Before you watch

Take a moment, let your eyes adjust.

Think about dancers and light.

Light

Dancing

And the gap         between bodies that are locked-together.

Remember that the gap between the bodies       is

the only space where light comes in.

***

witness how on one long night bodies are draped in darkness some lit erotically full of audible pleasure another darkness cloaks others in the silence of unwanted touch fluid ruptures of skin and an ominous threat of explosion fracture and pain.

***

I can’t watch the boys rough and tumble, round and round like laundry in a washing machine. In the drum that they make with their bodies is a gun and even while in reality it is softened by the material of their bodies, as I watch a frequency seems to rise  up, to make a sound like screeching metal on metal, so loud and real is its threat. Yet then the drum they form with their bodies seems to become another vessel; a weapon transmutes into a talisman to birth a new self.

            ***

Luís, Chico, and Gabi are geographers, I think.

They ask themselves what is where? Why there?

They are finding their way and they are offered maps; straightness, retribution, violence; for journeys that take them outside of themselves.

They look down at the terrain of their bodies, chart the ways they move in the spaces they have cleared

and they ask

Why is this happening here?

I watch them and whisper what I have heard,

An echo from maps I have been shown

(“a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at”)

***

These films are in movement, they are about movements in movement. Bodies move with ease for a moment and we think we might be watching a dance or an act of love and suddenly this ease collides with a surface that stops fluency in its tracks.The liquid rhythm of two bodies in contact becomes a staccato punch, the throbbing insistence of unwanted touch or the reverberating residue of the sadness left when tenderness is discarded for retribution.

A new cadence arrives with new questions;

Where will we travel to?

How will we get there?

Who will we hurt along the way?

***

In Cabra cega / Blindman's Buff Gabi’s limbs show her the way to the future she wants. Her arms reach up to the sky in protest, elbows out to protect her kin.

In a ritual of self defence her hands reach out to join with others. In this ritual the hands grasp with the grip they have always known. They are flesh colliding; rescuer, victim and perpetrator. But perhaps in a new ritual, they are flesh sliding, slipping over and around each other’s edges to reach for new formations, new justices.

Each member activates motion, and performs the question of its activation; the question of movement(s);

do I hold on or let go? do I struggle or yield?

In a world full of reaching,  gestures are shapeshifting.  Knuckles that keep fearful fingers safe, turn into bared and bloodied fists. The linking of arms  in shared struggle turns into a contortion, a dancing embrace becomes a groping meat claw. Perhaps we reach for too much, perhaps we don’t submit to the constraints of our desires. Cruising towards. Towards something else. To cruise is to move forward while also holding the attachments that secure us to what we have known so far. They cannot get there, if we cannot get there. In this collective not-thereness, this collective holding on, there is a derailing, a hurt(l)ing, a breathtaking trip that can only approach, and can never arrive.

***

After you watch,

Think about the ghosts that haunt Gabi.

Spectres spiralling the distances between

what we desire and what we can reach.

Consider how Gabi moves to resist,

even while the object of her rescue rests deeply.

As she orbits the one enveloped in the unknown darkness,

leading him back to safety,

make your own return.

Circle back around to wonder:

How must we defend the things dearest to us?

At rest, in peaceful slumber, yielding?

Or eyes forced open in direct combat?

References

Gilmore, Ruth W. 2022. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. N.p.: Verso Books.

Karpman, Stephen. 1968. “Fairy tales and script drama analysis.” Transactional Analysis Bulletin 7 (26): 39-43.

Muñoz, José E. 2019. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. N.p.: NYU Press.