BRANCH

Text: Alexandra Laudo
Writing Exercise: Alexandra Laudo and the students of the Branch, Root, Sprout, Stem course during the autumn season

Autumn is a time of expiration, exhaustion and temporary death. The fall of leaves and flowers shows that all forms of life and desire are fleeting. However, as the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones says: “even when the flower falls, the branch remains.” Autumn is also, thus, the possibility of understanding how exhaustion and diminished intensity are a necessary moment in the cycle of life. The leaves that fall form a substrate that enriches the earth and gives rise to fungi, mushrooms and moss, forms of life that grow in the shade.

During the autumn season of the Branch, Root, Sprout, Stem course, the one associated with the image and the idea of Branch, the idea of fall and life was very much in our mind. We took the word inappropriate (because it is already written, because it is not ours but someone else’s) and reappropriated (because we make it ours by reusing it) as themes and elements of work. We carried out individual and collective writing exercises from words found on paper, on street signs, on museum texts, and on the covers of books written by others. The exercise that we here share in A*Desk began as a collective word hunt around the La Capella Art Center, in which our mobile phone cameras helped us to capture words present in the signs of La Boqueria, graffiti in the streets of the Raval, printed on advertising and on the signage of institutional spaces. Later, over the course of some days, it continued as an individual collection of words that each one, separately, found in street signs, web pages, advertisements, restaurant menus, and consumer objects. The surface of the world is covered with words that beg to be read. We photographed many different places and sources, and used them as raw material to collectively write a poetic text through a WhatsApp channel.

I started. One night in October I sent the first four images to the group, which also functioned as words and first sentences. We had an established order of intervention, and a limit of forty-eight hours for the next person whose turn it was to continue the text to send their word-images. We agreed that despite being a collective text, one which should have a certain coherence and continuity, pauses, ellipses and full stops were acceptable.

This is our text, written by capturing and rewriting, by decontextualization and reappropriation. A branch text, made of words/images, dry and hard words found on pages, screens and walls that, in a strange kind of photographic rewriting, we tossed into the deep and infinite depth of a WhatsApp group thread.

Autorship: 1-4 Alexandra Laudo; 2 Rosa Llop; 5-9 Andrea Carrión; 10-14 Guilhem Berini; 15-18 Esther Solé Alarcon; 19-23 Germán Chocero; 24-28 Lorna Jordà; 29-31 Anxela Louzao; 32-26 Marta Fernández Jara; 37-43 Rebeca Tolosa Gilroy; 44-48 Anna Roura; 49-51 Àurea Estellé Alsina; 52-54 Sílvia Rossell; 55-58: Dani Colom; 59-63: Alba Garcia Llué; 64-68: Julia Coelho; 69-72 Elisabet Mabres; 73-75 Max Azemar; 76-79 Ada Fontecilla; 80-83 Lorena Ruiz; 84-88 Mercè Ortega; 89-91 Ruth Morata