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Magazine

13 January 2020
This month's topic: Night and Darkness
All of Cambrils in Darkness and Me Watching It All from the Terrace

Sentences, names and symbols of groups of young Russians who arrange to meet for a fight emerge in a maritime industrial area. All written in stones.

 

Ravens aren’t black for pleasure.

 

The impossibility of becoming detached from oneself.

 

And of falling into the deception of language.

 

Believing you’re learning to swim.

 

Building a settlement to settle.

And writing twenty-five kilometres non-stop.

 

Getting up on a shelf of rock forty metres high with no projection for singing.

 

Being as it is a blend of all colours, black is more itself.

 

Losing synthesised families as chemical pain.

 

Knowing you’re free, with no ties, no subjection, no social security.

 

The old man and the sea.

 

Telepathy through private frequency like the fear of the Neanderthal.

 

And the circus performer reverting time, taking an endless sword out of his mouth, unable to finish.

 

Like roast pork cuts for Christmas dinner at the Royal Palace.

 

Leaving when the season is almost extinct with melting pot of Russians and Germans.

 

Thinking that their leisure is based on their own condition. They’re the actors in the film they’re watching while they’re making it.

 

Others descend more than a hundred metres under the sea almost without being able to see or hear.

 

Coming on purpose to analyse everything you do, trying to understand. Simply being.

 

To the rescue. Of oneself, like in the old man and now the sea.

And knowing beforehand that only the fish bone will arrive.

 

Sadness as the exemplary.

Defending sacrifice, with no master, god or earning.

 

Like the old man and the stroll.

 

Valencia and Belgium began in darkness.

When they got used to the light and saw themselves, came the end.

 

Maria made sure that the newspaper around the cage of Titus, the Argentinean parrot, was wrapped in such a way that the text were legible from the inside.

 

Calamari more or less a metre and a half in length that live in the depths.

At night they dine out; their development enabled them to emit light that varies according to their mood.

 

Two Germans argue. She thinks calamari lousy, he looks at her.

 

Who could like it.

Aperol Spritz as an indicator of the health of capital.

 

And Carrie off stage making it even better.

 

Darkness can be in a lorry, far from the family.

 

But we probably prefer to analyse darkness in the head of the daughter of the worker at Miramar Transports.

 

Eva left yoga class with the silver mat that Lucía had given her two months before.

 

It was the chosen day, she’d been planning it for a long time.

 

She entered the hallway and when she was fetching for her keys they fell to the ground. She didn’t like it.

On that Today everything had to be perfect.

She preferred to climb the stairs taking advantage of the six floors plus mezzanine to vent her last breath in one last sprint.

 

She entered the apartment, greeted the mirror in the hall, dropped her keys on the silver panther and undressed on her way to the bathroom.

She opened the tap, greeted the bathroom mirror and sat down in the shower tray.

She spread her legs, took a piss and began to whistle Il Tramonto by I. F.

 

Meanwhile, she was going over the calculated steps that had to be taken with loving care and perfection.

 

And there she fell asleep, surrounded by La Toja foam. It must have been half past nine in the morning when she woke up.

 

She remembered the dream in which her father was the sail of the hang glider she was piloting with precision, just above a field of pink courgettes numbered from zero to one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four.

 

Ezekiel celebrated his rise, but what he liked most was being able to look down on his former coordinator. He had it in for him and it was now a matter of time to set the record straight. But he wasn’t seeking revenge. He preferred to forget and make others forget. In this way the victim would suffer up until his retirement.

 

He said goodbye when credit cards began to cut the air.

He went down to the garage as fast as he could, spat, put his helmet on and left on his RD350 as if he was riding one of those steeds that dance in sand arenas.

Everything calculated to make sure he didn’t arrive too early or too late for his appointment. Today he would kill her after having waited two years for the right moment.

He raised his visor to dry the first tear that fell from his eyes since his birth. The same day on which his mother died and his father disappeared.

 

– Hello Eva, how are you?

– Great, I was really looking forward to seeing you again. And how are you?

 

They met just where they had first chanced on one another. At eleven o’clock at night on the third breakwater to the right of Salou harbour.

 

I stopped drawing many years ago, perhaps because of how frightened portraying made me feel. Drawing makes it impossible for you to forget.

 

He couldn’t even reply when a dagger was stabbed into Ezekiel’s left side, a perfect cut at an eleven o’clock angle entering his pericardium and making its way to his atrium.

 

He knelt down, kissed Eva’s belly for the last time and arrested his gaze before falling at her feet. Eva immediately threw up on top of him. He hugged her and entered the tunnel with the help of poison hemlock.

 

Then they went swimming together.

 

Have you noticed that the tics you acquire when you smoke always seem to be someone else’s.

 

And non-smokers don’t have them.

 

Darkness is being reflected in the mirror for a very long time. Revealing your neutral self. Until you lose your identity.

 

Whether you like it or not is up to you.

 

To each his own pain.

——-

(Highlight image by  Goran Bertok)

‘Sergi Botella’s work revolves around the most commonplace reality under the premise of stressing the complex affective and emotional mechanisms that define our daily routines. In his artistic practice, this strategy enables him to try out fictional formulas inseparable from what is real and true. The starting point of this narrative system in constant process are the artist’s personal experiences and the relationships and influences that emerged from his immediate environments.’ David Armengol, 2012

Sergi Botella (Terrassa, 1976). His works are currently presented in the form of performances, texts and techno, exercises that are halfway between sound electronics and experiential remixes. His illustrated explanations flow in an atmosphere charged with auto-suggested lies and the most honest of narratives that adhere to one another.

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