Marginalia

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09.01.2017

MARGINALIA #21

Andrew Birk
December 1, 2016 – December 31, 2016

Every month Marginalia invites an artist, curator or project to provide a series of images that will serve as the background of Terremoto, in relation to their practice and current interests. At the end of each month, the identity of our guest is revealed and the whole series of images is unveiled.

 

I woke up in the grass with a Belgian Shepherd pawing into my face with its wet nose.
My friend Dennise told me last night that I’m going in the right direction and that something great is going to happen and I drank from the conviction in her eyes and knew she was right.
One experience feeds another.
One ripple precedes another.
Imagine a chalky turquoise waterfall in the green density of Chiapas.
A beam of light fights its way through the pine needle canopy and lands soft and yellow like the back side of a hand on the forest floor.
Unassuming soggy weathering, a trillium unfurls.
This year head shaved, eyebrows shaved, soul shaved, bullshit and defensive mechanisms also shaved.
Deportation knocked at my door again. My friends laughed about it.
This year I bleached the bright colors from my clothes.
I slid in dirt. The knees of my jeans ripped. Bugs bit. I plucked sour blackberries and dug holes in orange landscapes.
I stripped away my pretexts and decadent gringo shit and learned to walk quietly.
I don’t mind being in-between places.
My tongue can make those beautiful whispery windy little noises that close the words and sentences one hears talking about deep shit with taxi drivers at night driving fast at the south.
A clear consciousness is worth more than all the gold in all the hills.
Walking is music.
Kindness is omnipotence.
Fuck anything gained from being bad to people.
In cage fighting they say iron sharpens iron.
Nature makes nature nature.
Ana Mendieta should be our hero.
Anish Kapoor should design our flatware.
Things die. Forces act. Energy shifts. Lovers turn their backs on each other. Friends reencounter.
Money enters one pocket and leaves the other.
I looked at a 500 pesos bill and it didn’t make me feel a single fucking thing and it never has and it never will.
Stars explode into dust.
We are flying through space at an insane speed.
Frederick Douglass said in 1857 that there can be no ocean without the awful roar of many waters.
He says there are no crops without plowing up the ground.
Nothing can steer you from your path if you say otherwise.
Don’t tell me to take off my hat and I won’t tell you to take off yours.
My grandparents met at the deepest most sapphire staggeringly beautiful ghostly lake in the world in the 1930s and that story is on its last legs and things die and forces act and that lake is so deep inside my heart it is under my heart it is under my heart in a lurching old hotel in Valle de Bravo it is under my heart in a shitty drunken email it is under my heart when I eat caldo de borrego and lie down happy on the cold wet grass staring into the limits of stars.

Andrew Birk
December 30th, 2016

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