon.

(SE)
Dawn. 47 words on page 176, Deliria, 2009. “The sun was, although fogbound, present, and calmed by the bees consumed hours at the bottom of my clock, I went out to live, love and explore, to locate the responsible, make the guilty accountable och inform them of the dead ones hunger.

(AR)
Outside of our kitchen, there used to be an orange tree, reaching all the way up to the window. In the morning the whole room would be filled with a sweet smell. I remember that day, as we passed it by on our way out through the garden. The open fruits on the ground, that our eyes were fixed to, in our bended postures. They were not ripe; but pale and unready – in pieces all over, mixed with bits of concrete and dust. I remember thinking they resembled us, torn from the branch and how can I possibly carry this? Not being ready for farewells.

(EN)
Between origin and futurism lies, the mutation. The deviation caught in between forms. Skin that’s been bleached by an absent sun, the growing of new bones or a disappearing vision – I think we’re made of reality and fiction, equally, in the sense that there is no means of navigation; between what’s felt and what’s thought. Like inscriptions that continuously go through translations, a mother tongue distorted by exile and modern language.

(SE)
The paper is in an off-white, showing a circle, in different warm, grey nuances, and a dark ring at the centre, with black fields in its top and bottom. The middle is brighter and not entirely circular, but with a slight oval diamond shape, like an open mouth with its lips swelling towards top and bottom. The core is a white bullet, making the whole thing resemble a vinyl. Beams of black lens-shaped spots spread in a vivid X and you get a feeling of seeing something from above. The image has been described as one of history’s most important photographies and is the first visual of a double helix, dna strands, captured by Rosalind Franklin.

(AR)
Close the windows. Cover the blinds dear. Put those eyelids at rest. There are so many things we do not know. That we are not supposed to now, cause they’re secret. Its still early in the morning and we are not supposed to know about the day. Not meant to see yet. What comes our way, will be clear once we cross paths. There’s so much controlling, you keep holding all these things together. Repairing and protecting. What do you achieve from looking at those numbers, what do you do with that at the end of the day? They’re papers honey. Nothing but papers in a stack. Which may burn or get wet or be taken by the wind. But we’re here – we are not made of paper or writing. We are in the flesh and we are bones and we are not leaving, yet. We are staying for this day too, so let’s just see what happens.

(EN)
Soldiers at the front. The front is a shell – Shell-shock and the damages at the barrier, absolute. A red line is moving over vast landscapes, wiping out entire communities – the civilised settler is a ruthless killer. Having no king; but the ‘manifest destiny’ – a land of the brave and free, with its swelling edges and smoking guns. ‘To establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man’– She was meant to be a reflection of God. Now, carved from the divine, are some white, marble pedestals – reserved for the few and only them.

(AR)
There are six men, one for each sun, and a seventh man who is the sun in the raw, dressed in black and in red flesh. But, this seventh man is a horse, a horse with a man leading him. But it is the horse who is the sun and not the man.

(SE)
Where the water runs in, blue and white speckled plates float in stillness, sounds of forged wood and porcelain out of reach for the eye and slowly dancing down towards the brown mud, covering the floor bed of the ocean. Silk and green tea, drifts on with the current or returns home. On the sky, Europa is glowing; in a final breath – before the day takes us.

(AR)
یوم/َday. fifty-two words on page thirty-five. Masaas/ مساس , 2010. “At first she tried searching among the things around her for meanings for the words, or for something without a name that might fit the word, but spoken words had reached everything. The words without meaning increased until they filled the whole page and she was no longer able to ignore them.”

(EN)
And then – we left belief for science, abandoned God in hope of greater consolations – in their search of the ultimate truth, origin and destination. The West has become a snake, devouring its own tail – dissolving in hunger without even realising its disappearing act. Contemporary people, numbed by visions and magic tricks. We theorise on explosive energy, but forget about the actual bomb.

(SE)
There’s an illusion embedded in everything. We live by this, by longing in the image and the poem. We’re searching, in each movement, towards a formulation. Gestures. There is this idea, to one day arrive. Exhale. Contain all answers. But we tangle up in the same words, limited compositions, we repeat. We never arrive. We occupy. Steal our neighbours territory. We lay down with our torso on our own chair, while filling the others spot with our legs. We saturate their room who our scent and our sweat, soaking their land – ruining the crops. Slowly, we fill your house with our spirit, leaving all of this behind as we depart. The city. The building. The archive. The story. We gladly keep. The whole world under our dome.

(AR)
This is a sharp spear, with nothing at the end. No conclusion, no reward, nothing more to conquer. When we reach the end of the spear, we run out of luck. We need to imagine, need to imagine something beyond the given, beyond our names. Otherwise we’ll fall, everyone.

(EN)
He was speaking about restitution, of a letter sent to the president to restore the objects stolen. He stuttered on the word memory. With the ‘M’, stuck between his lips, he had to exhale and go again, every time it came up. All his other words around that, were entirely clear and articulate, everything; so well put – and that glitch in him, felt like embodied trauma. It had some kind of deep, unintended, resonance to his subject – to loss – and all the difficulties in mending that.

(SE)
Our cowboy is alone. His horse, dead by thirst. He has eliminated all possibilities of collaboration, executed those who got too close and said farewell to God. He lays down in the burning sand, exhausted Turning his face to the sky, his blurred vision focuses on the sun, which will never sink and pray for him again. Trembling, dark spots circulate above him – his lips taste of salt, his tongue of iron. A final thought, of being far way from home – before he opens his eyes fully to the intense – white – bullet.

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone

Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds